Jason Frye

A Walk Off

May 31, 2019 by Jason Frye Leave a Comment

In baseball, one of the most exciting points in the game comes when your team of choice trails by a run or two in the bottom of the ninth. You anticipate the bottom of the ninth during the middle inning break, wondering how the three batters will compete against their closer. Will they launch a game tying or winning run into the stands or swat at our dreams with a bat full of bluster? The anxiety builds and sometimes the magic happens and a walk-off occurs. Not often, mind you. Otherwise it wouldn’t mean much. It’s hard to win a baseball game and it’s also equally as hard to move on from a job. Will it work out with the new company? There’s the same type of anticipation, but unlike the baseball walk off, you can make a difference in the outcome.

NOTE: I’m not leaving my job…was thinking about this after a conversation with a friend.

Global regular expression matching in PHP

July 9, 2018 by Jason Frye Leave a Comment

I’ll be the first to admit that I have trouble with regular expressions. But they’re incredibly useful when used in the right way. For instance, I was recently tasked with finding a way to insert a related podcast into a story node. To do this, I gave users the ability to add a shortcode into the text that would be parsed prior to viewing, so I could inject the necessary HTML.

Sounds simple. The shortcode would come in the form of [podcast id=”1234″]. Great. That’s easy to implement and simple enough to parse with PHP if I can find it in the text string.

preg_match('/\[podcast id="\d*"\]/', $string, $podcastString);

This would work well, right? If you’ve done this type of thing before, you likely have your go-to source to test your regular expressions. I use www.regexr.com for my tests (they have a very clean and easy to use UI). So this will get all the instances of the podcast with the id if I use the /g flag in the regexr tool. But that flag won’t work with preg_match. That’s when I learned about preg_match_all. I know. I should know about this by now, but I’ve never dove into regular expression to any great length until now. So now this work just fine:

preg_match_all('/\[podcast id="\d*"\]/', $string, $podcastString); You can read about preg_match_all in the PHP docs.

User Account Deletion UX: A user deletion design pattern

January 24, 2018 by Jason Frye Leave a Comment

If you’re requesting a user create an account, you should also allow that user to delete the account. It’s not a one-sided contract. The big guys do it for a reason. Sure Facebook would rather you turn off your account for a break, but you can still nuke the whole thing.

I tried to find a design pattern that touches on account management. UI Design Patterns had a reference to Google’s account deletion process, but nothing of substance.

I looked around and a general rule of thumb seems to mirror what Google’s message gives users — you’ve deleted your account, but you can still resurrect it. Come back whenever you like, within reason, and we’ll set that deleted flag right back to zero.

But give users that option. Here’s how the design pattern might read for user account deletion.

Design Pattern Outline for User Deletion

Give a user a means to delete their account (not suspend, but actual deletion).
Be explicit with the user that the deletion will be completed, in full after 30 days. They can reactivate their account prior to that date so as not to lose any data. Force them to agree to that message.
Set a field on the user table with a delete_on date field to now().
This now date will be checked nightly to see if it is greater than 30 days. If it is, then delete the user information from the table.
Give the user the ability to login to the site during the grace period. If they choose, they can reinstate their account, which would purge the date from the delete_on field.

Large Collection of Data on Page and the iPhone Will Not Scroll

January 18, 2018 by Jason Frye Leave a Comment

This problem happened on a recent project. We’re sending the browser a data collection of profiles that can become quite large, upwards of 1,200 of them on the site, as a json object. Javascript handles creating the list of profiles for the user to scroll through. On mobile, we load 100 at a time and pull in more with a button press. Once we launched and tested on the mobile platforms, we noticed a very large, very real bug. On any iPhone browser, Chrome or Safari, the list would slow to a crawl. Like, super slow man. It was a dreaded bug, one that wasn’t replicable in the Chrome iPhone emulation tools and one that didn’t appear on a desktop when you shrank the window down.

First we looked at the site from other devices. On the iPad, the problem was there, but not nearly as pronounced. Android let you scroll through the list like water. So what could the issue be and what’s the best way to find out how to solve a problem on a mobile device when those same problems don’t appears on desktop or through emulation tools?

Head to Google

That’s right. We googled the problem. Unfortunately the first couple results lead nowhere. Until we got more specific with the problem.

The issue was we had a div that was scrollable. This div held all the profiles that were returned from the API. And since the problem was unique to Apple devices, the answer came from another site, where it was clearly laid out that we need a simple CSS property on that scrollable div.

-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;

Once we had that, we loaded up the site in Chrome on our Apple iPhone and everything worked fine. One. Simple. Tag.

For those who are interested, here’s a link for more info on overflow scrolling. And here’s a link for some more information on momentum scrolling on iOS devices.

Want to see the project?

Have you ever experienced problems like that when programming, one that’s resolved with a really simple fix? Let me know in the comments.

Add an additional WordPress site to a vagrant box

January 8, 2018 by Jason Frye Leave a Comment

When it comes to WordPress development on your local machine, a very quick and easy way to get started would be to use a Vagrant box, particularly a Homestead box. Homestead is a Laravel ready-made vagrant box that enables the user to very quickly get the Vagrant machine up and going with everything needed to run a Laravel. I use Laravel everyday, but I also develop sites in WordPress, so it makes sense that I would want to run WordPress on my Homestead box.

Here’s how you can add a WordPress install to an existing Homestead box. If you run into any problems, leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to help. If you need to get Homestead running, try following the Laravel Homestead documentation to get that going.

First off, you’ll need to start your homestead box and SSH into it. You can use putty or you command line. Once you’re in the vagrant box, cd into the /home/www folder.

cd /home/www
 
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
 
unzip latest.zip

That will create a wordpress folder in the /home/www directory. Change the folder to the name of your new project.

mv wordpress yourdomain
 
cd /etc/nginx/sites-available

Copy one of the existing configs to a new file based on your project name.

cp existing.conf yourdomain.conf

Edit the new config file.

nano yourdomain.conf

change the root directory location to the yourdomain folder. The final entry should read /home/www/yourdomain for a WordPress site.

Save the edits

CTRL + X and follow prompts to save the file.
 
cd ../sites-enabled
 
ln -s ../sites-available/yourdomain.conf .
 
service nginx restart

Change your hosts file to point to the new test environment. Make sure you’re opening notepad as an admin user on Windows (right click notepad and select “Run as Administrator”). Add the entry for your new domain, using .test as the TLD yourdomain.test

192.168.10.10 yourdomain.test

Make a mysql database for WordPress to use.

mysql -uhomestead -psecret
create database yourdomain;
quit;

Add the database values to the new WordPress install.

cd /home/www/yourdomain
cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php
nano wp-config.php

Add the database credentials to the database, using user homestead, password secret, and the database (e.g. yourdomain) recently created for the project.

CTRL + X to save the file. Follow the prompts to complete the save.

Open the site in your browser. It should resolve. If not, make sure there’s no typos in your configuration file. If there is, ensure you restart nginx after making any changes.