Ignition Development Blog

European Cookies don’t taste too sweet

Ignition Development — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 02:45:49 GMT

Being over here in little old New Zealand it can be quite easy to be sheltered from things going on in the rest of the wide world. Sure, we have the Internet (kind of), but it’s easy to let things going on around the world simply slip by. The European cookies directive is one of those things – the directive was passed on the 26th of May 2011, however I only heard about it in the past few weeks.

For New Zealanders reading this, you might ask “Why should I care?”, and the answer is – you don’t need to, although you might wonder why any Europe based sites you visit start asking your permission for cookie storage a lot more. But as we have a big European customer (Hi guys!) we have to care (or at least pretend to), even if that means essentially making our user experience worse.

So what’s it all about? Well:

On 26 May 2011 the European Commission made the controversial 'Cookies Directive' law. It applies to the UK and all european countries. It mandates that the use of cookies on european businesses' websites must be disclosed and explicit consent for their use be obtained from your users. The Information Commissioner's Office has given UK businesses 12 months in which to achieve compliance.

Ouch, but okay – let’s not debate the pros (?) and cons of this, and let’s not comment on the fact that it’s going to be pretty hard to enforce, and also we won’t make the “Hey, I’ll store your decision to not accept cookies in a COOKIE” joke, instead let’s just link to a couple of useful pages.

The first example gives you an idea of what you might run into in future when visiting European websites, while the second gives you a slightly more restrained example as well as a useful script to help you implement this without wasting too much of your own time.

Link: EU “Cookies” Directive. Interactive guide to 25th May and what it means for you

Link: The cookiesDirective.js

Happy compliance everyone!

-Ross

Tags: European, Cookies

An end of year look back at 2011’s integration/implementation work

Ignition Development — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:07:09 GMT

In a recent “end of year” type conversation in the team IRC channel we were talking about the range of external providers/third party services that we’d worked with / integrated to over the course of 2011.

Here’s the list we compiled – I still have a nagging feeling we’ve missed a couple, but nonetheless it’s a pretty varied range of products and services that we’ve worked with on top of our standard stack of ASP.NET WebForms, MVC, and jQuery.

Google Commerce Search – working with the latest version of this while the documentation was being written/revised was certainly a challenge, however GCS is something we’re looking forward to seeing the results of. The work we did with this should be going live sometime in early 2012, and it’ll be interesting to see the difference it makes to conversion rates. While we’re not an official “integration partner”, I think I can say with a good deal of confidence that we’re possibly one of the most experienced companies when it comes to working with the latest version of GCS in New Zealand.

Klarna – Now Klarna on the other hand, I can say we’re definitely the most experienced in New Zealand with this. If there’s other NZ companies who specialise in implementing Scandinavian payment providers then please get in touch, as I’m sure we could all swap some interesting stories.

Postoppkrav – the same goes for Postoppkrav! We do a lot of work for our good friends at Netthandelen over in Norway, and part of the fun there is working with providers such as this that we’d otherwise not have a chance to be exposed to.

TradeDoubler affiliate tracking – TradeDoubler has quite a range of offerings available, from simple tracking pixels through to slightly more complex referral systems. After 2011’s TD work I can comfortably say we’re experienced in working with their offerings at both ends of that spectrum.

Paypal – whether you love or hate Paypal, you can’t deny that they offer a cost efficient way to take money online. If you’re creating some quick buttons using their wizards then you can get up and running pretty quickly – however if you need a more comprehensive implementation solution then things can take a bit more time. Paypal’s quality of documentation varies, and there’s some slightly convoluted ways that certain things need to be done. In 2011 we worked more with repeat/recurring payments, which cemented our opinion that while pretty much any developer can get something built using Paypal’s systems, it can definitely save you time and money if you pick a development team who’s worked with them before.

DPS Payment Express – DPS on the other hand just works, and works well. Again, we’re not an official integrator, but we’ve worked with different types of DPS products for many of our NZ based customers.

BugNET and Exchange EWS – we spent a bit of time improving our internal systems this year, and now have a pretty neat system setup where an Exchange mailbox is monitored using a service and EWS. All emails sent to this address (Ssssh it’s for customers only!) get converted into BugNET issues, and the Ignition team gets notified. It also supports converting replies to comments on existing issues. This sort of thing is an example of better living through technology – as there’s nothing too complex going on here, however the results that this solution delivers helps save us all time.

Living Social – With the increasing popularity of these sorts of group deal providers, we spent a bit of time enhancing the Site Foundation Framework so that we’re able to easily run Living Social promotions. We already had a promotion code implementation, however this was a chance to extend it.

AWS S3 – Everyone loves the Cloud, and we’re no exception! While we run some servers on EC2, there’s not really any integration work that we did there. However we did continue to tinker with some direct S3 integration – Sam through creating his KOMPRESSOR (that will KRUSH) utility that allows you to Zip files and copy them directly up to AmazonS3, and Doug through some work he did with a VSTO plugin that allows direct saving to a S3 bucket. Cloudy!

Other things worth mentioning

Titanium Appcelerator – this is one of those things that people either love or hate. Either way, you can’t deny that Titanium lets you get building iPhone/Android apps pretty quickly. We tinkered with Titanium a bit in 2011 through working with one of our partners.

XCode – Working with Titanium inevitably lead to doing more work in XCode. We have a couple of small iOS based projects in the works currently, stay tuned for more information and updates on those in 2012.

jQuery Templating – this year we did a lot of work with jQuery.tmpl while it was in beta, and so we cringed a little as the project got put on hold and turned into JsRender. jQuery templating is a great way to work with web services and JSON, and we’re pretty excited to get our hands on JsRender once it matures a little.

Azure - We also started looking into Azure, but it’s early days there. We’re excited about Azure – even though we’re happy with AWS EC2, as a .NET shop Azure just feels like it’ll allow us a bit more of a seamless integration into our toolset.

So there you have it! Our list of things we played with in 2011. See anything on the list that you’ve got plans to use in your projects for 2012? Drop us a line if you’d like to talk more about a technology or about your next project.

It’s certainly been an exciting and varied 2011, and we’re looking forward to taking a short break before getting back into things in 2012. From the team at Ignition Development, we hope you have a Merry Christmas and a great break over the holiday season.

-Ross

Congratulations to Sam Wood!

Ignition Development — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:49:27 GMT

It’s October, and of course that means it’s time for Microsoft’s MVP announcements.

Congratulations to all new and renewed MVPs, but especially to Ignition's Sam Wood, also of Tentacle Software fame who has been renewed as a MVP yet again.

If you’re a Windows Home Server Developer, and haven’t read Sam's blog – then quite frankly, you’re not a Windows Home Server Developer. It contains plenty of posts, guides, and tips to help anyone looking to get started with creating WHS Add-ins.

-Ross

Common Entity Framework Errors and Performance Tips

Ignition Development — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:46:59 GMT

Ignition Development’s own Jan Heggernes has written up a post where he covers some of the errors and worst practices he’s come across while working with it. Jan has done a lot of work with the Entity Framework, and specifically has spent a lot of time working with performance tuning applications using it, and he’s somewhat of an expert in this space.

Check it out on his blog: Common Entity Framework Errors and Performance Tips

-Ross

Tags: Entity Framework

Some site updates for June

Ignition Development — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:24:25 GMT

It’s June, and we’re midway through 2011 already – time really does fly when you’re rushed off your feet. Nothing makes you realise the passing of time more than looking at a site you did ‘recently’ only to realise it was actually put live a couple of years ago! This was the case with the Farro Fresh website which went live in 2009. So this month we’ve spent a bit of time sprucing up the site, replacing some images, reorganising some bits, and adding a few new features. Take a look and let us know what you think.

During the update the site was upgraded to version 1.7 of the Site Foundation Framework, and we took some time to make a few small SEO related changes - it was nice to see a visible increase in traffic a week or so after applying these updates. Watching the Internet at work is a magical thing, kind of like watching ants in an ant farm – or something like that. If you’re into high quality foods then you really should pay the good folks at Farro a visit – there’s currently 2 Auckland locations, and a new store in Hamilton on the way.

On the subject of site updates, our good friends over in Norway have just put live the latest version of www.blivakker.no, a site which Ignition is heavily involved in. Chances are that not many readers of this blog are in need of great value cosmetic goods from Norway (the shipping across to New Zealand is kind of a killer), but if you are then you should check them out!

-Ross

Tags: Clients

What’s cooking? Site Foundation Framework 1.7, that’s what!

Ignition Development — Wed, 04 May 2011 11:01:25 GMT

We’re currently putting the final touches on version 1.7 of the Site Foundation Framework, and I have to say that we’re really looking forward to getting this release out in the world for our customers.

A lot of the changes in this release are in the backend, however you know that feeling you get when you’re feeling good about a piece of software? Well, that’s the feeling we get when upgrading to this release. The skinning and customisation engine has been upgraded based on experiences gained from a couple of other projects, there’s been a few usability improvements to the administration section, and there’s been a couple of handy new SEO features added. We’ve also removed a couple of external dependencies and have upgraded some libraries/components such as jQuery and TinyMCE to their latest versions.

We’ve also got an interesting new module for SFF underway. It’s too early to talk about it much yet, but watch this space…

-Ross

Tags: Site Foundation Framework

Amazon apologises for cloud fault

Ignition Development — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 06:23:49 GMT

A portion of our US hosting services are provided using Amazon’s EC2 service, and so last weekend we shared a service outage with a great many other companies around the globe. Up until now we’ve found Amazon’s services to be incredibly reliable and feel that if anything last week’s outage will only make things more reliable in future. Even though last weekend’s outage was an inconvenience, we’re not in any hurry to move our sites away from EC2 and overall are pretty happy with the way they’ve handled the situation – their status site provides a pretty good indication of what’s going on, they’ve apologised, and what’s more provided a small credit for consumers.

If you’d like to read more, here’s a couple of links with additional information on the outage and the apology:

Link: Amazon apologises for cloud fault

Link: Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption in the US East Region

-Ross

Tags: Cloud Computing