Debugging Facebook Posts

When your users share something on Facebook they get something that looks like this:

One of my clients had a problem where the text that was showing when sharing a page to Facebook was wrong and I learned two things.

1. It's very hard to test this using the normal front end.
2. Facebook caches information about your page.

The link below give you access to see what Facebook is getting from your site so you can fix any issues and force an update to clear the cache.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/

The thing I find most interesting is that Facebook is finding this winking smiley face on the TPT home page:

Better Know a Library: Faker

When you're developing websites it's very easy to create a small subset of data so you can test but there are some performance issues and bugs that will only rear their ugly head when you have a large amount of data. It's very difficult to create this test data and have unique values set. You could just fill your database with random letters and numbers (substr(sha1(gmdate('U'))), 0, 10) but it's better to have nice looking data if you need to demo changes.

The Faker library provides a way to generate fake but real looking data for your test environment.

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Video: How to Learn to Code

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvK0UzFNw1Q[/embed]

Creating Your Own Standard in PHPCS

At Zimco, we've started working on standardizing our coding but we ran into a little problem while we tried to automate the process of making sure our code adhered to that standard.

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Link Post: Unmasked: What 10 million passwords reveal about the people who choose them

I have a love/hate relationship with passwords and it's interesting to see what the common passwords are.

http://wpengine.com/unmasked/

Link Post: Introducing the Symfony Demo application

I've been working with Symfony for a couple projects and I've been super happy with the documentation. It seems like every time I do a search for something that I'm stuck on the project has already had a piece of documentation. It's nice to see they have this cool demo application that's using their best practices. It's super basic but it's a nice reference.

http://symfony.com/blog/introducing-the-symfony-demo-application

Creating a Custom Fork of a Composer Library

Composer is great because you can easily add libraries to your projects and have it automatically pull down the same versions for every deploy of your site. The downside to composer libraries (and open source in general), is that sometimes it's hard to get your pull requests for bug fixes merged into the master so you can use it on your project or add your own customizations. You can fork the repository in order to gain more control over the source.

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GitHub QuickTip: Adding a Folder From the Web Interface

I needed to add a file to a directory that didn't exist using the GitHub web interface (I didn't want to clone the repo [lazy I know]). If you add a new file and then type the name of the directory and then the forward slash (/) it will automatically create the folder:

Cool trick for the two times a year I need to make changes directly on the GitHub site. ;-)

Helpful Tool: Initializr

Initializr is here to kick-start the development of your new projects. It generates templates based on HTML5 Boilerplate by allowing you to choose which parts you want or don't want from it. A responsive template has also been added to start from a basic design instead of a blank page.

This was super helpful when I created a new site for a client.

http://www.initializr.com/

Podcast Roundup: April 2015 Edition

Now that the weather is much nicer I've started working on some home improvement projects and listening to my huge backlog of Podcasts. I thought I would highlight a couple that I've found interesting.

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