Jason Corradino – Developer
The most interesting project of my career.
May 12th
I just finished what is probably the most interesting project of my career thus far. This project involved a lot of work with responsive HAML/SCSS, a slew of jQuery, and a hefty serving of Ruby on Rails. I was brought onto the project a little late, as it was running behind and absolutely needed to launch on time. I started on it about a month and a half ago.
My role was mostly front-end oriented with HAML/SCSS/jQuery with only a bit of Rails work required of me, but I took the opportunity to get more comfortable with Rails, and took as many back-end tickets as I could (and that I thought I was capable of handling on my own without causing more work for someone else later on). But I honestly have to say that the most impressive thing about this site is likely the responsive nature of it. It is completely responsive, and scales based on the screen that is seeing it using media queries. Apparently this is the first project of it’s kind at Sears, and we were setting a standard for the rest of the company to follow with our work – laying the foundation, if you will.
Stay tuned for images, the link to the live site, and a much more detailed synapsis of the work I did for Kenmore.
The Birthday Club and Facebook’s API
Apr 24th
KMart's Birthday Club
I recently finished working on KMart’s Birthday Club website, a wordpress-based children’s site that is geared towards parents looking to make their child’s special day memorable. My role was handling all the social media aspects required in the project plan.
One of the bigger problems I ran into with this – I really didn’t like any of the existing facebook plugins for WordPress, so I ended up building my own. It was really an interesting learning experience. This gave me the opportunity to dig deeper into the new facebook Graph API than I have in the past, and it wasn’t as terrible as the facebook API once was.
My largest, and most interesting task, was to pull down photo-galleries and create a taxonomy for each one. The interaction with facebook for pretty much everything I had to do was fairly simple:
/** * Fetches data from facebook API * * @author Jason Corradino * * @param $path (required) facebook query path * @param $format (optional) format data is returned as either an object or json [obj|json] * @param $attr (optional) Adds additional attributes to the URL * * @return returns object of facebook data by default, json if 'format' parameter is set to json * */ static function getData($path, $format="obj", $attr="") { $pluginOptions = get_option('facebook_gallery_options'); $token = $pluginOptions["token"] ? $pluginOptions["token"] : FACEBOOK_APP_TOKEN; $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://graph.facebook.com/".$path."?access_token=".$token."&api_key=".FACEBOOK_API_KEY."&".$attr); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); $return = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); return ($format == "json") ? $return : json_decode($return); }
The above code will use your facebook application token to open up a curl with the facebook graph API, pulling down the requested data set within the URL, returning in the format set within the function call — defaulting to an object, but allowing a JSON response.
There will be a more detailed post about this down the line, and I am considering releasing the plugin I built to wordpress.org extend. So look forward to that.
Happy coding
How to remove spammy facebook apps. (updated)
Mar 23rd
When facebook released their new timeline layout, the path you must take to remove junk applications from your facebook profile has also changed, so I thought I would post the new steps to help out anyone in need. It is still fairly easy to do, so lets get to it.
Step 1
And select privacy settings
Step 2
Scroll down to Apps and Websites and click Edit Settings
Step 3
Select “Remove unwanted or spammy apps”
Step 4
Now we just need to select the application
and then remove it
And that’s it, now just repeat step 4 until you’ve removed all of the apps you don’t want.
Comcast/AT&T/Verizon: I Call Shenanigans
Feb 25th
This, my friends, is the internet (or at least a small bit of it)
After seeing this stuff spread across the internet, I thought I would interject, and explain to everyone how the internet “actually” works.
Recently, I have started seeing more and more internet service providers claiming that a small percentage of their users are “hogging” all the bandwidth. That a small group of users are using the networks so much, it is bogging down the system for everyone else.
Shenanigans.
There is a small modicum of truth in that idea, but you need to understand how networks actually work before seeing how garbage that claim actually is. Lets say I go out and start up an ISP in Chicago. I put up one “data path” (connection to the internet as a whole) for my soon-to be customers, and eventually get my first customer. He thinks it is great, it is fast as hell, and he is happy. So happy, in fact, that he goes out and tells all his friends how awesome my service is. A few weeks down the line, 10 of his friends decided to try me out, so signed up. Now instead of one person on that data path, there are 11.
Imagine this as a group of cars on the highway merging into a single lane of traffic. When there is one car, everything is all fine, and he goes on like there are no problems. What happens when there are 11 cars? The cars start to jam up, and some get forced to wait their turn to merge into the proper lane. This is what is happening.
Now customer 1 is calling and complaining that his internet service is sluggish, and not nearly as fast as it was when he signed up. Who’s fault is this? Is this the fault of the customers – regardless of how much information they are using up, it is nothing more than one more car on the hypothetical highway above doing the same speed as everyone else, or is it the fault of the system operator – the entity that is in charge of making sure there are enough lanes available on the highway so that users can get through without long wait times.
Go back to the highway scenario… do you blame the car in front of you for the traffic jam… or the entity that caused the jam in the first place?
Next time you hear someone say that the dirty users are using up too much data and ruining a good thing for everyone… call shenanigans on them, and tell them that the ISP is just being cheap, and using users as a fall-guy instead of upgrading their networks to provide a level of service they promised you when you signed up (and are more than happy to charge you for getting)
