One of the things we’ve started doing quite differently over the last few years is how we test our web projects. Now, most people would (rightly) assume we actually check or test our work before sending it live. But *how* we do this testing has changed drastically. For testing a web project, there are four …
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Mobile first – 5 key constraints on mobile devices

We’ve seen a big surge in mobile traffic across all of our projects this year. Some of these are getting more mobile traffic than desktop, and in others browsers like ipad or iphone have replaced Internet Explorer as the most popular browser (yay!). To meet this, we’ve had to go mobile first and rethink the …
Read MoreVulnerability scanning – checking code every time before it gets deployed

We’ve been using Brakeman to do vulnerability scanning as part of our Continuous Integration (CI if you’re into dropping acronyms) process for a few months now. Running Brakeman as part of CI means that this is something that runs every time one of our developers makes an update to a project. So plenty. Brakeman is …
Read MoreBypassing the sign up hurdle with super-soft joins
Red Ant client NCPIC has been pushing the boundaries of web-based psychological interventions for the past four to five years. Their latest intervention program Clear Your Vision had a few hurdles it had to overcome when it came to translating it to the web. The intervention is aimed at young people, generally of high school age, …
Read MoreManage SSL redirection in Nginx using maps, and save the universe
We use the Nginx web server for the majority of our websites at Red Ant. It’s incredibly flexible, and built for speed (freakishly fast in fact). One drawback though is that finding solutions for some of the more curly configuration problems can be difficult. Nginx is relatively new and has had a fairly rapid release schedule …
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