Tag Archives: web

UI and other network considerations – Embracing the Network lunch’n’learn

This talk is available in various forms across the web and it’s interesting the difference in reaction it received – with the old team at Haymarket we came up with about two pages of suggested changes to our front-end code and other improvements.

At Mountain Warehouse, a lot less interest – but then the team is fairly back-end focused and never really get to play with the UI.

Note: this is a different video of the same talk as the original has vanished.

SmashingConf 2015 Barcelona: Patrick Hamann — Embracing the network from Smashing Magazine on Vimeo.

YouTube oembed parameters / documentation

Update Nov 2017 there now appears to be official documentation.

While looking at a bug in Umbraco, I could not find, anywhere, a definitive description of the YouTube oembed service – so I’ve decided to write one up. Please let me know if you find other features, or if this has drifted away from accuracy. Or if I’ve just been incompetent and not found the official API documentation somehow.

The YouTube oembed service is available at https://www.youtube.com/oembed (note https, not http as otherwise advertised, it’s 301 redirected).

Standard parameters (as per oembed specification)

  • url – the URL of the resource
  • maxwidth – the maximum width. The thumbnail size is not affected. This value, if bigger than the usual video return, will increase the size of the video.
  • maxheight – the maximum height. The thumbnail size is not affected. This value will only decrease the size of the video.
  • format – “json” or “xml”

Non-standard parameters

  • scheme – you can set this to “https” to make the returned code work on a site served over https. (Why the returned data doesn’t use “//youtube.com”, I don’t know…)

Sources

Clearing DNS caches

When making DNS changes it can often take a while for various DNS caches between yourself and the source to clear. I’ve often found that the last ones to change are the ones in the last few metres – from your router to your browser.

You’ll need to find the one upstream that’s incorrect and fix “backwards” from that – i.e. check your Windows DNS cache first, then work towards the browser.

Browser

According to OpenDNS, all browsers will clear their DNS cache if you use their clear cache functionality, but that’ll take out a lot more than DNS.

Chrome: Visit chrome://net-internals/#dns and press the ‘clear hosts cache’ button. You can also see what IP it’s talking to on this page.

Firefox: Close and re-open browser should do it – otherwise there’s a fiddly method involving about:config. When I’ve tried out the plug-ins I’ll add a suggestion, but if you’ve using one let me know in the comments and I’ll update this.

IE: no independent DNS cache.

Local Windows machine

At command prompt: ipconfig /flushdns

Use ping to see if you’re resolving OK.

Windows Server (if acting as DNS cache)

At command prompt: dnscommand <servername> /clearcache