Blog

  • Rolling out bcrypt password hashing

    We’ve just started rolling out a change across all of the sites we host, to improve the security of user passwords. WordPress is very widely used. Because of this, WordPress’s development team often make decisions that keep WordPress compatible with a wide range of hosting environments. Sometimes, this comes at the cost of potential security…

  • Testing the Robot

    Yesterday, we did some quick tests on a robot that’s part of a design for an upcoming site. (More on that later). I tweeted about about it and got 168 responses, which was surprisingly high. Since it got so much input, I thought I’d write up the results, which, happily, aligned pretty well with our…

  • Timecop Gotcha

    Timecop is an extremely useful gem which allows you to simulate the passing of time in RSpec tests. We’re using it to test parts of Citrulu – for example, making sure we don’t send you multiple emails about the same thing. One of our tests has this shape: it “should do some stuff!” do #…

  • Introducing: Lily Dart

    We’re excited to announce that Lily Dart has joined dxw. As our first permanent designer, she’ll be working on the look and feel of most of our projects. Having a designer on the team will make it much easier for us to react quickly when our clients need things that need pretty. She’ll also be…

  • KISSmetrics

    We’ve been using Google Analytics to analyse traffic to Citrulu so far, but adding custom events to track significant things (e.g. when a user first creates a real test file) is a massive faff. We’re currently working on integrating KISSmetrics via its JavaScript API and it looks pretty shiny so far: everything is centered around the user, and…

  • Introducing Whippet

    For a while, we’ve been working on a stand-alone web server for doing WordPress development. We started working on it for a few reasons: With all those in mind, we started writing some software to wrap around PHP 5.4’s built-in webserver. It accepts requests, figures out where they should go, and hooks into the WordPress…