Three Things: ImageMagick, RequestBin, Responsivness
By Steph Skardal
June 28, 2012
It’s been a while since I wrote a Three Things blog article, where I share tidbits that I’ve learned that don’t quite make it into a full blog post, but are still worth sharing!
Image Stacking via Command Line
I recently needed to stack several images to CSS spritify them. I did some quick searching and found the following ImageMagick command line functionality:
convert add.png add_ro.png -append test.png
convert add.png add_ro.png +append test.png
The -append argument will stack the images vertically, and +append will stack the images horizontally.
RequestBin
Recently, I needed to quickly examine the contents sent during a payment transaction. Richard pointed me to RequestBin a neat and quick tool for examining the contents of an external request. I was testing the Elavon payment gateway integrated in an application using Piggybak. In my code, I made the following change:
class ElavonGateway < ViaklixGateway
self.test_url = 'https://demo.myvirtualmerchant.com/VirtualMerchantDemo/process.do'
self.live_url = 'https://www.myvirtualmerchant.com/VirtualMerchant/process.do'
+ self.test_url = 'http://requestb.in/abc1def2'
I ran through a single checkout, then visited the RequestBin inspect URL to examine the variables passed to the payment gateway, to see the following data (the text overwrites itself in Chrome):
RequestBin example output.
A Responsiveness Tool
I’ve been working on responsiveness for a couple of sites recently. One of my clients pointed out responsivepx, which allows you to toggle the width of your browser to review various responsive layouts.
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