Discover the latest developments in the digital world

Critical CSS can mean the difference between seeing a page within 2 seconds or having to stare at a blank page for 10 seconds or more.

At the start of July 2017, Google introduced the revamped Google My Business. Just like publishing posts on Facebook, users can now also resort to likewise functionalities in Google My Business. Putting it more bluntly, users can from now on post text, images, videos, GIFs and events that will appear in the search results of your, or any other, company.

Fun fact: 90% of all global data has been created within just the last 12 months. And this astonishing number is ever increasing at an exponential speed. It’s close to impossible to comprehend how much data is actually being released every second. As a result, people are getting overwhelmed. But than how, as a marketer, can you read and analyze all this data about your consumers and your market, making sure you focus on relevancy and efficiency?

Did you know that human brain activity is significantly more triggered and activated when interacting with a known person compared to interacting with an unknown person? This is, from an evolutionary perspective, because our brain tells us that personalizing is more worthy of our valuable attention. This association can also be extended to and made use of in the business world.

Welcome back to our 3-part blog post on how to build a new feature for your application. This step-by-step guide will help you with your development process.

This blog post will explain the main ideas behind machine learning and try to show you why you should care about any of them in the first place.

Welcome back to our 3-part blog post series on how to build a new feature for your application. This step-by-step guide will help you with your development process.

In this blog I'll be guiding you through the process of creating a new feature for an existing application. 

We've listed a few Drupal 8 modules along with our personal experience and the reason why you should avoid them. Of course, this information might become out of date in a while as modules get updated and bugs are fixed.

My team and I were a few days away from launching materialise.com, a brand new Drupal 8 website for a 3D printing company when we started noticing some strange behavior regarding the URL aliases of the nodes.

For a while now we've been looking for a competent alternative to compete with Drupal. When a client requests a Content Management System (CMS), our go-to-technology has always been Drupal. Lately, however, we've had a growing need for a custom CMS solution.

PHP 7.1.0 was released this month, so it's time for a roundup of the most important new features that were added in this release.

Web Summit is the largest technology conference on the planet. A great place to find out what the tech world is working on and what the next big thing will be. What is my key takeaway for companies that want to be future-proof? Storytelling.

For the last 3 days, me and my colleagues have been in Lisbon for Web Summit 2016. It's impossible to write about each and every talk we listened to, but here are our 5 takeaways from this conference so far:

After a huge recommendation of our colleague Herman, who went to BrightonSEO last year, my colleague Lien and I were eager to know what the fuss was all about.

While Google Classic Analytics reaches its end, still a lot of websites are using the ga.js trackingcode to send data to their Google Analytics account.

In addition to our Google Docs scraper tool (which checks a list of websites on the use of the ga.js code), we also talked at #GAUCBE about creating smarter segments in Google Analytics.

CSS specificity: a concept every front end developer has been struggling with at some point. It‘s usually the reason why your CSS rules don’t apply to some elements, although you explicitly defined it.

Many developers tend to learn CSS specificity by trial-and-error, which often results in the overuse of styling with id’s or with the well-known last resort !important. In most cases these issues can easily be solved by tweaking your selectors so that your code will remain clear.

So you came here to save a kitten? That's wonderful, but the real reason we're both here is to talk about clean code. In this blog post I'll be sharing some of my personal experiences and tips. But before we dive into the tips and tricks part, let's talk about what we, as developers, do and why we do it. 

We are a proud sponsor of Web Tomorrow (June 16th, Ghent). Our experts will provide you information about our services and what we can mean for your company. On top of that, you can participate in a contest where you can win a pop-up team of our experts.

Phaser.io is a HTML5 game framework that gives you all the necessary tools to create a game in JavaScript. It’s easy to setup and also easy to learn with a lot of quality documentation and example code snippets available online.

As online marketing and consumer behavior are changing all the time, we like to introduce you to our omni-channel marketing paper. It is our Adagio methodology, of which we believe it is an excellent way of organizing your marketing strategy.

Pharmaceutical companies used to sell treatments only to doctors and hospitals. Today, both patients and physicians expect easy access to in-depth drug information, across any device. We empower your sales team to sell more effectively, and deliver better care, with customized content and responsive support for every patient.

Silicon Valley is all about CHANGE. And new digital media and technologies, largely driven by Silicon Valley innovation, have definitely CHANGED the roles and responsibilities of marketing departments worldwide.

So we’d like to provide insight into how marketing departments within Silicon Valley are actually using the technology themselves. Here’s Five Silicon Valley Marketing Trends that we see.

How can you get a legacy codebase under control and bring it to a new level of maturity? This post summarises my advice and lessons learned from years of working on a large legacy web application.

Sonata Project is a bundle collection for Symfony to basically make your day-to-day CRUD programming tasks easier. Hooking up your precious doctrine orm models with a backend interface has never been easier!

So let's get started! We are going to build a portfolio system with tags and clients ORM attached to it. First we set up our Symfony project from scratch by running composer:

This is more or less a how-to on installing and renewing an SSL (or better, TLS) certificate, on Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudFront (Dutch blogpost about Amazon AWS services). 

These instructions are targetted to do it unattended, so you can automate it, for example with Let's Encrypt certificates.

Front-end developers have a lot of influence on a website's performance. In this article, I will be covering some techniques that will help you optimise your next project.

Whether you are using MySQL, MongoDB or another data store, you will have some kind of paging mechanism to scroll through your data set.

Sharing is caring, especially among developers, where the sharing takes form as open-source code and community tools.

While we were using RequireJS in a project we stumbled across a few problems. One of those problems was getting our assets loaded through a versioned path.

Last week, we read an interesting paper that focuses on pharmaceutical multi-channel marketing in a digital world. We like to share the insights we gained:

At Intracto we use Bamboo to automate building and deployment of our web projects. All our projects have a comparable directory structure with a Gruntfile in the same location.

On the 12th of June the Domain Driven Design eXchange took place in London. Intracto was there and we’d like to recap the points we found most interesting here. Should your interest be piqued while reading the following, be sure to check out our jobs.

Last month, at eHealth Week 2015, the European Commission talked about ongoing and potential future policy actions in the field of mobile health. They discussed three important fields: Privacy and Security, Safety and Transparency and Web entrepreneurs’ access to the market. Read more about the topics they discussed here.

Why we switched?

We run Apache with it's PHP module mod_php by default and it works fine. For some projects we prefer php-fpm to have more control and less overhead.

In a previous article (written in Dutch), I talked about our Vagrant setup and how we use shell provisioning to keep things simple.

For this follow-up article, I wrote a script that compiles PHP7 from source. This script was tested on Debian 8. It compiles PHP7 with all options Debian (and Dotdeb) usually do. You probably don't use many of these options, but now you can easily strip down your configure string and re-run the shell script. It activates opcache, has the MySQL extensions and compiles PHP CLI and PHP-FPM.

In our previous blog post, we introduced our back-end developer, Lorenz, who is in charge of the final step of our work flow. But before he can get his hands dirty, a lot of work needs to be done by his colleagues. So in this post, we would like to introduce our front-end developers.

Last Sunday (Sept. 15) I took one of the many stages at Drupalcamp Leuven for my talk 'An Introduction to the Symfony Standard Edition'. I wanted to introduce Drupal developers to the basic workings of Symfony by way of a demo, as Drupal 8 and Symfony 2 are much more integrated. So a good understanding of Symfony would benefit Drupal devs as well.

If you build web applications, chances are that they will send e-mail. Think contact forms, order confirmations, etc. On a developer machine however, you usually don't want this e-mail to be delivered to a real mailbox. You could use MailCatcher to solve this problem, but there are also other solutions, like using your current MTA in a smart way.

Git is becoming more popular in favor of svn, as everyone knows. In this post, we'll show you how to easily migrate from svn to git. Make sure (on ubuntu for example) that you have the git-svn package installed. It should be available from your default repositories.

In this post, I will show you how to create a .deb package from some binary files.