It has been a long week at Neutron Interactive. We ran into quite a few issues on some of our site paths that reaffirmed my hatred for Internet Explorer ( any version ) and all things Microsoft. The CSS errors were mildly quick fixes – except for some nasty PNG link disabling – but all in all the errors have been fixed . . . almost.

So, we have been working on figuring out the best method of testing at Neutron. I personally have been researching into Selenium, it has a nice little Firefox extension and on top of that I can export the test into Python and run tests from the command line. But this still runs the issue of having to open my VM and test each individual browser – exactly what I am trying to avoid.

Fortunately Selenium has a solution : Selenium Grid. The Grid allows you to run tests on multiple machines in parallel. This means I can distribute my test across X number of boxes in X number of browsers all at once. Pretty fancy eh? I soon began dreaming of our backroom filled with various computer oddities running everything from Gopher to Chrome each simultaneously checking our sites for deficiencies and alerting us of failure.

Alas, this test farm would be a bit more to manage and the power consumption would be out of control. The planned solution is to setup multiple Virtual Machines running a single browser version and having the Grid ship the tests to each VM. So far, I have had success running parallel tests in Firefox on Leopard OS X 10.5.7 and Firefox on Windows XP.

There is still quite a bit to go to get the Selenium Grid running, but I think this is the perfect solution for testing in multiple browsers in the quickest time possible.

When I catch a few extra minutes at work ( Web Developer at Neutron Interactive ) I have been designing and playing with the Neutron Interactive Web Site. I don’t like the old site at all – it does not capture the vibe you get when you are at Neutron. So in this new design I really wanted to get the feel of the office and the people that work there.

I drew out the general idea I wanted – took only one sketch to get there, but I had been thinking about the site for while.

click to enlarge

Threw it into photoshop, and kinda worked a little bit of stuff in there. The background if my favorite, it has some brick, the neutron logo, cracked cement and the bulk of it is a mushroom cloud. After a lot of tweaking, I finally came out with something I liked, except for the right column – which I still am not sure what I will use it for. But here is the gist of it . . .

The new site is currently running on a development server – but I recorded 30 minutes of coding out the CSS and HTML for it – for any of you that can make it past 1 minute of it without ripping your eyes out.

The site will launch soon . . . but for now – enjoy.