I have been looking at the node.js site today and it got me wondering is JavaScript the answer to everything?
In the past I have had a look at server side JavaScript projects such as the excellent Aptana Jaxer as I am fed up writing in two languages for each project (mostly JavaScript front end and PHP behind). The idea of sharing JavaScript code across both ends and the elegance that can bring is almost too much to pass up.
Now there is a node.js which takes things a bit deeper, think how elegant and scalable your system could become if your web server was built on JavaScript and tailored to your app!
So I would like to work on a LJMJ stack sometime soon :)
As I become more happy with the progressive enhancement way of working there are several technologies that I have started to use but have come up against the usual barrier ‘but we need it look the same in IE6,7 and 8 as well’. With CSS3 rules such as border-radius becoming more popular, I’m glad to see a solution that doesn’t call for yet more jQuery calls.
IE-CSS3 nicely solves the problem for border-radius, box-shadow and text-shadow by using propriety MS technologies. I can understand why some developers are against this as it stops MS from getting their act together and producing a decent browser, but sometimes you have to be pragmatic!
This story in the Guardian it a great example of what can go wrong when you use an unmoderated Twitter feed on your site. Handing your homepage over to the general public is risky for anyone but it you are a political party then you are asking for trouble! There have been many examples of this before such as the New Skittles homepage fun that happened last year but I found this one particularly funny, especially as they paid a lot for a site that was a rehash of a dubious pressure group campaign. I have advised against using anything but account fields in the past since the skittles thing, its good to be reminded why.
The moral of this story, think about what you are doing …. carefully!
I had a frustrating few hours yesterday. I put a fading rotation of images on a homepage, tested it thoroughly on my dev site and then once happy uploaded to the live site. Disaster! The images had looked like they white noise in them while they were fading. I had to roll back instantly, thankfully that was all of 60 seconds!
This caused a lot of head scratching, I tried many different images. It seemed to be only the images that were on the live site that caused the trouble, a real headache. I tried everything even taking screen prints of them an re-cutting in case of file corruption. I finally came to the conclusion that it was the black that was at fault, all three pictures had a large amount of black. Having found that out, I lightened the images by a small amount so there was no pure black in the image and all was fine!
Searching for similar occurrences, I did find a few references including this one http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/iewebdevelopment/thread/4df69380-c1ef-4fb6-8e7b-f133131b4abe
It does seem that Internet Explorer (6 through 8 at least) cannot handle pure black (#000000) pixels in Jpegs with a transparency applied without putting white speckles in their place, terrible!
I read 37 Signals last book ‘Getting Real’ at the beginning of last last year and it inspired me to make a website that is beginning to pay off. Just like their advice, it does one thing better that the current way its done, it doesn’t have any extra bells and whistles, it was debugged while live, it grew from the functionality outwards and most importantly I did the work once and then sold accounts. It’s now picking up subscribers nicely after the slow start that came with entering an unfamilliar marketplace.
Now 37 Signals have brought out a new book, ReWork, I haven’t found this book quite as ground-breaking but it seems to be full of great advice in short sharp essays on how to get things done more effectively.
There is a taster PDF here.
Smashing magazine produces some great lists of interactive techniques using JavaScript libraries, this is a list of some of them that I may use (or as is usual, write myself).
I like this one for the way it makes a lists of links inviting to interact with, needs a jQuery version :) http://www.web-kreation.com/demos/mootools-1.2_mouseenter-mouseleave/
I need an improved calendar system (and this is code I dont like to write myself). This looks great http://www.stefanoverna.com/log/create-astonishing-ical-like-calendars-with-jquery
One thing I want to add to SqooDriver 2.0 is an improved image manager. At the moment images are resized to a number of predefined sizes that are used on the site on upload. I want to allow cropping by the user before the image is uploaded and the facility to make a thumbnail image that isn’t just a smaller version of the main image. This looks just the ticket http://deepliquid.com/content/Jcrop.html
I came across this map last year and was good to be reminded of it. For fixed areas of zooming it can provide a much more pleasant experience than embedding Google Maps.
An elastic thumbnail may come in handy http://buildinternet.com/2009/09/sproing-make-an-elastic-thumbnail-menu/
Another great list is mentioned by SM which contains 11 really useful little plugins, the kind of things I write myself http://trif3cta.com/blog/entry/jquery-plugins-under-4k/
Oh and this is amazing http://razorjack.net/quicksand/ :D
I have split a site in two for a client, the second site Datacentience Consulting is similar in design to the original but has a different emphasis. Datacentience Consutling specialises in datacentre optimisation and emply a number of techniques such as rationalisation, consolidation and virtualisation in order to provide best practise in datacentre management.
SqooDriver CMS makes it simple to undertake such a task. Splitting a site can be a huge undertaking on many conventional CMS systems but the three table design of the underlying database enables a rapid ‘split and cull’ of the page structure, and the engine makes easy work of the duplication of the CMS installation, no long lists of plugins to install!
I have been watching the logs of a new blog I put up today about cheap Brighton. It is strange watching traffic develop from zero. I used some of my standard tricks which saw me get indexed in Google in about 5 hours which is about average. What I wasn’t expecting was the very sudden flood of bots and other suspicious activity.
The activity that worries me the most is that hundreds of completely different IP addresses are all asking for a single file. I would expect this kind of nonsense of course but not within a few hours of the domain registration!
It pays to watch your logs, if you don’t this is where you end up with hacking attempts getting through with brute force, of course you can’t watch them 24 hours a day.
So what to say about Barcamp Brighton….
I have never been to a barcamp or in fact any similar sort of (un)conference before. I was a bit nervous as the only price was that you had to put a talk together.
Within a couple of sessions I had got the concept and by early afternoon I was totally enthused having been to sessions ranging from accessibility, Flex, geocoding and user research. It wasn’t so much the sessions as the people that seemed to make it for me, there was an awful lot of enthusiasm expressed in many different ways.
My favourite session of the day was creative thinking for logial people which was a great deal of fun which started by showing how the opposite of black could be yellow (clue: context). Perhaps the funniest thing was we had a room full of techies and none of us could work out how to turn the lights on!
One of the sessions was about WYSIWYG DHTML based editors and the need for a better one. By the end, I had agreed to sign up to an open source development project, my first! If you need one and find things like TinyMCE don’t meet your needs then why not sign up to this http://code.google.com/p/editable-framework-js/ and join in:)
At 1am sozzled on free Jamesons, I was still scribbling on bits of paper and talking about data structres. I learned that the structure of my CMS was actually interesting to quite a few people, not something I would normally talk about in a bar!
Sunday had a fair amount of hungover people including me; I was knackered, I did notice there were far less smiles and far more yawns. Managed to get to the first session that I wanted to see which was the second of the day having missed the first and the breakfast.
The highlight was possibly the discussion organised (rather than lead) by a MySpace person about social networks, we talked long into lunch and covered a range of fascinating topics.
My own discussion could have been better. I now know something about when to schedule your session, I got that wrong which meant there were not enough people in the room to have a proper discussion, I needed a wider range of experiences to make it work. I would have done better reverting to my original talk on DIY content management systems.
By the end of the day I was exhausted, glad to go home and have a snooze. I would recommend a Barcamp to any developer, designer or new media person, you don’t have to be a techie to have benefited.
I now have a great long list of things to do, better get on!
… but Barcamp is a great format for finding out things you never knew you needed to know. Met some brilliant people and talked about some really interesting stuff :)
Can’t fault the free food or booze either :D
