April 2010
2 posts
Is JavaScript the answer to everything?
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...
IE and CSS3
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...
March 2010
5 posts
Cash Gordon or why you shouldn't use unmoderated...
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...
The IE Jpeg black pixel transparency bug
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...
ReWork
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...
Some JS techniques I may use
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...
Datacentience Consulting
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...
September 2008
5 posts
Log Paranoia
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...
1 tag
#barcampbrighton3
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...
Will say more tomorrow ....
… 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
http://barcampbrighton.org/
Time I got rid of the design on Tumblr!
It was only meant to be a stopgap for a week or two and is nearly a year old :)
Choices Choices Choices!
Yesterday I installed the brand new shiny Google Chrome browser and was impressed. I liked the comic, especially the bit about how processes were handled, although it’s worth noting that MS have outlined a similar scheme for IE8, Im guessing Microsoft will be annoyed. So far, I have seen a few rendering bugs, one on http://news.bbc.co.uk (at the top) and one Tumblr using it’s editor,...
August 2008
1 post
Twitter and SMS
Strange one this, Twitter doent seem to have a business model. It shown no adverts and most users don’t even visit the site but use third party applications that take advantage of its API instead. So it seems rather strange that Twitter should ignore a possible revinue stream and dump a service they were providing for free that users would love to pay for.
Last Thursday they announced that...
July 2008
1 post
47 percent of IE users are up to date
This is more than I thought. According to the Swiss Institute of Technology 47% of Internet Exporer users have out of date browsers making them a security risk, this compares with 83% of Firefox users and 65% of Safari users.
If you havent yet then please update your browser and while we are at it, if you are using Internet Explorer, move to Firefox or Flock, they are just far better!
Report...
June 2008
9 posts
Clearing floats the very easy way!
Why has this simple technique taken so long to emerge? The float clearing problem has been around as long as CSS based layout. It has been a big problem!
The W3C always recommended the clearing element fudge that invalidated their aim of producing fully semantic code, hypocrisy.
A method I helped developed with a former colegue was even the fashion for a few months, making onto...
Every web app developer should read this book!
Getting real by 37 signals, read it online for free. I have been building web apps for 9 years and never have I found so much good advice in one place.
Each chapter lays out a part of a philosohy that will get you developing quickly and efficiently. Great advice includes:
Designing from the functional centre of a page outwards rather than building a framework and squeezing the functional inside...
SqooDriver goes Russian
I have just spent a while altering my content management system editor to cope with multiple languages including Russian, Chinese and Arabic. I have a project that requires four languages and it seems like a good time to go double byte.
Having done a similar job in the past, I knew there would be some difficult bits converting the system to use UTF-8, single byte to double byte conversions always...
Apple killing the web
No not the usual kind of rant, the Apple World Wide Developers Conference seems to have generated so much traffic that a myriad of sites seem have gone down because of it!
These seem to range from various Apple store sites across the world to Twitter, and tech blogs such as Engadget.
I’m glad I’m not an Apple nut anymore, I used to love them in the 80s, these days they are just...
Spurl being spammed
The homepage of Spurl has the following message on it:
Limited feature set:
We are currently forced to offer reduced functionality due to heavy spam attacks. The lists with New and Hot spurls are therefore disabled until further notice.
All social bookmarking sites get used by internet marketers, spammers and good content providers alike, they all get this abuse. The problem is how do you...
Coincidence? Are we McStupid?
My friend Cyriak was sent a link to a video by a fan of his of a Swedish McDonalds advert which had a striking resemblance to his own work. The agency involved have apparently said its a coincidence, judge for yourself!
Cyriak’s animation …
and the advert …
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Itl08AFJOZI
After Sony and Coca Cola have both had bad publicity from similar problems, you...
April 2008
1 post
BBC News - Best viewed in Netscape 4?
The BBC has slowly been revamping its websites and as of yesterday morning it was the turn of the news. I would have expected for them to have made the site better, and indeed they have given me my number one wish, the site is now much wider with bigger text and no longer hugs the left-hand side in a narrow strip. However all the other improvements are skin deep. Looking under the hood, I was...
March 2008
8 posts
The worst website I have seen in years! →
Congrats cellfoam, yup the product is bad but that website reminds me of the worst of 1995 (it’s only missing blinking text to get top marks). I would say get a professional in to start from scratch but to be honest I don’t think its worth it, this product needs to disappear almost as much as the site does! Cheers stumble for bringing me to this :)
How to annoy your sysadmin
I saw this listed on Codango: “InstaMSG is a PHP script that will send an instant msg to the webmaster by producing a temporary text file and scheduling an AT job. It than launches a batch file, which in turn launches Notepad that shows the text file. File is than automatically deleted.”
Training Schools Site Launched at Conferece
I travelled up to London last Wednesday to the South East Training Schools regional conference for the public beta launch of their new website, trainingschools.org.uk . The site was put together by Sqoo and designed by Julia Brown, comissioned by the Training and Development Agency For Schools (TDA) in association with Dorothy Stringer School. The site aims to provide a central place for...
IE 8 Beta released 'for developers' →
Apparently it now fails ACID2 :(
[SPAM] It would be a MySpace email
I don’t get any other false positives from a certain popular public domain spam detection system; but I just got one and I wasn’t at all surprised it was from Myspace, as all the others I have ever got have been too. It’s not rocket science and when you run an automated system that sends millions of the same email (a you have a friend that is having a birthday one) surely you...
A Mixx too far?
When using a social media site to post a story, how about going back to the source? Look at this: A popular story posted on Mixx which goes to … Engadget which turns out to be a repost of a story on .. Boing Boing which got its content from .. a post on ‘The Consumerist’ which finally … Bingo! the original post on an audiophile forum I feel all reblogged out!
Web Developers win VS Microsoft
IE8 will render properly, “We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.” said Internet Explorer general manager Dean Hachamovitch, El Reg reports. I had recently read at A List Apart that IE8 would require a proprierty tag to do this and would follow IE7 by default (which I guess would be better better than following...
February 2008
5 posts
What would Google look like if it had to optimise... →
I think this is a serious point illustrated in a tongue in cheek fashion. My biggest bugbear is duplicate content, I want to give my users relevant content they want on the page they are on rather than where Google wants it to be. This is a good illustration of why monopolies are damaging, Google is now damaging the net and it is beginning to show. See this as well for a bit of irony:...
Deserting Facebook
As I thought was beginning to happen back in December, users are deserting Facebook, according to Nielsen Online users fell by 5% from Dec to Jan. There are a few different causes of these including the privacy issue and dilution of ‘cool factor’ as older users like myself have invaded. The one I think may have been the killer though is advertising. Facebook users are in a walled...
Its not all Microsoft's Fault!
I fired up an old Pentium III, 512MB laptop I own, I don’t use it as the screen has an expensive to fix fault which is a shame as its a tiny little lightweight Tosh but I have kept it as an emergency machine as its just about usable. It runs Windows 98. It’s been a long while since I have used 98 and was shocked how quickly it booted and how fast all the software ran. It got me...
Please Digg this ID Card Story
A leaked document gives away the British government’s real intentions for ID cards and the methods they are thinking of using to coerce (their word) us into getting one. This document shows that many ministers who have spoken in the house have been rather economical with the truth. This story is not reaching the media so we need to blog and web 2 its way into the public’s consiousness....
January 2008
4 posts
I Support Andy Clark's CSS Unworking Group →
The way CSS has been developed is wrong. It’s too dictatorial and does’s not meet the need of the people on the ground. I think its the designers and developer’s turn. (Thanks fellow tumbler Paul Giacherio for pointing me this way!) I just which he would set the group up as a real entity :)
The past and the Future - Good Developments
Firstly. the past, thanks to Notes from Phazm for the great news that Microsoft are now forcing upgrades to IE7, no more pressing no to updates and making us developers miserable. Hopefully this means that developers can dump IE 6 (the worst browser since Mac IE5.5) and start producing sites that use the full richness of modern DHTML. Which brings me neatly on to the future, HTML 5. I have now...
Network Solutions - Don't use them for anything
This has been in the news for a little while, it is something a lot of people had wondered when it would happen rather than if. When you search to see if a domain is available using the Network Solutions site, you are locking yourself into buying that domain from them at an uncompetative price or risking loosing the registration to someone else! What NS are doing is registering every domain...
Not even your stats data is safe from viruses!
I was looking at my stats for bimblog.net and I noticed 5 referral links from a site I didn’t recognise. Being curious, I clicked on the link in my stats package and found myself on a site that was trying very hard to get me to install a virus not very convincingly masquerading as a video codec. I then looked up the domain and found some information on the site, it seems that it was using...
December 2007
6 posts
Happy Birthday Peace goes live
A site I have developed has just been put live:) Happy Birthday Peace celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Peace symbol which was drawn in 1958 by Gerald Holtom. Happy Birthday Peace is designed to be both an interactive and education site and has features such as user contributed galleries for peace symbol art and videos, a message board and blog as well as educational and historical articles....
Browser Bashing
For some reason half of you use Internet Explorer as your main browser, of course that is your choice and from the perspective of a user, it is unlikely you will know anything is wrong with that. In fact you are likely to think that all this anti Internet Explorer rhetoric is just another bit of Microsoft bashing and to some degree you would be right. There is a big problem with Internet Explorer....
Send a Christmas Card to Second Life!
I have been working on a secret project with Dave Dub in Second Life, and we are ready with our first test release! I am not going to say what the application is, that still remains secret. Using the tools we have built, we have put together a little site to test some of the functionality running with live traffic. That site is a web based postal service that allows you to send a Christmas card to...
#1 Woo!
I’ve got an article I wrote to the #1 position of the publishing charts for its category :) I know this isn’t that important, but hey, I’m glad my writing is up to scratch! Most Published EzineArticles in the Internet-and-Businesses-Online:Domain-Names Category Your Domain Is Your Lifeblood Domain Names Auction to Sell Your Domain 5 Keys to Get Started with Domain Names...
How Ironic
I posted a rant against chain letters on facebook, meant for my friends and 10 mins later I received 2 copies back from friends who just sent it on …. “Why facebook chain letters are bad….. I *hate* recieving them, you know the ones that you receive a dozen of withtin the space of a couple of weeks. There are plenty and quite often they seem all fluffy with themes ...
Reliable Web Hosting
I have been asked 3 or 4 times this month by people who are not my customers, where to get reliable web hosting from. I use a company called Hostgator, who I find brilliant. They are cheap, have great tech support, a full list of features and have not let me down. So why don’t I just keep this info to myself and resell the hosting for more money? I will happily host small sites on a...
November 2007
11 posts
My New Seafront Office
I just moved into an office in an arch on the seafront in Brightonia out of sudden neccesity. Quite a shock! I spent a few hours wandering around Second Life a few months back but had put it aside, now I need to do some work within the world iteslf and to do that I needed an area to work, strange. Brightonia is quite a nice little place, the seafront is a spookily accurate recreation of...
The Big Swish
Firstly, sorry if this isn’t my most eloquent posting; I’m currently suffering from blocked sinuses and my head feels like its about to explode :( I have been thinking about what I call ‘the big swish’, information that swashes round the net from place to place, finding different audiences using different forms as it goes. Heres a few good examples: Twitervision Digg arc...