What's Sqoo Media up to?

Log Paranoia

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:07:33 +0100

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.

#barcampbrighton3

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:17:00 +0100

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!

Will say more tomorrow ....

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 02:25:05 +0100

… 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!

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:00:30 +0100

It was only meant to be a stopgap for a week or two and is nearly a year old :)

Choices Choices Choices!

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:20:00 +0100

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, although I have seen no similar issues with a similar editor that I use for my SqooDriver CMS.

The other astounding thing I found last night was this, which is really amusing:
That’s right, Chrome’s spellcheck doesn’t know the word Google!

The other interesting bit of browser news I have seen is this Vimeo video about Ubiquity from Mozilla, a text based system that allows you to do things naturally without having to go to loads of sites and cut and pasting code (I could have done with it for this post for example). Stunning if it works, it may even be a Chrome killer for me:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Twitter and SMS

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:42:12 +0100

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 outside of the US, Canada and India, users could no longer receive updates via their mobiles, leaving a large number of users up in arms and considering jumping ship for similar services that still give SMS updates.

Thankfully a number of web developers stepped in almost immediately and started developing alternatives including my friend Russ who put together HootSMS. HootSMS appears to be the only working site up at the moment although it looks like two or three others will be up fairly soon, we will see if UK users leave Twitter or will be pursuaded to stay, they are the largest group using SMS and the rug has been pulled from under them. Hopefully HootSMS and others will put it back!

47 percent of IE users are up to date

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:07:00 +0100

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 from BBC.

Clearing floats the very easy way!

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:14:00 +0100

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 positioniseverything though not for long as it involved a fudge where margins were shunted up and then down by 32767ems, a bit nasty. The content-after method soon replaced it as it was far better.

The content-after method has been the main way things have been done for the last couple of years or so and seemed to be the simplest but again it was a little wrong, placing a CSS generated full stop within the DOM, if not the markup.

This is simple, put overflow: auto round the div that is to wrap the content, obvious and simple but no one has realised it. Developers like to think they are clever so how was there such a collective fail!

By the way it works great, thanks Paul :)

Every web app developer should read this book!

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:31:00 +0100

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
Getting the smallest functional implementation possible out there and live rather than making an app that does everthing before launch
Not setting long term deadlines

Brilliant, there’s a reason these are they guys who put ruby on rails.

SqooDriver goes Russian

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:11:38 +0100

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 have some nasty surprises. Last time it was for a PERL with SQL Server system using the MSHTML ‘editor’, this time its PHP with MySQL using the TinyMCE editor.

Getting the Russian code to roundtrip starting from a TinyMCE input box took a while, I had to trace the data path trough the system in a fair amount of detail, I was almost tripped up by an htmlentities call.

What made this task so much easier than last time was the fact I was using PHP and MySQL both of which have a great deal of community support, two pages helped me no end, PHP UTF-8 Cheatsheet and MySQL and UTF-8 thanks for shortening a chore no end!

I like worldle.net there are loads of word cloud generators out...

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:36:47 +0100

I like worldle.net there are loads of word cloud generators out there but this is the prettiest! I use it to visually check the density of keywords. It could do with a few more colour pallets to match the number of fonts though.

Apple killing the web

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:32:54 +0100

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 another tech company to me.

Want the shiny new 3g iPhone? Maybe not today afterall!

Spurl being spammed

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:24:52 +0100

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 filter the service without harming it, I imagine it is going to take a Google like approach and that can be painful.

Spurl is not my favorite for IM tasks, I know of a couple that rank much better (and faster) in Google, but it is good and quite popular. I would feel a bit guity if that was all I used these services for, I feed them other content for that reason and I imagine when the filters hit, I won’t get a slapdown when they come (fingers crossed)!

Coincidence? Are we McStupid?

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 21:24:07 +0100

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 would have thought that McDonalds would check what their ad agencies are churning out!

I hope that Cyriak gets the fees that were paid to the agency plus damages for having his worked linked to a company he didn’t endorse. In my opinion, I don’t see how something this close can be claimed as mere coincidence, especially as the animation technique is almost identical!

Copyright law has been tighened up dramatically over the last few years and the internet has made both IP stealing and its detection much easier, 15 years ago an idea taken from one country and used in another had a good chance of evading detection. Were in the 21st century guys, time to wake up!

First it was down and now its malfunctioning, Amazon must be...

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:38:00 +0100

First it was down and now its malfunctioning, Amazon must be loosing a fortune, not to mention shares have taken a tumble!

YUK! Maybe Google is about to have a botched facelift.

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:26:17 +0100

YUK! Maybe Google is about to have a botched facelift.

BBC News - Best viewed in Netscape 4?

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:14:00 +0100

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 quite surprised to see markup that would have made a developer from last century proud. The whole site is table based, not just the outer structure but the whole thing. Add to that spacer images, inline styling with depreciated attributes and a whole load of other ancient tricks which really really really belong to days past and the result is a complete mess. Not to mention the overcomplicated and unnecessary JavaScript.

Turning off the stylesheet results in a page that is all over the place. I’m glad they kept there ‘Low graphics version’ as it is absolutely necessary but one set of well constructed HTML should suffice. Also, the low graphics version has a stylesheet that is just not necessary at all, turning it off does little so why bother?

Perhaps it is too much to expect them to reach a content first div/CSS based layout in one fell swoop on such a complex site, but I have managed to do exactly that to one with far more variable content and over 40,000 pages. It took me 2 months of preparation and a 24 hour switchover period and I did it virtually single-handed.

I think this BBC news site redesign is a complete disaster. Sort out your CMS first!

The worst website I have seen in years!

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:28:00 +0000

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

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 01:15:11 +0000

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

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:36:00 +0000

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 providers of training to share their work and encourage links between the various providers. From an exercise at the conference, I could appreciate the need for this site, there is a lot of knowledge and resources that need to be shared. It seems that conferences like this one are currently the only way some of this information gets shared.

The site has been built to encourage interaction between members and the posting of materials. At present snapshots of an individuals work, news and events can be posted by registered users as well as being able to participate in online discussions.

The site is currently in beta and is being filled with initial content, public membership will be rolled out in the near future.

To quote from the site:

This site has been developed by Training Schools in the South-East. Training Schools are high-performing schools that have been recognised by the Department for Children Schools and Families as providing exceptional school-based professional development for all their staff. They provide innovative training for support staff and teachers, work closely with providers of Initial Teacher Education and lead the way on training and development for their local authorities and local schools.
Schools and all members of the training school programme believe in sharing innovative and interesting work with all members of the education community.