Web standards in action…

Sun Jul 16

I had a nice email from a client late on Friday night saying that their website was on the first page of Google for one of their most important products. The site: House of Crystal. The search: glass trophies (note: this position may change in the future, so get ‘em while they’re hot!).

The great thing about this is we’ve not done anything special with the site - it’s just plain HTML pages. However I built the site using web standards, which means the text on the pages has semantic value. That means Google (and other text-dependant ystems such as screenreaders) can tell easily which bits of text have different types of meanings. Meaning like “this is a heading”, “this is a paragraph”, “this bit should be emphasised” and much more.

It may be a minor point to some, and the number of web developers using web standards may be small at the moment, but I firmly believe this is the future of the web. And, in case you don’t think using web standards has much tangible benefit, look no further than House of Crystal - they’re on the first page of Google, and all with very little traditional SEO effort.

A rant about the state of British terrestrial TV…

Fri Jul 14

I haven’t ranted in a while, so here goes. TV is rubbish. For every gem like 8 out of 10 cats there are half a dozen wases of time like those “celebrities do stuff that they weren’t made famous for and frankly suck at” shows. Gah.

While I appreciate the sterling work done by such bastions of highbrow entertainment as Stephen Fry, it’s all to clear that just a few minutes of watching the drivel of reality TV shows is enough to start killing off ones braincells at an alarming rate. If I wanted to experience back-biting, gossip, banality, boredom and peoples emotional unstability in the evenings I’d just do overtime in the office.

And now, the final nail in the coffin, the straw that is breaking this camels back, is the lack of coverage of title=”The Tour de France”>the Tour. This is one of the longest-running, most well-respected, gruelling sporting endurance events in the world - the world cup on two wheels - yet I’ve not even seen mention of it on any of the standard 5 channels. After putting up with months of world cup hype, and the usual Wimbledon washout, why can’t I be rewarded with even a daily Tour highlights show?

It’s frankly disgraceful, and enough to make one buy a freeview box. Except then I’d just have a load more channels of unadulterated cack to sit in front of. Gah.

The customer is always right…

Wed Jul 12

Yes, sure. As the good people on Andy Budds website have made clear, some clients are just clueless. That goes for managers, too. If you want to feel my pain, just read that list.

My three things:

1) There is no substitute for good content (and no, I won’t ‘just make something up’)
2) There is no substitute for good design (and no, I won’t ‘just use the Powerpoint template’)
3) There is no substitute for hard work (and no, it won’t happen overnight)

The wonders of OOP…

Mon Jul 10

You know how earlier in the year I was lamenting the fact that this OOP thing was OK, but I didn’t really Get It? Well, I think I get it now, and all thanks to a conversation with the great M@ about equine genitalia. I kid you not.

So the new Wiblog system is being built using really simple code like this (don’t try to run this psuedo-PHP, it’s not real).


// create the new page
$page = new Page;
// set the new page title
$page->title = “Entries for “.$page->selectedMonthName.”, “.$page->selectedYear

// create the new entries object
$entries = new Entries;

// set the parameters for the entries we want to fetch
$entries->year = $page->selectedYear;
$entries->month = $page->selectedMonth;

// get the selected entries
$entries->getEntries();

// loop the entries
foreach($entry in $entries->entryList){
// write out this entry to the page content
$page->content .= $entries->draw($entry);
}

// create the page links for multiple pages
$page->pageEntryLinks($entries->totalEntries);

// write out the page
$page->draw();

Isn’t that easier than writing the whole thing from scratch every time?

Out and about (14:21 pm)…

Mon Jul 10

Here's something fantastic: the Tour de France in Google Earth. Go to letour.fr and follow the links. The Tour is also going through my parents village!