Sun Oct 25
At a party last night a friend of mine told me about a new spoof email he’d seen. I wasn’t aware of it (I don’t keep my ear very close to that particular ground) but here’s an example just forwarded to me:
> Subject: Attention - Important Notification
> Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:14:44 -0600
> From: tech-admin <tech-admin@myjournal.com>
> To: info@myjournal.com
>
> Attention!
>
> On October 22, 2009 server upgrade will take place. Due to this the
> system may be offline for approximately half an hour.
> The changes will concern security, reliability and performance of mail
> service and the system as a whole.
> For compatibility of your browsers and mail clients with upgraded server
> software you should run SSl certificates update procedure.
> This procedure is quite simple. All you have to do is just to click the
> link provided, to save the patch file and then to run it from your
> computer location. That's all.
>
> http://updates.myjournal.com.secure.digi1adm.org/ssl/id=7335328053-info@myjournal.com-patch30892.exe
>
> Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter and sorry for
> possible inconveniences.
>
> System Administrator
>
> __________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus
> signature database 4520 (20091018) __________
>
> The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.
>
> http://www.eset.com
Scarily real, huh? The “http://updates.myjournal.com” subdomain makes it look very official. So, be careful out there.
Tue Sep 22
There’s a meme on Twitter at the moment entitled Share your Stats where web guys are sharing statistics about the browsers viting websites. I’m not sure who started this meme, but I guess they are trying to get a feel for how prevalent Internet Explorer is, particularly version 6. You know most web developers don’t like Internet Explorer 6, right?
Anyway, I have a few sites I can share the statistics for. Here they are:
Share Your Stats meme results
| Website |
Browsers |
Operating systems |
|
Firefox |
Internet Explorer |
Safari |
Chrome |
Opera |
Windows |
Mac |
Linux |
| stillbreathing.co.uk |
51.47% |
29.11% |
9.55% |
5.04% |
1.79% |
75.88% |
16.87% |
6.55% |
| wibsite.com |
69.68% |
18.28% |
4.81% |
4.15% |
1.10% |
77.50% |
15.62% |
6.28% |
| myjournal.com |
34.58% |
51.40% |
8.41% |
2.80% |
n/a |
86.92% |
8.41% |
0.93% |
| performerjs.org |
65.73% |
11.32% |
8.45% |
9.77% |
2.88% |
73.52% |
16.72% |
9.11% |
| beatsbase.com |
45.40% |
33.97% |
12.06% |
5.71% |
2.86% |
80.95% |
17.14% |
1.27% |
| comp-unlimited.co.uk |
16.91% |
75.21% |
3.83% |
2.23% |
0.46% |
93.45% |
4.73% |
1.14% |
| Large business website |
7.52% |
81.22% |
9.01% |
1.63% |
0.35% |
90.28% |
8.71% |
0.26% |
That’s pretty much what I expected, with a very large proportion of visitors to the more commercial sites weighted towards Internet Explorer and Windows. For the other sites, particularly those with a heavy web development slant, the statistics show a wider spread of browsers. It’s good to see Chrome making inroads, but these kind of results must be somewhat disheartening for Opera.
Sun Aug 23
A little while ago a guy called Jim contacted me to ask for a small addition to my Personal Welcomes for Wordpress MU plugin. It was a good suggestion and easy to do, so I did it. Then I realised I’d seen something on TV about this guy, so I asked him to write something about what they ar doing, and how they are using my plugin. Here’s what he put:
After being featured on PBS for taking our canine cancer survivor Jerry on
the road trip of a lifetime, viewers flocked to tripawds.com to find out
more. As blog and discussion forum traffic grew, we migrated the website to
WordPress MU so we can now offer free Tripawds Blogs for others to share
their own three legged dog stories.
We use Chris Taylor’s Personal Welcomes plugin to send each new member a
personalized message, welcoming them to the Tripawds Community, and
providing them with helpful links to make the most of their blog.
This handy plugin allows us to create different templates with specific
messages for those who signed up without creating a blog, or those who
created a blog but haven’t yet posted anything. The admin panel for Personal
Welcomes now provides convenient links to new blogs so we can easily edit
each welcome message we send with relative comments, thus creating a truly
personal welcome for each new user.
Many thanks to Chris for his helpful plugin, and quick attention to our blog
links feature request!
http://tripawds.com
It’s great to hear of someone using one of my plugins, especially for a site making a difference to people … or in this case, dogs! Good luck for the future Jim.
Sat Apr 11
I got an email today from Friends Reunited, which I’m sure everyone knows well. Apparently they have a new website. My curiousity got the better of me. I wish it hadn’t.
Firstly the page I saw when I followed the “have a look at your brand new homepage” link looked like one of those full-of-advertising sites, and not a good one:
See? Ugh. Where’s the information about what’s new? Where’s anything?
Fortunately they provide a “Don’t show me this page again” link. Except, uh-oh…
It’s not a link. They’ve fallen for the old ASP.NET “let’s make every link, NOT a link!” trick. By using the ASP.NET PostBack “feature” they’ve made their site inaccessible to any visitors without JavaScript – including, and you’ll like this, Google. Let me be plain: ASP.NET PostBack breaks the web.
Now before anyone gets their knickers in a twist (hello, colleagues), here’s a caveat. Friends Reunited has people visiting using pretty much every permutation of browsing technology possible. They are a big, public site. And the web is, according to Douglas Crockford, “the most hostile software development environment imaginable”, so breaking the basic building blocks of the web is bad. Really bad.
It’s not that I don’t like ASP.NET, it has some fantastic features. Repeaters, for example, are genius. And recently I’ve been developing some custom controls which offers amazing power to the developer. Masterpages, too, are fantastic. But to get something so fundamental as links so fundamentally wrong, was BIG mistake on the part of Microsoft. And unfortunately, due to ignorance and many other reasons, too many developers write websites using PostBack – despite there being alternatives and plenty of help to escape it.
One of these days I hope to write a proof of concept showing how Microsoft could have built the same features as PostBack into ASP.NET, but without the pitfalls. Oh for more geek time.
Anyway, on with Friends Reunited. So I click the not-quite-a-link, still hoping that something great awaits me. Alas, it was not to be:
Yup, I got an error. Oh well.
So it’s goodbye Friends Reunited. Not only do you have an inaccessible site, but one you proudly advertise to your users which promptly falls over at the first click. Not that it matters to me much, everyone uses Facebook anyway.
Sun Jan 25
The world of the web is changing, perhaps more now than ever. With vast numbers of people now regularly online the web is no longer the province of geeks and academics, but a valuable part of everyday life for many. So it stands to reason that the web itself – and the collection of technologies that make modern websites possible – will evolve. One of the biggest evolutions, in my opinion, is HTML5.
First, some history. HTML is the main language of the web, it’s what makes web pages work. It’s been around for a long time, originally being developed to provide a way to markup – that is, describe the structure of – documents online back in 1991. Tim Berners-Lee, called the father of the web, is director of the World Wide Web Consortium which oversees the webs continued development including HTML. The current version of HTML is 4.01, defined in December 2001, and work is continuing on version 5.
I’ve written about HTML5 a couple of times before, as I think it has massive potential to impact the web for the positive. Progress can appear slow, in fact both of those articles are from 2007, but I understand there is a huge amount of work to be done to get something off the ground. The really great news is HTML5 is already here. At least or some browsers.
If you’re lucky enough to use the latest version of Firefox, Opera or Safari, you’ve got many of the new features in HTML5 already. Bruce Lawson has been kind enough to create a page where you can test some of these, namely header, footer, aside, nav and article. Internet Explorer, the thorn in the side of every web developer, doesn’t support these new elements, so by default that test page won’t work. basically, if IE doesn’t understand those elements, you can’t style them with CSS or manipulate them with JavaScript. As John Allsop said in a recent A List Apart article:
[modern browsers having HTML5 capability] looks like an excellent start. But when we try styling, for example, section elements with CSS that looks like this:
section {color: red}
…most of the above-mentioned browsers manage to style the element, but IE7 (and so presumably 6) do not.
So we have a serious backward compatibility issue with 75% of browsers currently in use. Given the half-life of Internet Explorer, we can predict that most users will be using IE6 or IE7 even several years from now.
Unfortunately, if you are looking for alternative solutions to the CSS problem, putting class attributes on your section elements and then trying to style them using the class value won’t work in IE. Perhaps there is some kind of workaround out there, but unless there is, that looks like a deal breaker right there. However, the deal is back on. You’ll notice on Bruce’s test page it works in Internet Explorer 7 (I haven’t tested 6 yet). How? Simple, by using a JavaScript trick mentioned by Sjoerd Visscher from w3future.com. All developers need to do is “create” the new elements for IE like so (using conditional comments, as we’re tidy boys and girls):
<!-- Dirty JavaScript hack to make IE able to apply CSS to elements
that it doesn't usually know about, plus miscellaneous IE rules -->
<!--[if IE]>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.createElement('header');
document.createElement('nav');
document.createElement('article');
document.createElement('aside');
document.createElement('footer');
</script>
<style type="text/css">
header *, footer * {text-align:center;}
#wrapper {width:100%;} /* otherwise, IE halves the width of <nav>*/
</style>
<![endif]-->
That script ensures only IE browsers see it, then creates the new HTML5 elements using JavaScript. That means we can then style those elements how we wish. This, dear readers, is how a new age on the web is born.
You may think I’m making too much of this, but I am genuinely excited about the possibilities of new elements – and I’ve not yet even mentioned the audio and video elements, which do pretty much what you’d expect. For me, even a few extra semantic elements like nav and article is going to have a positive impact on the web.
Here’s a sample scenario. You go to Google (other search engines are available) and search for your favourite type of moth: Large Deathwing. The results you get back are generally pretty good, but you also get a lot of results including the word “Large” from different parts of the page. Things like “View large text size”, for example. Poor example, but you catch my drift.
With these new HTML5 elements, it’s possible that search engines will be able to ignore text in non-important sections of pages, like the navigation or any asides. Only words in valid article elements will be retrieved and displayed for your search. Well, that’s the idea. I’m not so naive to believe it will happen quickly (or even at all) but a greater amount of semantic information being built into HTML is a good thing.
I’m hopeful for the future. And as I’ve said a number of times I’m looking forward to putting this stuff into practice. Perhaps thanks to Bruce’s test above, I can start doing that for real.
del.cio.us,
Digg,
Yahoo!,
Google
