...more recent posts
I've actually started writing end user documentation for Geneva. I've never gotten this far before.
The war on IE 6 heats up:
Several large websites in Norway have launched an advocacy campaign urging Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade their outdated web browsers.God I hope this catches on. Without going into the details let's just say that IE 6 is a huge problem for web developers and the world would be a much better place without it. I've been doing some traffic analysis on this site lately and the results are as follows:
Leading the charge is Finn.no, an eBay-like site which is apparently the largest site for buying and selling goods in all of Norway (Finn is Norwegian for "Find"). Earlier this week, Finn.no posted a warning on its webpage for visitors running IE 6. The banner, seen at right, urges them to ditch IE 6 and upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.
Dozens of other sites, including the influential tech news website Digi.no, have joined the campaign, but have widened the playing field by suggesting either upgrading to IE 7 or switching to an alternative like Firefox, Safari or, of course, Norway's own Opera browser.
The drive is spreading to other countries.
FireFox is 46.48% of the traffic here, with Safari at 39.31% and all flavors of IE at 9.91%. Then Mozilla Compatible which could be a ton of different things at 3.25%, and everything else below 1% all the way down to PlayStation 3 at 0.03% (WTF?). The roughly 10% of IE users breaks down as follows: IE 7: 60.93%, IE 6: 38.25%, IE 8: 0.55%, and IE 5.01: 0.27%.
So that's about 4% overall on IE 6 (I won't even mention whoever is using 5.01!?!?) Not too bad. I think internet wide it's a little higher though. Most designers already ignore IE 5 (you just have to because that is really the worst software ever written,) but IE 6 is a toss up. If you're really going for a wide audience you can't piss off 5% - 10% of your potential market. If you're just doing a more vanity-ish site than probably you don't care too much. If we can just get IE 6 usage down another couple points we can all safely forget it.
List of common passwords that the Conficker worm tries as one method of spreading itself. Not sure these are scientifically the "most used" passwords, but it must be fairly representative since the Conficker worm does pretty well. If you have a password like these you need a new system. I recommend using the first letter of every word in a phrase you know well (like maybe a song lyric.) Take Me Home Country Roads would yield 'tmhcrttpib'. Not perfect (would be much better to have some letters and punctuation in there,) but very easy to remember and won't fall to a dictionary attack or something like the Conficker list.
What would you call something that was sort of like a blog, except the order of posts was author defined instead of being reverse chronological?
This comes up because I've made a little plug-in for my new software that lets you keep a FAQ. Each entry is a question and an answer, and the order of entries on the page can be rearranged by the author. But now it strikes me that a FAQ is just one particular use of this plug-in since I think there are probably lots of situations where this would be useful (in the sense that it's like a re-orderable blog where each entry has a title and the body of the post instead of the FAQ specific 'question' and 'answer' nomenclature.)
But what would the whole thing be called? Not terribly important, but I can't think of what to name it.
Xargs tutorial I need to look at some day.
(I make no claims that this blog is interesting to anyone else, as this post and almost all others show!)
The Golden Grid is another CSS framework (like the popular Blueprint and 960 grid.) I've yet to use one of these for anything, but I keep watching with hope. At this point my intuition is that these projects can save you a lot of time and headache, until you need to do something that a particular framework can't handle. And there's always some demand that breaks the grid. But I guess that's why I have a job so I shouldn't complain. Still, if I ever have time to update one of my personal project pages (like this one from the dark ages of the web) maybe I'll play around with one of these.
Some insane people have developed a text editor that runs in the browser. It uses javascript to draw everything into a canvas tag.
Bespin builds on this API to recreate a text editor from scratch. That’s right; rather than use the native facilities of every modern operating system that give you word processing features for free, Bespin rolls them from scratch, including such basic constructs as a blinking cursor and text selection.I mean, seriously, that's insane. But if they could make it work well it would be really cool. It's a text editor, but the goal is to focus on code editing and to deliver not just a usable product, but something you might choose over your current desktop code editor. It's like javascript's coming of age party in the sense that programmers are somehow magically drawn to writing code editors in whatever their language of choice is - but no one has had that urge until now with javascript.
Runs in FireFox as well as WebKit and Chrome nightlies. Project home page.
Falai website launches. Sometimes you disagree with a client about something (like having a front page with no information on it,) but you have to do it anyway. Still, all together, I think it's a pretty nice site. Little bits of jquery made some slightly tricky stuff very easy to do.
(Just started resolving for me, so it's possible you might see the old "site under construction" version of the site still.)
Eric Meyer on the deficiencies of CSS for layout. I've linked to a bunch of similar posts from others, and again I couldn't agree more. I'm linking again here because Meyer is the man; he explains the issue very well; and it's kind of funny how frustrated he is (in a "thank god someone else is this frustrated too" sort of way.)
Very good presentation (audio with slides): An Intensive Exploration Of jQuery. Assuming you know a little something about javascript and the DOM this is a great place to start.
Wow. Very cool. Google introduces canonical URLs. This solves the problem of losing google juice due to identical (or largely identical) pages being accessible through different URLs. You decide which URL is canonnical, and then put a special <link> tag on the other pages pointing to the cannonical URL. Now google knows to return the cannonical page in search results rather than any of the similar ones, and all your google juice flows to that one page.
The big example would be http://www.example.com and http://example.com. If your site is reachable at both addresses, and both are linked to from external sites, then your rank in google until now has been split between the two (this is simplified a bit, but still.) Now you can decide that you want http://example.com to be the "main" (or canonical) URL, so you just put a <link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/"> tag in the <head> section of the www.example.com page.
But this is useful in tons of other situations since we're slicing our data up so much these days. Take blogs for instance. A certain post might be accessible from the front page of a blog, from a permalink, from a comment page, from a trackback page, from a search page, from a tag or category page, etc. In the past all of these different views of the "same thing" would be seen as separate by google; now you can pick one view to be canonical. This just really makes sense to me. Thanks google.
Cool, slightly depressing, and thoroughly comprehensive tables highlighting the readiness of major browsers to correctly handle advanced web techniques from PNG alpha transparency to all the fancy CSS3 stuff. That must have been a ton of work to put together. Just glancing at the page is a pretty damming indictment of Internet Explorer.
Check out the final table for the grand scorecard for each browser. Note that Chrome has an advantage in the "Past" category since it's a brand new browser with no past. Otherwise Safari has a slight lead over Firefox and Chrome although they all do pretty well. Opera does okay and IE sucks.
Cross browser javascript vector graphics library:
Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop and rotate widget, for example, you can achieve it simply and easily with this library.I like the js syntax - pretty intuitive:
Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML (mostly equivalent Internet Explorer implementation) as a base for creatinggraphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing vectorart (similar to Flash) compatible cross-browser and easy.
Raphaël currently supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+.
// Creates canvas 320 × 200 at 10, 50Check the demos, they're pretty nice looking.
var paper = Raphael(10, 50, 320, 200);
// Creates circle at x = 50, y = 40, with radius 10
var circle = paper.circle(50, 40, 10);
// Sets the fill attribute of the circle to red (#f00)
circle.attr("fill", "#f00");
// Sets the stroke attribute of the circle to white (#fff)
circle.attr("stroke", "#fff");
WebKit is the browser engine behind Apple's Safari and a host of other browsers (on the desktop, and increasingly on mobile devices.) They are really pushing the boundaries of what can be done while making sure these new capabilities are defined as open standards (so, for instance, really pushing new ideas and technology into CSS3 and HTML5.) This post discusses new CSS animation capabilities which seem like another shot at knocking down Adobe controlled Flash (as well as a preemptive shot at Microsoft's somewhat similar SilverLight.) Presumably, if there is a free and open way to create some effect then developers will use that way rather than resort to a proprietary solution that costs money.
That's all great. And it's smart of Apple to be backing this sort of thing. But why oh why don't they leverage QuickTime better? If there were just decent javascript hooks into the QuickTime player it would take away the massive advantage that Flash has in terms of embedding media (especially video) into web pages. Absolutely everyone uses Flash to do this, even though (thanks to iPods and iPhones and iTunes) everyone has QuickTime installed on their computers. But there is just no reasonable and reliable way to create javascript controls for the player. I cannot understand why Apple doesn't fix this.
Appropriately ugly site of command line one-liners: commandlinefu.com.
These days I feel like computers and the web are in a period of cooling. We've gone through a highly innovative stage where change was happening at an amazing rate, and now we are trying to integrate all that and not much new is happening. Except this change to the client / server model is quietly becoming a big deal:
The HTML 5 specification provides a new mechanism for client-side data storage: JavaScript database support. HTML 5 is currently in development by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). JavaScript database support is available in Safari 3.1 and later, and in iPhone OS 2.0 and later. You should read this documentation if you are a web developer who wants to store data locally on a user’s computer in amounts beyond what can reasonably be stored in an HTTP cookie.Google Gears, of course, is doing very similar things.