As tagged by Littlebun here are ten things that make me happy.
Two days from now and the ceremony will be over, we’ll be welcoming our guests at the reception, having our photograph taken and getting ready to sit down to dinner.
Of course, you only need to see what my beloved has written to realise what sort of madness the next forty eight hours will be filled with.
This may be the last time I have Internet access for a while. Please try not to break the Internet whilst I’m away.
PS. We did briefly consider a honeymoon in New Orleans. Then we discovered that the weather was a bit risky at this time of year. The events there this week put our problems into perspective.
Looking over the Technorati redesign as plugged by Eric Meyer (same old stuff – nice CSS but fixed width design, fixed font sizes in IE, breaks with only a couple of font size increases in FireFox, minor validation errors) I saw that the Tags page didn’t display properly in Opera 8.01.
The relative frequency of the tags are indicated via nested <em> elements with a CSS style font-size: 1.03em to produce the increased size.
But Opera screws up and rounds the font sizes down. I’ve written up a description of the bug and submitted a bug report to Opera.
Until Opera and/or Technorati do something about this issue there’s a quick fix that Opera users can apply. As Technorati includes id="technorati" on the <body> tag it’s relatively easy to add #technorati .heatmap em {font-size: 1.06em !important;}
to a user stylesheet and restore the tag coloud to its full glory. The exact size value needed will vary depending on your particular default and minimum font size values.
Moving away from the Opera bug we’re still left with the larger issue. What’s the best way to (a) mark-up and (b) indicate relative importance in various media.
As far as the mark-up goes HTML doesn’t offer us that many options and <em> is probably the best choice. Things are slightly confused by the presence of <strong> – how does strong emphasis relate to multiple levels of emphasis created via nested <em> elements?
By default browsers don’t change their output for nested <em>s so there’s no way short of viewing the source for the user to see the level of importance. For graphical media increasing the font size is one possibility but even when Opera’s shortcomings are ignored this might break down (consider mobile devices for example). In non-graphical media the font-size is meaningless.
Volume or pitch are options in aural media but don’t make for an easy listening experience (this sort of tag cloud is designed for visual skimming and doesn’t really work the same way when listened to linearly; but if a listener chooses to listen to it they should get the same information as the reader, via some means or other).
The best solution I can think of would be to add title attributes to each tag giving the relative level of importance. So a tag surrounded with four levels of <em>s would have title="Level Four" or something similar.
Whilst not ideal (and maybe tag clouds aren’t such a good idea) this does have the advantage that it brings together mark-up, styling and metadata (the <em> elements, the font-sizing and the titles) to reinforce the same message. The message. Ah, that’s the real problem. The relative popularity of the various tags is the message and the message should be in the data not in anything else. But that means turning the funky tag cloud into a boring table. 🙁
In all the confusion (new job, planning wedding, flat hunting, being ill) it completely slipped under my radar that sometime over the last few months marked the point where I had been online for ten years.
I’d used the departmental network at university and pre-web systems like Prestel before then but in the spring of 1995 I went online in the sense that we mean today and started using e-mail, FTP, telnet, usenet, gopher (remember that?) and the WWW.
Ten years ago I’d never seen a web site, I’ve spent the last eight years creating web sites for a living.
… if you’re the person who ended up on the SFSFW web site after searching for “centaur bestiality”.
The word ‘bestiality’ appears exactly once on the site, on the same page as the word ‘centaur’ though not at all close together. I’m afraid that the searcher would most likely have been disappointed.
Other search terms that somehow ended up at the SFSFW in the first half of June include:
The worrying thing is that the society has such wide interests that all of these, except possibly the lap dancers (especially as GZG are not based anywhere near Devizes), are topics that we could cover.
But the number six term overall was “emperor dalek”, only just behind “troublesome trucks” and “bob naismith”. Will it be higher by the end of the month?
I’ve created a page listing various 25/28mm Dinosaurs and other prehistoric miniatures. It’s a work in progress and but will probably grow into some sort of monster listing with pics and reviews.
This is the first time I’ve used the Page feature in Word Press and I’m sure I’m missing out on all sorts of features I could be using to make it better.
Today I got a comment spam, nothing very unusal just the normal online poker thing. But what was odd, and novel, about it was that the two dozen or so links in the comment all had rel="nofollow" as part of the link code.
Hang on, I thought, isn’t nofollow supposed to be defeating comment spam? (It’s not intended to stop comment spam hitting your blog, at least not straight away, but it is intended to make comment spam less attractive to search engines thus eventually killing it off by reducing the ROI.)
So why would a spammer send out comment spam with nofollow already included?
It could be that the spammer in question is an idiot who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Nice thought but most spammers are actually quite smart. I know it doesn’t look like it when you receive a million penis/breast enlargement spams which (a) you don’t need anyway 😉 and (b) don’t apply to your half of the population, but they are playing the numbers game in a big, and profitable, way and they do know what they’re doing.
So maybe they’ve discovered that some blogs are letting comments through without moderation so long as they have rel="nofollow" on all links, coupled with search engines that don’t yet support this new “standard”.
Or maybe they’re just experimenting to see if the above case is true anywhere. Damn I hate my blog being used as a lab rat.
Any thoughts?
Of course the technique I outlined a few days ago isn’t limited to favicons. It can be used with any appropriate image. I realised that I could make links to Live Journals look exactly like they do on LJ itself by including the following in my CSS.
#content a[href^="http://www.livejournal.com/users/"] {
background-image: url('http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif');
padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}Still Gecko only obviously, due to the use of the CSS 3 selector.
What I should do is cobble something together in WP that automatically converts <lj user="foo"> into an appropriate HTML link complete with icon. This is the sort of thing that Live Press was supposed to do but (a) I could never get it working and (b) it hasn’t been upgraded to Word Press 1.5. Time to brush up on my PHP and get hacking.
This grew out of a discussion regarding .ICO files and CSS on alt.html. Now, I made some mistakes in my off-the-cuff suggestion there (I used [att|=val] rather than the correct (and, annoyingly, CSS3) selector [att^=val]. After switching to the correct selector I realised that, even allowing for the simplification supplied by Toby Inkster, this would be Gecko only for now. But it is a nice trick anyway.
In essence what it does is insert a site’s favicon before any link to that site. As CSS doesn’t parse the value of att() it can’t be done on a generic level (it could be done with JavaScript but raises a number of other issues) but it can be done for sites that you link to frequently.
#content a[href^='http://groups-beta.google'] {
background-image: url('http://www.google.com/favicon.ico');
padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
#content a[href^='http://www.imdb.com'] {
background-image: url('http://www.imdb.com/favicon.ico');
padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
#content a[href^='http://www.amazon.co.uk'] {
background-image: url('http://www.amazon.co.uk/favicon.ico');
padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
#content a[href^='http://en.wikipedia'] {
background-image: url('http://en.wikipedia.com/favicon.ico');
padding-left: 20px; background-repeat: no-repeat;
}Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present a new breakthrough in web site design and development – the Alcohol Based Usability Testing Theorem (hereafter ABUTT).
The basis of ABUTT is that usability testing can be difficult to organise but that so long as you can organise the proverbial piss up in a brewery you can still gain most of the benefits of usability testing and improve employee happiness at the same time.
First, take your team to the pub for a good old fashioned liquid lunch.
Then, take them back to the office and ask them to test the web site. With the alcohol coursing through their bloodstream their co-ordination, memory, reading and comprehension skills are all impaired. In other words, they begin to approach the level of web use skill demonstrated by the average man in the cyber-cafe.
Watch and take notes.
Well, it should demonstrate Fitts’s Law if nothing else.