YouTube to kill IE6 support on March 13
I got my notice from Google a few months ago with but it looks like they have a set date for dropping IE6 support – hooray!
Archive for the ‘Web’ Category
YouTube to kill IE6 support on March 13
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Dead Simple Page Editing
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010Just to scratch an itch – here’s a quick and easy script to allow end users to edit content areas on a website. A lot of people end up with complex content management tools when all they really need is the ability to update a little bit of text on one or two pages of their site. This let’s that happen with a minimum of effort.
To install:
- download the script and unpack it in your website folder – or unpack and upload if you don’t have shell access.
- edit the conf.php file to change the default username and password
- make the content folder writeable by the web server process
- on pages where you wish to enable editing. Add the following lines of code to your php file:
<?php include “editor/include.php”; ?> – right at the top of your php file
<?php echo $headers; ?> – at the top of the <head> section of your site.
<?php make_block(‘blockname’); ?> add as many of these inline in your file whereever you’d like an editable block to appear. - point your browser at http://www.mysite.com/myfile.php?auth=1 (the auth=1 part will authenticate you and enable the editor)
- click on the block to edit and make your change.
Couldn’t be simpler right? or – I can’t think of a way to make it simpler yet.
Shoot me an note or post a comment if you find it useful! – robert at hutman dot net
New Site Launches
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010Some calm after the storm finally. 2 big site launches this week!
First: A financial services site including a pile of fun jQuery stuff for managing tabbed content and keeping it searchable. We’re really happy to be working with EatonGolden on this one and pushing the envelope with what we can integrate into the HutCMS.
and
Second: http://www.agentedgetraining.com/ uses a subscription model similar to USA Sports Careers. Randy Smith with Synchronicity Web Designs worked through the details with us for building a system for capturing leads from feeder websites and automatically distributing them to website members. We also added special permissions managment to the system for granting access to content based on subscription level.
Client Side Sorting and Display
Monday, November 23rd, 2009I’ve been working on a project recently which requires some fairly complex sql joins and calculation gyrations which had me tearing my hair out to get everything to come out right. For some I ended up having to add content to the results programatically. On top of it all, the table columns had to be adjusted based on the result set – so the html layout I was given to work with just wasn’t flexible enough to handle the big variation in results. I was able to solve the whole thing very nicely with the jQuery tablesorter plugin and this scrollable table tool. As long as the results aren’t too long – less than 5000 records or so – I can skip sorting on the server side entirely and leave it to the browser. It certainly simplified the code a ton and the click to sort functionality is much smoother – no resorting to page refreshes to make it happen.
jQuery plugin: Tablesorter 2.0.
http://www.webtoolkit.info/scrollable-html-table-plugin-for-jquery.html
Web Open Font Format backed by Mozilla, type foundries
Monday, November 2nd, 2009Looks like font support might be pretty close which is great news. I can’t wait to start building CSS based navigation that can actually match a photoshop mockup without having to either wreck it with the same old fonts or spend a ton of time slicing images of text. Updating those image based navigation elements a few years down the road will get a ton easier as well. Woohoo!
Web Open Font Format backed by Mozilla, type foundries – Ars Technica.
How will people find me?
Monday, November 2nd, 2009“I want to set up a site so people can find me.”
I’ve been getting lots of questions lately about being found on the web and when I try to answer them I sound like I’m talking in circles. What sounds like a perfectly reasonable question like what domain name to choose is the wrong question to be asking. Instead you need to know how you want to use the Internet for communication and develop a strategy to make it work. Search engines, web sites and computers in general tend to seem a lot smarter than they are. While technology as come a long way it’s good to remember that things are simpler than they seem. Here are a few things to keep in mind when contemplating your web presence.
Google is not the phone book.
Google searches are geared toward finding content – not people or companies. When google indexes a site – it indexes the content of the site and gears it’s search results to what it deems to be the most relevant information related to the search terms someone has entered. It does a really good job of sifting through an amazing pile of text and coming up with a page that probably has something useful – but the results are based on content that google has indexed. If you’re searching for a product, you can find it on google because someone has written something useful about the product. If you’re looking for a person, you may find them because something’s been written about them. Just having an email address or website though won’t help you a bit unless you say something with it.
You are not just your website.
If you’re looking to establish a presence on the Internet, you need to be where everyone else is. No one is going to ‘hang out’ looking at your website unless you have something really interesting to say or look at. That doesn’t mean you’re not interesting and people don’t want to find you – but if you’re not out to publish something you’ll want to be findable on sites where people are looking for you. That means having a profile on social networking sites and being listed with any professional associations that are relevant. If you’re trying to promote your company, make sure it’s listed on index sites like yelp.com and dmoz.org. It’s just like being listed in the phone book – you need to put your name out there for people to find it.
Don’t expect instant results.
It takes time for a site to build a reputation. If you’re launching a new site – it will take a bit for your ranking to build. Getting some links to information on your site from other highly ranked sites will help a ton. A successful web presence requires a lot of work – your presence. If you’re trying to promote your brand, someone needs to be online talking it up. If you’re looking to sell a product you need to be positioned so that someone looking for that product will find you. If you want your expertise recognized, you need to show the online community that you are worth listening to. While there are a lot of bad SEO firms out there who are selling smoke and mirrors, a good SEO firm or Internet marketing company will help you identify where your audience congregates on the web and should help you make your presence known.
Email Blasts
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009Tilka Design has been creating some nice templates for email newsletters and marketing. We’ve managed to get some fairly complex layouts working for everything from Entourage to Outlook 2007. Getting css layouts to behave across multiple platforms is childs play compared to the issues one runs into with HTML emails – especially with Outlook 2007.
The Microsoft HTML reference for Outlook 2007 makes for some scary reading. What it’s boiled down to for me is going back to the IE5 days of tables and spacer images to make the elements behave. Forget being able to assume that your width and height properties will actually work. Add to that the complete lack of background image support for anything but the body tag and it makes for lots of rowspan and colspan hell.
For email marketing platforms – Mailchimp is the winner hands down in my opinion. I haven’t had a chance to play with constant contact – but building usable templates in Mailchimp is much easier that myemma.com or exacttarget.com and their inbox inspection service is a huge timesaver. We’ve played with phplist as an alternative that we can run locally – but the features and usability of Mailchimp make it a good value.
Check out some of Tilka Designs Email Pieces
Browser Testing with Selenium
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009Kelly was kind enough to show me Selenium today and I had to share. With most wizbang tools – if I can’t make it do something useful for me within about 20 minues I generally move on unless it’s something really amazing. Selenium is not only amazing – but I was up and running with the help of Sauce Labs in no time at all.
Selenium is a tool which allows you to build a script for testing a web site or application. It captures events as you walk through the site and creates a script to reproduce them for testing purposes. Just open the tool, click record and perform your test task . At the end you can have it run a bunch of checks to make sure you ended up with the output you expected. The really cool part comes with the ability to then run a server process which will execute your script in different browsers on other platforms to verify compatibility. Sauce labs provides a distributed service to run your scripts on all of the major browser platforms while capturing the output to flv videos. Once I had everything set up – it took all of about 10 minutes to build a test script and have video of it running in IE6,7,8, FF3 and Safari – pretty awesome and much more informative than just checking for css consistency between machines.
Browser support for CSS3 and HTML5
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009I’ll stick with Firefox just because I can’t live without Firebug – but here’s an interesting look at browser features. Big surprise – IE is still awful!
http://www.deepbluesky.com/blog/-/browser-support-for-css3-and-html5_72/
SEO Fun and Games
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009This article has spawned a lot of discussion over SEO techniques and the general perception of the SEO industry. While SEO has it’s place – covering the basics of good site structure should be plenty to get you found on google as long as you have content that’s worth viewing. Any decent SEO company will help you build page structure and content that’s easily accessible – both by your audience and google. Anything beyond that is really smoke and mirrors.
We recently stumbled upon this tool – http://websitegrader.com/ which gives you a nice quick report on your site and it’s search engine placement. It covers the basics and will give you some pointers on what you can do to improve your site.