Yellow Swordfish

Rate My Webhosting is a handy online app from Hostgator. Just by adding a snippet of javascript to you enable your sites visitors to rate the load speed of your page on a sliding scale (1-5 stars). Hostgator provide you with a secret link to a Google maps mashup with your visitors locations overlaid, and a breakdown of how they rate you. This should be a useful tool to run on any site that is geotargeting ~ if you are located in Europe paying for North American adwords traffic and have a host in Asia it is good to know how well your site is responding. Sites that are slow to load lose traffic, and a lot depends on the location and quality of your host.

You can see my secret link here (I’m not too worried about showing the stats on this blog, although I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone working in a competitive niche).

I liked this little app so much that I wrote a Wordpress plugin for it. Wordpress can be a pain when it comes to adding javascript snippets, so hopefully this will make it quick and easy to add Hostgator’s tool to your site. If you want a copy of the Wordpress plugin please contact me and I will make it available to you.

Don’t forget to rate my webhosting whilst you’re here!

I quite often draw inspiration for color schemes from the web pages of others. I Like Your Colors is an awesome tool from Red Alt which extracts color codes from the html and css of any webpage. A great idea, and pretty neat execution too!

I have been with DreamHost for a couple of years. They seem like nice people and the support team have been helpful and good to me. But I rather suspect that they are suffering from their own success. Sell cheap - stack ‘em high. There is just too much competition for servers and cabling and too often my site loads as if I was back on dial-up. Sadly they have no option between the cheap and cheerful and the dedicated server so I am moving on.The next couple of days will see things patchy here and, while the new DNS server records kick in who knows? Email may disappear briefly as well. I will be closing down comments in about an hour so that I can start the process of moving my database. And all being well, will be back soon.

[UPDATE: Well one or two little scares but as before I am always astonished at how easy such a move really is. All back to normal I hope!]

OK - I have trimmed out all of the fat and gone back to blue. As well as resurrected an old colophon from the past.

I’ve removed all of the AJAX stuff and fancy bits and gone right back to basics. And hopefully it will be a little quicker and responsive now as well.

The Good, Bad And Ugly

It’s good to know that some major websites are almost a pleasure to use. I yesterday booked a couple of flights on the Air Canada website. It was a pleasure to use - fast, accurate, responsive, easy. Today I have tried to do the same with the US Airways site. Total disaster. Loss of temper. Outrage that a site can be so bloody awful to use. It took me longer to try and eventually give up on than the flight time I am trying to book!

To Em Or Not To Em

I have been absent from these pages for over a week now. This is largely because I have been completing the latest version of my forum plugin. It’s not the problems, little bugs and support that ends up taking the most time; it’s actually all the good ideas that people keep coming up with, so many of which I can’t resist. But at the same time I have been tiring of the ‘blue’ look to the site and felt it needed a refresh. Which also tied in nicely with one of the reasons I started this site in the first place.

Originally I just used it as a learning device. I was new to php, css, xhtml, rss and lots of other acronyms and wanted to learn. I wont say I have conquered them but at least I now know what they all mean and how they all work. So the next challenge I wanted to have a go at was scalability and to swap from blue to red.

It’s not perfect and there is still some CSS to tweak and little things to alter but the goal was to create a theme that still worked when a user hits the control + (or, for us Mac users, the Apple +). So wherever possible, although not complete yet, I have eradicated fixed pixel widths in favour of ‘ems’, fixed font sizes in favour of percentages and on the whole it is hanging together as planned. Even, I believe, in Internet Explorer 6. Well, almost.

Tesco Standards

Web standards and accessibility are abstractions that the majority of internet users probably know nothing about, but for those that do it can become a passionate debate and crusade. We are talking cross-browser compatibility - where websites function correctly on all browsers on all computer platforms. And it is actually very easy to achieve - all it takes is a simple decision before the design starts that this is a goal.

Ten years ago when Microsoft’s appalling and non-standard Internet Explorer ruled the roost there was perhaps an excuse but that has long passed and even Microsoft has made some small headway into compatibility and standards - although they still attempt to lock people into their platform.

One company that seems almost proud to flout standards and by so doing, disenfranchise a potential market for their service, is Tesco. We have the letter to prove it and I quote:

 We don’t support either Mozilla or Opera browsers.

Signed by one Eve Hughes, Customer Services Manager.

So, if you are a user of the Apple Macintosh, you cannot do your on-line shopping with Tesco. If you are a user of a Linux platform you cannot do your shopping with Tesco. And if you are one of the growing army of people who have finally realised that Internet Explorer is just more trouble that it is worth, is a security black-hole and non-standards compliant, then you too cannot do your on-line shopping with Tesco either.

Which is why we are about to check out Sainsbury.

Three Men In A Boat

Some time soon I am going to have to re-read Jerome K. Jerome’s marvelously evocative Victorian comedy ‘Three Men in a Boat’. I admit is has been many years since I had the pleasure of reading it last - but I quite obviously missed something on all previous readings, and now, thanks to my wife, her iPod and the iTunes site, I am curious.

She decided to download a book from the iTunes store - really as an experiment to see if she liked listening and being read to - and the book she chose was the Jerome classic.

On visiting the site the next day she saw that it does the same sort of thing that Amazon does - make recommendations based on your recent book purchase coupled with items other people chose who also bought your book. It came as quite a surprise to both us us that the recommended book for people who bought ‘Three Men in a Boat’ was a volume of erotic short stories! And this is an aspect of Jerome K. Jerome I had entirely missed.

Just recently it has seemed to me that the BBC has got it in for us Mac users - and that probably includes the Linux brigade as well. I do know that not that long ago I was able to watch, from the comfort of sitting in front of my Macbook Pro, video clips on the BBC News website. And I know that sometime in the last few months every attempt I have made to do just that has resulted in an empty screen. No message. No error. Just…. nothing. Yet I assume someone out there is getting it loud and clear and after reading a little snippet of news tonight, my guess is that it’s the Windows Legions.

The BBC has unveiled plans to launch an on-demand TV service delivered over the web and to receive this you need their ‘iPlayer’ software which…. wait for it…. only runs on Windows based machines. That’s two fingers from the BBC to Mac users the world over. On the basis that the BBC is a corporation funded from license fees paid by everyone who wants to receieve radio or television in the UK and that their charter disallows commercial interests or political bias and that they claim to provide a service available to ‘everyone’, this decision is not to be taken sitting down.

Not Quite Yet Mr. Wilson

Earlier this year during May, I wrote up a surprise email I had received from Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft. He was asking me why I had stated in an even earlier piece, that Yellow Swordfish looked pretty lousy in IE6 and had gone so far as putting a message over on the left (for IE6 users) stating that view.

He was, understandably, of the opinion that it looked and worked just fine in IE. We shot one or two friendly emails back and forth and he even helped out with a small HTML error I had coded in and, at the end of the day, left me with the distinct impression that the particular rendering issues and CSS non-compliance issues I raised would be fixed up in IE7.

And now IE7 is past it’s beta and is released and I have today taken a long hard look at the official version.

Sorry Chris. Nearly there. But I have taken the notice down so it’s going in the right direction.

Helping WordPress Newbies And Helping My Development

The website of Sam Devol - Running With Scissors - is fast becoming a great repository of information for newcomers to WordPress with an abundance of step by step advice, troubleshooting tips and links to other sites that deal with specific issues. Sam is a regular on the WP support forum and has helped me out a few times in the past, including one or two fixes for some sloppy code, and he knows his stuff. It’s just a shame that so much of this useful material has to be hunted down outside of the official WordPress Codex.

Anyway, I have Sam to thank for another discovery. FireBug from Joe Hewitt. Yes I’m sure everyone knows about FireBug except me but I am bad at browsing so much of this stuff just passes me by. FireFox is not my browser of choice. But it is the browser I use just about all of the time. And that is largely because of the wonderful extensions that are available. As far as help with web development is concerned, I figured that the absolutely indispensable Web Developer Extension from Chris Pederick was the extension king. FireBug builds on that with even more fantastic help. As the author says: “FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.”

FireFox is not my browser of choice but it is more and more becoming the only browser possible for me to use.