Jun 11th, 2009
by Todd Barber.
So when Top 10 lists are released that involve the “best places in technology” my humble abode always gets snubbed. It also seems as if when the “bad” lists, technology or otherwise, are released Memphis makes the cut, but when the “good” lists come out, we are seemingly always left out.
That being said, imagine my surprise when I see the Top 10 list of cities that people would like An Event Apart to visit in 2010, and right there at number 10 is Memphis. For those that may not know, An Event Apart is a conference put on by the good folks over at A List Apart. While I have never been I have followed along at home and once our economy gets itself in order this conference is high on my “want list,” along with SXSWi.
So since they only do 4 of these a year and Memphis is 10, I may be out of luck. But at least we made the list.
todd
Posted in: Conferences.
Tagged: A List Apart · An Event Apart · Memphis TN · Top 10 cities
Feb 27th, 2009
by Todd Barber.
Now that we have started to put a few more videos up at You Tube we have also embedded some of them directly into our pages. I took the embed code sample provided by You Tube and pasted it into the page.
<object width="480" height="295">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wmkkVhBxLsc&hl=en&fs=1"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wmkkVhBxLsc&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed>
</object>
Now is where my problem comes up. We are making an effort to produce pages that are all W3c compliant and we are using XHTML 1.0 Transitional and the embed tag doesn’t validate. According to the HTML 4.01 elements page, there is no embed tag. But the specs for HTML 5 have the embed element. So once HTML 5 gets here life will be easier.
In the meantime there is a way to validate using the HTML 4.01 tags.
<object width="480" height="295"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
data="http://www.youtube.com/v/wmkkVhBxLsc&hl=en&fs=1>
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wmkkVhBxLsc&hl=en&fs=1"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
</object>
Take the type attribute from the embed tag and move it to the object tag. Then take the src attribute from the embed tag and move it to the object tag but change the name of the attribute to data. Also make sure all the ampersands (&) are encoded (&) even in the URL.
Once HTML5 comes along this code will still be valid since the object tag is staying around.
todd
Posted in: HTML, Technology.
Tagged: embed · embed code · embed tag · html · object · object tag
Feb 24th, 2009
by Todd Barber.
OK, so the <script> tag can go in the <head> section of a web page, but the <noscript>tag can not. Go figure!
The problem came up when someone tried to display a jQuery image rotator to cycle through some images. To make sure it degraded nicely when javascript was turned off we chose to just display a static image. The problem was that the plugin used, s3Slider, had a height set on the div it displays in. While not entirely bad while javascript is turned on, it creates a rather larger white box when javascript is turned off.
Simple workaround in this case…
We set a display:none; on the <div id=”s3Slider”> in one of the stylesheets used so that by default the div would NOT be shown thus eliminating our large white area. So for the folks with Javascript turned off we are done.
For the folks with javascript turned on we just use javascript to change the display style. The s3Slider code is initialized using:
$(document).ready(function() {
$('#s3slider').s3Slider({
timeOut: 4000
});
});
We changed it using jQuery chaining:
$(document).ready(function() {
$('#s3slider').css({display:"block"}).s3Slider({
timeOut: 7000
});
});
You can ignore the change in the timeOut as that doesn’t affect this. Notice the addition of the css({display:”block”}) which causes the block to display, but only for those users with Javascript.
todd
Posted in: Technology.
Tagged: html · noscript · s3slider · script · work around
Nov 26th, 2008
by Todd Barber.
First off, Happy Thanksgiving.
My primary project that is going on right now is migrating the 51K or so pages on our main web server into our new templates. So my group and I are having to go through each directory and first decide if the content there is relevant. We have no real clean up process, so many of the pages and directories are being deleted. We are about 35% of the way through the directories (not necessarily that far on the page count). And we are not using a content management system (CMS) so we are moving them all manually.
Screenshot of view source from pandora.com
That now brings me to my View Source Fail. Most folks on campus are excited about moving their pages into the new templates as they are a tremendous step up from where we were. That being said I have seen a few pages that have been moved without me knowing about it. This is necessarily a bad thing, unless of course it is done wrong. Then it causes all parties involved a little extra work.
Some folks have taken the view source method to see what the code for the new pages look like. Then they remove what they don’t need and throw up the page. This works fine until there is an update to the template. Since there is a repository that pulls in all the necessary files, things start to break because most of these “view source pages” don’t point to the repository.
So the point of this rant is not to bash the view source functionality, I have used it many times to help me out. I have also used it to see what others have done to help them out. But be aware that what you see isn’t always what you get. With so many people using server side scripting languages (PHP, Perl, ASP, Python, just to name a few), things can be done behind the scenes that manipulate what is shown when you just “View Source.” This is also true when server side includes (SSI) are enabled. With most scripting languages the file extension is no longer html or htm, so the flag should go up that something could be going on at the server level. With SSI enabled, the extension is still html or htm, so it is harder to know.
“Web work” isn’t as easy as view source makes it out to be. This is a good thing, because there are enough poorly done pages in the web world.
todd
Posted in: Technology.
Tagged: server side scripting · source · view · view source
Sep 26th, 2008
by Todd Barber.
Ok, a series of events have prompted this post about trying the whole cloud computing craze. A tweet, a blog, and a hard drive failure. The tweet (from Mark Greenfield) asked “As I move more and more of my business to the cloud, should I be thinking netbook rather than fully loaded laptop?” He was answered by pointing him to a blog post at camplesegroup.com.
Then, the next day my hard drive said it was about to go out. So I started to think, I can do this as well, and now seems like a good time to start. The aforementioned folks are both considering a lighter and easy to manage laptop. I’m thinking why not be able to just find an open computer with an internet connection and be able to be productive. This concept would work great at conferences, some teachers, or people that travel around a bit. I also realize this isn’t for everyone, just yet. In the web world, most of the stuff I do and interact with is on a different server already, so I have that going for me.
So much is already there. Bookmarks, pictures, music, docs, email (both work and personal). The only thing that I didn’t automatically know of is storage space. I have since found Dropbox and Humyo. I decided against Dropbox since it requires a local installation, where as Humyo doesn’t. I’m not against local installations, because there are things that I don’t know of a replacement for yet (Gimp jumps to my mind for me), but it would be nice to rely on local installs as little as possible.
So how has it been for a few days? I am currently working on a Linux box and it’s been fine. So far I haven’t needed any of the 16 GB of stuff (all work related) that I had to copy, makes me wonder… So the next time you send me a Word doc or Excel doc, you’ll never know, but it was probably edited on Google Docs.
todd
Posted in: Technology, cloud computing.
Tagged: cloud · cloud computing · google docs · humyo
