Archive for November, 2007

Newspapers and magazines are slowly starting to make use of the web. A lot of them have websites now, but they don’t seem to know what the heck they’re doing.

My major complaints are:

• No comments. I often disagree with articles (or find errors), and I like to leave a note. “Dead-tree” publications rarely allow you to post comments on their sites, and in the rare cases when they do they tend to be heavily moderated.
• Bad design. The web is not paper. You can’t treat a website like a newspaper/magazine. That means no “between-page” ads, and no newspaper-style front pages. Print design is not the same as web design; so if your publication is going online, hire someone who knows how to design for the web.
• Subscription content. You’re not going to get very far online if you make people pay a subscription to view your content.
• Lack of links. When “traditional” publications sites mention websites, they pretty much never link to the actual sites. Often they don’t even list the URL. Hoarding PageRank is just stupid.

You’re working on some changes to your website, so you put-up a message saying that the site will be down for a few hours. Your users won’t like it, but it’s necessary sometimes.

If you have to block access to your site while you work on it, make sure you include important information like, for instance, an estimate of how long the site will be down.

When you take your site down for maintenance, it’s also a good idea to give your users something to do. Give them some links, YouTube videos, etc. Make sure that, despite not being able to access your normal content, their visit was worth their time.

Here’s an example of a good downtime page: (more…)

Do you use Macromedia Flash in your websites? While it gets some bad press (SEO and usability-wise), it’s got a lot of good uses. YouTube, and other video-sharing sites, use Flash to play videos. Some sites have Flash-animated logos. A lot of online games are made with Flash.

A common annoyance with Flash “movies” (the term for Flash files) is that they have a static size. While you can scale them by hard-coding pixel values into the embed code, there’s no easy way to have a Flash movie automatically scale itself to fit its parent element.

Enter FitFlash, a JavaScript library that will allow you to make your Flash movie “fluid.” If you build full-Flash websites (*cough* Warner Brothers *cough*) then you definitely want to look into this.

FitFlash looks like a great library, though I (currently) don’t have much need for it. If you work with Flash a lot, look into FitFlash.

Gravatar is a service that allows you to have an avatar image that follows you around the web. Sites that support Gravatars (Globally Recognized Avatars) just ask Gravatar.com whether your (encrypted) email address has an image assigned to it. If it does, then it pulls the image from the server and inserts it next to the comment you left.

It’s fairly easy to add Gravatar support to your site, and even easier to get your own Gravatar. For instructions on adding support to your site, read the documentation. You can use PHP, Perl, Coldfusion, or any language really. Plus, if you’re lazy, there are plugins available for major platforms such as Wordpress.

Why should you add Gravatars next to your blog comments?

• It makes it easier to recognize commentators…including you. Who cares about comment highlighting when you can just have a personal image next to your comments.
• You’re giving your readers the ability to personalize their comments a little more.
• Tons of people have Gravatars. If you allow theirs to show-up on your blog, they may comment more frequently.

WhyDiggIsBlocked.com

Is this a parody…or is it another maniac who thinks ad-blocking should be illegal? Looking at the two sites, WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com and WhyDiggIsBlocked.com are very similar.

• The designs are nearly identical, featuring the same blue-and-gray header.
• The sites both offer code to block visitors based on their browser or referral.
• They both talk about how Digg (or Firefox) are ruining the web, or more specifically, the banner ad industry.

Interestingly, “Why Digg Is Blocked” mentions the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox…the same extension that “Why Firefox is Blocked” is complaining about.  Both sites complain about users infringing upon the rights of “the rights of web site owners and developers.” What about the rights of users?

WhyDiggIsBlocked.com is rather ridiculous (as is WhyfirefoxIsBlocked.com) and I wonder if it could be a pardoy of the older site. Or could it be another ridiculous project by the guy who created WhyFirefoxIsBlocked?

To optimize your search rankings, you should decide whether your URLs should have the “www” in front of them or not.

This is a topic everyone has been arguing about lately. There are advantages to both.

Reasons to use WWW

• Non-tech people need something to tell them “this is a web address.” The two things that tell them that are www and .com. If you don’t put the www in, then people rely on there being a “.com”. In an age when there is a shortage of .com domains, do you really want to reinforce the association between URLs and “.com”? You could use “http://” but do you really want to put that horrible-looking thing on your business card (or whatever you’re putting your domain on)?
• It adds balance to the URL. The three characters (plus a dot) even things out, as you have “.com” (or some other TLD) after the domain.
• When I want to go to Webmaster-Source.com, I type “webmaster-source” into the URL field and press CTRL+Enter. The browser adds the “www.” and “.com” into the URL. If you don’t use the WWW in your URL, then I have to wait an extra 3 seconds for the redirect to the www-less URL.

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• Wordpress 2.4 - January 24th
• Top 30 Popular Websites That Still Are Using Tables as Main Layout Structure: There are more than I thought. Some sites, like Google, use tables for compatibility reasons. You can load Google in pretty much any browser.
• Technotarget.com has compiled a sizable list of useful AJAX, DHTML, and JavaScript Libraries.
• Inspiration: 30 More Excellent Blog Designs, courtesy Smashing Magazine.
• Everyone hates spam. That’s unsolicited email, not the tasty sandwich meat made by Hormel. You’ve probably seen those email obfuscation services that convert your address to ASCII codes so the spambots have a harder time reading them. This new Wordpress plugin, known as Obfuscate, automatically obfuscates your email whenever it finds it in a post. It won’t replace having a separate address for your fan-mail ( ) but it will cut down on the spam.
• Here’s another plugin I need to try-out: Trustworthy XHTML. Could this alleviate some of our problems with the WYSIWYG editor?
• More inspiration (from TutorialBlog): 30 Great Website Designs (Part5).
• 6 Easy Steps to Making a Web Hosting Switch

The term “blog” has been in use for around eleven years now, and there are about 120,000 new blogs created every day (according to Technorati). Of course, not all of them remain active for very long (too many people start blogs and then quit a couple of months later).

There are plenty of people saying that blogging is a “trend” and that people will just stop blogging when it all dies down. Yeah, right. So, people who say blogs are just another trend think that CNN is going to shut down their website? That Ars Technica will stop reporting on tech news?

As I’ve said before, blogs are not online journals. A blog is merely a website consisting mainly of chronologically listed articles. The average person may think of a blog as an online journal, but that viewpoint isn’t really correct. Those blogs that die after two months are mainly Blogger or LiveJournal blogs set-up by someone who never intended to be very serious about blogging. (more…)

The poll asking whether you like the new ShareThis 2.0 or ShareThis Classic, which is luckily still available to anyone who wants it, has ended.

There have been some interesting results:

43% said “What’s the difference?” Either a lot of people aren’t very observant, or they didn’t even bother to look before voting.

27% said they don’t care at all.

13% said ShareThis 2.0 is better.

16% said ShareThis Classic is better.

Personally, I like Classic better, but the new ShareThis 2.0 has some cool features. Plus, I like the fact that non-Wordpress users can easily add ShareThis to their site.

The two biggest JavaScript frameworks in use are jQuery and Prototype. Until recently, I used Prototype a bit. After having to use jQuery for a recent project, I’ve actually started to enjoy using it. It’s easy to use, and it’s lightweight. I’m probably going to re-code a bunch of things over at NTugo so I can use jQuery there instead of Prototype. It’s a lot better.

Enough of my personal experiences, here are the hard facts:

jQuery

File Size: 21KB

Code Required to Toggle a DIV:

<script type="text/javascript">
$('#mydivtrigger').click(function() {
$('#mydiv').toggle(400);
return false;
});
</script>
<a href="#" id="mydivtrigger">Toggle!</a>
<div id="mydiv">
Lorem ipsum.
</div> (more…)