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Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS Redesigned to Look Like Facebook

Matt — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:02:08 +0000

I guess it was only a matter of time. Someone has taken Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS project and re-skinned it to look a bit more like Facebook. FBootstrap, as it is called, should be very useful for those who make Facebook applications and enhancements for fan pages. In addition to meshing well with Facebook’s design, the grid CSS has been tweaked to match the widths of fan page tabs (520px) and application canvases (760px).

Many of the elements don’t look quite like Facebook’s, especially the form fields, but they’re close enough that the average user won’t notice. The modal boxes have one of the closest adaptations.

Fbootstrapp [GitHub]

Best of 2011

Matt — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:00:35 +0000

Well, it’s been another year of blogging. 2011 was a pretty busy year for me, and I got a few fun projects done. Minimus, my free Mac application for easily compressing CSS and JavaScript, is one such thing.

Anyway, now’s the time when I usually do my annual rundown of statistics and the best (or most newsworthy) posts from each month of the year.

Monthly Page Views: 39,286
Monthly Unique Visitors: 29,568
RSS Subscribers: 662 (average over 30 days)
Toolbar PageRank: 5
Approved Comments: 3,554
Akismet Spam Comments Blocked (to date): 533,824
Legit Comments to Spam Ratio: ~1:150
Total Tweets: 8,609

(Monthly statistics as of December 31, 2011.)

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

I hope you will all continue reading through 2012. Happy new year!

Universal Censors Podcast on YouTube for Mentioning Megaupload Music Video Takedown

Matt — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:05:32 +0000

Universal Music has been getting a lot of bad publicity online lately, after they filed a takedown request and illegally removed a music video produced by Megaupload from YouTube. The song, featuring several mainstream pop celebrities, is original work and the accusation of copyright infringement has caused some head-scratching. Megaupload is now suing Universal over the abuse of the DMCA.

Tech News Today, a podcast in the TWiT network, covered the story in Monday’s episode, just like various blogs have done since the news broke. Since Tech News Today is cross-published to TWiT’s YouTube channel, they have, strangely, been dragged into the fight. A few hours after the show went up, it was taken down from YouTube on “copyright grounds,” at the request of Universal. That’s right, a panel of pundits talks about a news story involving Universal, plays a 5-10 second snippet of the song that Megaupload produced, and their video gets a DMCA takedown request.

TWiT sent a counter-notice later, and the video was restored, only to have it taken down again by Universal shortly after. TWiT is currently on their second counter-notice.

The TNT episode was taken down for reporting on Megaupload’s video and specifically for showing it. We have counter-noticed twice.

— Tom Merritt (@acedtect) December 13, 2011

This farce is dragging into the spotlight a problem that has long been an issue with the DMCA. The law is used just as often to censor criticism and squash fair use as to take down legitimate infringements. Since the defendant usually has to go to court in order to fight the takedown, which is expensive and time-consuming for individuals, the large businesses filing the claim can usually get away with it.

Update: TNT talks in greater detail about the issue in Episode 392: Conspiracy Theory Tuesday.

Obfuscating Email Addresses

Matt — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:31:23 +0000

Posting an email address on a public web page is a recipe for disaster. It’s the way to get a metric truckload of spam. This, of course, makes it unfortunately difficult to allow visitors to a website to contact you without inviting the spammers in as well.

The two primary methods used to combat this issue are contact forms, which have their own issues with spam, and obfuscation. There are plenty of pre-made contact form scripts, the better of which have some anti-spam measures in place (cforms and Contact Form 7 are popular options for WordPress). But what about obfuscation, for those times where it’s better to simply list the address rather than installing a whole form?

I’ve found a couple of good articles on the subject, for those of you who want something a little more complex than simply writing like “my email AT example DOT com.”

A List Apart’s Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation is an interesting read, though their solution is a bit involved and requires a bit of server-side scripting for it to work.

Perishable Press’s Best Method for Email Obfuscation? is a reasonable comprehensive guide, with plenty of clever methods to choose from, and pros and cons for each. I liked the techniques that involved writing the email backwards, or inserting null text in an HTML span, and using CSS to flip the text or remove the span of null text. Those two options don’t play nicely with copy/paste, though.

Google Launches Page Speed Service

Matt — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 11:58:56 +0000

Google recently launched a Page Speed Service, an offering along similar lines to CloudFlare. You set up a CNAME to point your domain to their servers, which cache your pages and serve them at blazing speed. They also run everything through the lines of mod_pagespeed to lower file sizes. It’s basically like a CDN for your entire website.

Page Speed Service is an online service to automatically speed up loading of your web pages. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.

This is targeted mainly at people running small to medium sized websites, such as WordPress blogs, on shared hosting. The service takes the load off your server, so you don’t have to worry about it running slowly or going down from traffic.

Page Speed Service is currently in a trial period, where it’s free for anyone who wants to use it, but it may end up costing more in the future.

It will be interesting to see how this competes with CloudFlare, which offers more features and a free plan that is more than sufficient for most users. (You can pay $20/month for extra analytics and some more advanced features.) CloudFlare isn’t just trying to speed your site up, though. They also want to help protect it from DDoS attacks, email harvesting, and other unpleasantness. It already has quite a bit of traction.

Lions and iClouds and iOS 5: WWDC 2011 Roundup

Matt — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 04:08:19 +0000

Too busy to watch the liveblogs of Apple’s big WWDC keynote? Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most noteworthy links. There’s a lot changing in iOS, and OS X Lion is just around the corner. Then there’s iCloud, the crazy service that does more than most speculated.

iOS 5 overhauls notifications, messaging while cutting the USB cord [Ars]
The Big WWDC 2011 Keynote Roundup [Macstories]
Apple iOS 5 iPhone / iPad 2 hands-on! [Boy Genius Report]
10 New Features to Get Stoked About in iOS 5 [AppStorm]
Apple iOS 5 hands-on preview [Engadget]
Apple Has Finally Stuck A Dagger Into SMS. I Love It. [TechCrunch]
Apple iCloud announced for free, replaces MobileMe [Boy Genius Report]
MobileMe stays live through June 30, 2012 [TUAW]
Apple Introduces iCloud: Contact, Cal, Docs, Photos, and Music Syncing Free of Charge [TUAW]
Mac OS X Lion to arrive in July via Mac App Store for $29 [Ars]
Lion Server will be an extra $50 via the Mac App Store [Ars]
Lion requirements: 64-bit CPU, 2 GB of RAM [TUAW]
iBookstore Finally Comes To iTunes [Macstories]
Find My iPhone 1.2 Released, Supports Notifications for Offline Devices [Macstories]
App Store Now Lets You Download Not-Available Apps, Like Tweetie 1 [Macstories]
WWDC 2011 Keynote Available for Streaming [Macstories]

Smartphone Users: Where do You Surf the Web the Most?

Matt — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 11:34:01 +0000

Whether you have an iPhone, and Android device, an iPod Touch or a BlackBerry, where do you most use it to surf the mobile web? Where do you flick through Twitter, comment on Reddit, check emails or play Angry Birds? Do you use it habitually, without a thought, or are you a light user?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Apple to Announce iCloud, iOS5 and OS X Lion on June 6

Matt — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:35:43 +0000

Apple put out a press release that they will be unveiling a large batch of “next generation software” on June 6th at the World Wide Developer Conference. This will include iOS 5, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and something known as iCloud.

CUPERTINO, California—May 31, 2011—Apple® CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software – Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.

It is speculated that this press release, specifying exactly what will be covered at the keynote, is a stab at preventing the usual stock drop from disappointed speculators hoping for new hardware. (That will probably be in September.)

We already had a sneak preview of Lion last year, but this should be a look at the final product—as well as a release date. The big news will likely be iOS 5 though, with its rumored widgets and notification overhaul. iCloud is the big mystery—I’m thinking it will be some sort of storage and syncing API, integrated with iOS and Lion, for app developers to leverage.

Oh, and the iPad versions of the iWork apps are now available on the iPhone.

Angry Birds Comes to the Web, in HTML5

Matt — Fri, 13 May 2011 12:09:57 +0000

Rovio, on the 10th of May, released an unexpected new version of their popular Angry Birds game. Previously available on iOS, Android and OS X, Angry Birds is now available on the web.

You can find it in the Chrome Web Store, or at this URL. It’s currently in public beta, and is free for the time being at least. (It also runs in Firefox 4.)

The game is 100% HTML5 and JavaScript, and it runs very smoothly all things considered. There were a couple of quirks when I tried it, but they are likely just bugs for Rovio to work out and not a product of the platform. It really puts the myth that Flash is necessary for browser games to death. (Hopefully in the future we will see GUI composing tools along the lines of Adobe Flash that export to plain HTML5 instead of a proprietary format.)

If that’s not enough of an Angry Birds fix for you, how about a cover version of the theme with real instruments?

BREAKING: Apple Acquires Sprint for $32 Billion

Matt — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 12:30:29 +0000

In a surprise press release this morning, Apple announced their acquisition of cellular company Sprint for $32 Billion. Sprint, known for its uncertain financial situation, reportedly agreed to an Apple takeover after a private bidding war between Apple and the search giant Google.

Apple has been seeking a way to escape the oppressive policies of the two larger cellular companies, AT&T and Verizon, for some time. The Sprint acquisition will allow them to offer the iPhone without carrier-imposed restrictions on things like tethering and data usage, and may very well lead toward cheaper plans.

In the announcement, Apple stated that they plan to offer unlimited data and voice for $30 per month, with SMS added for an additional $5. Adding additional handsets or other devices (i.e. the iPad) to your plan will cost an additional five to ten dollars per month, depending on the brand and model.

Details are still sparse, but we will cover the news here as it unfolds.