5th April 2012 by Jason C. Filed under: Software
I’m currently using a pretty old machine to browse the web, so recently whenever I’ve clicked on a YouTube video that’s only available in 360 -wide or less, it’s been automatically served up to me as an HTML5 video. Now the problem with that is that because of the age of my machine, the video performance went down the toilet. I mean, really, sometimes the picture would stick for several seconds on one frame.
I looked around the web a bit for a solution, and found am html5 disabler extension for Firefox, but I didn’t want to add another extension, and didn’t want to disable html5 for other sites.
So, after a bit of thought I dug into Firefox’s about:config screen. I looked for ‘video’ and ‘html5′, but no joy. Then, I looked up ‘webm’ and there was the setting, under media.webm.enabled. I changed this from ‘true’ to ‘false’ and well if Bob isn’t my uncle, YouTube now reverts to the Flash player, and I’m much happier with its performance.
I thought I’d post in case anyone else out there is looking for the same solution.
18th March 2011 by Jason C. Filed under: Design
Sometimes when working on a project there can be a little friction between different groups. Where people’s jobs are different, their goals are different, and their processes differ and lie outside their collaborators’ expertise. Three distinct groups come to mind from my own experience: the client, the designer and the developer. Sometimes lines are blurred between the three, and sometimes the designer is replaced by a project manager, though often this project manager can be thought of as the designer’s proxy.
One issue that crops up fairly often for me is when trying to get websites or html email to look consistent across different browsers / email clients. There’s a golden rule about, that I think anyone commissioning web development should know:
Websites will not look the same in all browsers.
Nor should they. Each browser uses a layout engine to format the pages of the websites you visit. There are a lot of different layout engines out there, built differently and for different purposes.
Users have different settings. Some users have low res screens so won’t see the whole width of the site, some have high res screens and will have to enlarge the default font size to be able to read what’s written. Some are on dial-up and will have disabled background images, others will be browsing the site on their phone or tablet.
So not only is it impossible to make sure that all browsers show exactly the same page to everyone, it isn’t desirable either. If I want to set my font size larger so I can read my laptop while sitting comfortably in a chair, then that’s my business, and I don’t want some jumped-up website over-ruing me and setting the fonts so small I have to squint.
Remember this the next time you’re developing a site. Users don’t sit and compare the site in different browsers. Here are a couple of links: saying it with passion, and with a bit of explanation.
11th January 2011 by Jason C. Filed under: Web-development
Hmmm, it seems that it’s been an inexcusably long time since I last posted here. Sorry about that, but life gets in the way. I’d rather be too busy to post than not.
Anyway, I ready this a while ago and have just got round to posting it here. It’s an article – Essentials of writing high quality JavaScript. A very useful article with some good pointers on code formatting with analysis of the why. I have changed my curly-brace style as a result, you will be excited to hear. So now I do this:
function somename() {
// code
}
instead of this
function somename2()
{
// code
}
23rd February 2010 by Jason C. Filed under: Code-bits
A new design agency being formed by an existing client needed a site. They had a good design ready, I just had to build the thing. It’s built in WordPress, but I also pull in their Twitter stream on the client side.
Twitter’s api is easy enough to use. I opted for the JSON-p format, but something I didn’t realise at the time was that the status updates are purely the plain text. So any URLs, usernames or hashtags are just plain text: no wrapping in <a></a> tags. It’s an easy problem to solve, though, and here it is for anyone else who needs it.
function twitify( text )
{
// replace urls with linked ones
var t2 = text.replace(/(http|https)(:\/\/)([^ ]+)/ig, '<a href="$1$2$3">$1$2$3</a>' );
// replace @username with clickable twitter link
t2 = t2.replace(/@([^ ]+)/gi,'<a href="http://twitter.com/$1">@$1</a>');
// replace hashtags with Twitter searches
t2 = t2.replace(/#([^ ]+)/gi,'<a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23$1">#$1</a>');
return t2;
}
So, feed the tweet into that function, and back out it comes with links, @users and #hastags made clickable.
Did I mention I ♥ regular expressions?
27th January 2010 by Jason C. Filed under: Off-topic
I got an email today from my sister-in-law, forwarded on after she’d signed an online petition. The petition was to lobby the international community to cancel Haiti’s debt. From what I have read (which is very little), the debt seems to be both incredibly unfair and a huge burden for the country. The G7 is due to meet very soon and could take action on this with enough pressure, so sign up quickly.
UK residents can sign both the below petitions, anyone else can sign the second one only.
Go on, you know it makes sense!
21st January 2010 by Jason C. Filed under: SEO
There’s some good, solid advice here on trying to get Google sitelinks. The thing about sitelinks is that they give you more space on Google’s results page, and make your site look much more trustworthy and high-profile. This article dishes out some sensible advice, but unfortunately the exact method of getting these sitelinks remains securely locked in Google’s cupboard.
Of course, for the sitelinks to display, you have to get to number 1 on the search results page, which is a science in itself.
8th December 2009 by Jason C. Filed under: Code-bits
I’m not a .net developer. A few months ago, though, I was building a mini site for a property company, who’s hosting was on a .net server. I thought I’d have a go at using master pages instead of several different include files.
What a revelation! I really like the way that you specify a page that’s to be used as the template for the site, and simply add some place-holders that are to be populated with the content from your individual local pages. The whole thing then hangs together very nicely. You can even use relative links that are re-written by the server so no matter where you content page is, the link is always pointing at the same file. The code is clean, too, as the master and content pages are all marked up using XML, so all your code looks nice and is easy to follow in your editor of choice.
A different, but equally small site has now come up and it’s got me thinking about how to implement something like this in PHP. Now, there are several templating systems already out there for PHP, for example Smarty. I didn’t want to use one of those, because like I said the site’s very small, and adding all those extra files in there and using the Smarty syntax would just unnecessarily increase the development time for such a small site. So, I set about making something up myself.
I’m pretty pleased with what I came up with: it’s not quite as clean as the .net version, but it is simple and easy enough that it will help rather than hinder the development of such as small site. I’ve got my template (the ‘master’ page) on which I’ve defined a couple of areas where the content is to be dropped in.
template.php:
<?php Header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8"); ?>
<html>
<head>
<title><?php echo $page->title; ?></title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/path/to/stylesheet.css">
<?php echo $page->head; ?>
</head>
<body>
<nav>
<ul>
<li><a href="/">Nav item 1</a></li>
...
<li><a href="/">Nav item n</a></li>
</ul>
</nav>
<div>
<?php echo $page->content; ?>
</div>
<footer>
footer message here
</footer>
</body>
<?php echo $page->foot; ?>
</html>
page.php:
<?php
$page->title = "Hello, world";
$page->template = "template.php";
?>
<?php ob_start(); /* head */ ?>
<meta name="description" content="description here">
<?php $page->head = ob_get_clean();
?>
<?php ob_start(); /* content*/ ?>
<h1>The Page Title</h1>
<p>The article goes here</p>
<?php $page->content = ob_get_clean();
?>
<?php ob_start(); /* foot */ ?>
<script type="text/javascript"> ... /* page specific script */ </script>
<?php $page->foot = ob_get_clean();
?>
<?php include_once $page->template ?>
23rd November 2009 by Jason C. Filed under: Web-development
Although this is a pretty old topic, and people have decided to come down on one side or the other already, I was reminded of the debate recently. I was looking at some code another dev had done, and was altering it to suit my style more. There was nothing wrong with it, but the tags were done in the XHTML style rather than HTML.
Now, way back when, I thought that XHTML was going to be the saviour of the web, and it was closely intertwined with the move away from table-layout to a more semantically correct layout. So I have coded a fair few sites using XHTML. In recent years, though, I have switched back to HTML. I have my reasons. And they are:
- IE does not support XHTML. It can render (modified) XHTML code served as HTML, but that’s not the point, is it? If you add the proper
<
