supersonic feet

WordPress, the software I use to run this blog, is in beta-testing for a version 2.0 release and looks pretty cool. I’ve installed beta2 on another site where I’m planning on setting up a blog and the back-end interface has had some clear improvements made to it.

The layout for writing a blog posting has seen the most obvious improvement, with a WYSIWYG-style editor (quite a simple one, but it’s actually good to see people keeping things simple where you don’t need all the extra bits found in other WYSWIWYGs) and some AJAX effects for the ancillary ‘tabs’ (category selection, etc.), so they can be minimised and/or re-ordered.

There’s a beta forum set up on the WordPress site, where you can also download the latest release candidate (they’re actually just out of ‘real’ beta).

Although this time paying a bit more for the service (those at a loss to the reference can check out my last web hosting-related post).

The web design company I work for got a new dedicated server a few months ago from LiquidWeb, a managed hosting company based in the US. We haven’t had to use their support much so far, but I recently got in touch with them for some help/advice on getting a shopping cart system to work on an old client site that’d been moved over to the new server.

The shopping cart developers weren’t being much help and had asked us to change some settings that looked to me like they would open u psecurity holes. LiquidWeb support replied very quickly saying they’d made the change and explaining about the effect (apparently negligible after all) the change would have on security.

The change didn’t fixe the problem, but the attitude of LiquidWeb’s support staff is what every host/service provider should offer, yet very few do.

Anyway, I thought I’d better continue my trend of giving praise where due

Firefox 1.5 has been released at last with a few minor additions, but my main interest is the increase in speed.

The only problem I really had with Firefox 1.0.x was how slow it was to start up. The new 1.5 release seems much faster on my machine here at work, so I’ll have to try it out at home and verify that I’m not just imagining it.

Firefox can be downloaded from the Mozilla site.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that it also has better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows.

Last month I mentioned a PHP framework based on David Heinemeier Hansson’s Ruby on Rails, called PHP on Trax.

At the time, it was quite early in development and not really ready for use, but I’ve kept a casual eye on it since as it could turn out to be very handy. It turns out I was keeping a particularly casual eye on it, as I failed to notice the site change to a more RoR-style layout and the publishing of a very basic demo app in the mould of RoR out-of-the-box apps.

It’s obviously still under development and I haven’t delved too far back into it yet, but it’s nice to see a bit of progress and as ‘PHP on Trax’ is the most popular search term for people finding this blog, I thought I’d do an update on it. Maybe I’ll check back in another month and find it’s taken over the world

During my daily browsing of various design showcase sites the other day, I came across the This is Cable site, linked to from Design Shack.

The site looks very nice indeed - certainly worthy of appearing on a design showcase or two - and it looks like the developers had a general idea that they should be moving towards using divs instead of tables for layout, but they just didn’t quite get there.

It’s perhaps a bit harsh to pick on this one site when there are plenty of others out there that are equally, if not more, guilty of sticking to the ‘bad old ways’, but this is an apparently brand new site that looks great but just ain’t very accessible.

A quick look at the code shows that the nice touch of the slide-out contents menu has been done by placing the two sections (menu, content) of the site into a table and then shifting the position of the whole table about when hiding/showing the menu. Why? This could have been done so much easier (and more semantically) by using a couple of divs, with one floated to a side.

By using divs, they could also have had the contents menu below the main content in the HTML, providing screen-reader users with a much easier time of getting at the meat of the site on each page.

Aside from the upsetting (to me at least, obviously not necessarily to the general visitor) use of tables, there’s a huge block of inline JavaScript at the top of the page. Would it have been so hard to pull that off into a separate file and save time on page loads, readability and aid SEO?

Probably the main reason this site got to me so much is that the various CSS galleries (I’m aware Design Shack isn’t one) have done such a good job of showcasing great design that also validates and is accessible, I’m left incredulous that there are still designers out there capable of producing such visually impressive sites yet haven’t apparently taken the time to make sure as many people as possible can get at them.

Not to mention the trouble they’re likely to have when/if it comes to re-designing the This is Cable site. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, my re-design of this site was done almost entirely through editing the one CSS file. This is Cable will do well to come up with a new design that doesn’t require changing the HTML on any of the pages, thanks largely to the container table that’s been used.

I’ve been through a number of web hosting companies over the years and in general the services haven’t really lived up to what was promised or the companies have just gone bust. I’ve now been with a hosting company (Beachcomber) for a number of months (can’t actually remember when I started hosting with them, but it’s been a while) and have had a pretty good time of it.

I’d been renting a dedicated server from them which was in fact a re-sold server from a large datacentre in the US (that’s fine, it gets me a second level of support). Recently the network performance hadn’t been great and eventually it went down for almost two days after an upgrade of router software went horribly wrong and the data centre didn’t have a backup plan.

About the same time I got an email from Beachcomber revealing that they’d stopped taking new orders with this datacentre and would like to move everyone else out. It would’ve been nice to have been told they weren’t confident with them earlier, but the email suggested they were talking to the other DCs they work with trying to get a deal to move us over. They suggested it wouldn’t be quite as good a deal as the servers we were on were a one-off special, but they’d do their best.

As the massive packet loss started to subside on my existing server, I got the offer email happily declaring that they could match my existing plan with another data centre and to email them in order to take the offer up. Now I’d just paid the next month’s bill a few days earlier and wasn’t about to pay twice in one month, so I emailed them saying the offer looked good, would it be available next month?

Email came back and it seemed Beachcomber weren’t going to charge for the server switch. Great.

So I’m now set up on my new server at a (hopefully) more reliable data centre and I have to give kudos to Beachcomber for taking the hit to get their clients moved over. They’re keeping the old servers up as long as they can (presumably until the end of the billing period) to help ease the move and my move has now been made.

There are obvious motives behind this: unhappy customers are very likely to leave, especially after nearly two days minus their websites. Offering them the free move to a new, more reliable DC both placates the customer and shows positive action. It’s not entirely dissimilar to the recent move by Six Apart to offer refunds to customers of TypePad. It’s obviously at least in part to make sure customers are retained and to encourage a few positive reviews (bit like this one, eh?) that could encourage new customers towards such an outwardly proactive company.

Nevertheless, it shows that the two companies understand the frustrations of their customers and rather than make hollow gestures of refunds if the damage can be proved and the customer can jump through hoops, they just straight up offer a ‘generous’ solution that’s easy to obtain (or leave if you don’t feel you need it).

Even as a marketing ploy, it’s a better way of running a company and showing a bit of accountability - earning a second chance with your customers instead of expecting one.

As befalls most designers of websites, the urge to re-design (or at least re-align, Cameron Moll-stylee) hit me a while back with this site.

I still quite liked the old design (above), but there were a few problems with it including the fact that the HTML/CSS wasn’t too hot and the menu tended to mess about in some browsers (notably Opera). This new layout is actually XHTML 1.1 compliant and thanks to the beauty of CSS, I’ve only made two changes to the actual HTML itself (well, three including the doctype change) - moving the menu below the content in the HTML and adding the associated anchor link to the top menu.

… OK, I also removed the old tagline (”Assorted machinations of Adam Perfect”), but that doesn’t count

I do realise that having moved the main WordPress menu to the bottom of the page, the ‘menu’ link up top isn’t entirely obvious as the method of finding it, so I’m going to play around with the wording a bit. Any suggestions welcome

In a vaguely similar vein to a blog post by Jason from 37signals last month, where he discussed (among other things) the technique of having events nearest to now in larger type than those further away (and therefore less urgent), I had an idea that would help me immensely (and I imagine others) when writing large web apps.

I use Zend Studio for writing my PHP apps (and indeed for more general HTML/CSS writing), but there comes a stage in many projects where you find you have loads of files open at once, combined with the need to be switching between them often.

Zend’s ability to clone windows certainly helps, as you can have 3/4 files readily visible all at once for reference/editing (even duplicates of the same file for writing at one end and checking it matches stuff at the other). Even with this insanely useful functionality (I actually feel partially handicapped when forced to use an editor that doesn’t offer it), there’s still plenty of searching through the many tabs (currently 18 as I write) at the bottom of the window for the next file you need to edit.

Anyway, at last I get to my idea: have recently-viewed/edited files (tabs) in scaling text sizes. For example, the last file you were viewing before the current one would have perhaps double-size text, with others scaling down to the standard font size as you go back through the view history.

Expanding on this (as the above only really helps when you’re switching repeatedly between the same 2/3 files), the ability to mark tabs with a colour and/or size permanently would help further for common files that you need to find regularly, but not necessarily in the back-and-forth fashion described above. For example, I could set my access class to be red, bold text at 1.3 times normal size, so when I need to check something in that class file, I can quickly scan for the big red tab rather than strain my eyes parsing across the tiny tabs looking for the word ‘Access.php’.

There are undoubtedly other areas of your standard IDE that could use a similar or related treatment, but I’ll stick to the tabs for now.

Blog comments (not that I get any here), much like discussions on forums and mailing lists, can very easily turn into shouting matches over the smallest of details or misunderstandings.

It’s nice to see, therefore, a site that takes a little unexpected step to calm people down in the instant before they start typing. Particletree’s comment box (for their features) has a ready-typed sentence that I imagine must work rather well at cheering people up just as they’re starting to write their comment.

You don’t expect to find anything other than something along the lines of ‘comment goes here’ in message boxes for comment forms, but Particletree decided to go with:

Just imagine - you’re about to launch into your vitriolic stance on the scientific merits of a usability test that looks a bit suspect, you scroll madly down to the comment box and are confronted with the form telling you to give everyone a hug.

Clearly this won’t work for everyone (or perhaps even for most people), but I bet it’d reduce ‘flaming’ a fair bit, at least for a while before people became immune to the message (at which point you’d have to get creative and start changing it regularly with ever more witty and unexpected niceties).

I wasn’t even in a bad mood when I found it (or about to post a comment as it happens), but it still struck me and gave me cause for a little internal chuckle.

Only a year or so late, but I came across a great little bit of javascript, aptly titled ‘IE7′, written by Dean Edwards. It’s a set of javascript code that can be included in a page to bring IE5/6’s CSS support up to a par with modern browsers like Firefox.

I haven’t tried implementing it in a site yet, but the IE dev team gave it their support as an interim option some time ago and it looks pretty well done anyway.