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Blogs » Archive for March, 2007
SXSW Interactive 2007: Day Three
(Read coverage of day one and day two of the SXSW festival.)
Here are our highlights from day three, with contributions from Lucas Chan:
- The Growth And Evolution Of Microformats
Moderated by the most active evangelist of microformats, Tantek Çelik, I was hoping this wouldn’t be another “introduction to microformats” talk. While the discussion didn’t really deliver on its promise of revealing what the future holds for microformats, it did at least go beyond the basics by covering:- the history of microformats, as illustrated by t-shirts (and here was I thinking that Tantek had put on weight since I saw him last — it turns out he was just wearing 17 t-shirts!)
- the Operator plugin for Firefox, demonstrated by the plugin’s creator, Michael Kaply, including example uses such as adding events to your Google Calendar, adding contacts to your Yahoo contacts list, or viewing a map of a location that has been geo-tagged.
- a sneak peak from Glenn Jones (Madgex) of a beta tool that uses microformats to help manage contact and profile info across social networks.
- some example applications showing microformats in use (including an impromptu demo where Jeremy Keith used a modified extension based on the Tails plugin for Firefox to send contact details using …
WaSP Street Team
SitePoint author and long time WaSP member Rachel Andrew writes:
The WaSP Street Team launched today; we’re trying to get some interest up before launching our first task.
I missed the announcement at the WaSP annual meeting here at SXSW, but here’s some more about this initiative from the signup page:
The WaSP Street Team is about you. No, not all the other YOUs reading this but YOU you, in your actual skin. The idea is that together we create a number of tasks – challenges if you will – to help the promotion of web standards in your local community. Things that will help get the word out to the businesses, educational institutions, web shops and individuals who live and operate directly near you. As a central group it’s hard for us to reach those people, but as a distributed team, it’s easy.
This sounds like something that would be well-supported by the existing activities of the Web Standards Group (everyone confuses the two organisations already, so why not join forces in fighting the good fight?). If you’d like to be involved, head on over to the signup page and you’ll be kept informed.
Godaddy DNS Outage Hits Millions of Sites
Godaddy.com, the largest domain name registrar in the world suffered a massive outage this weekend.
Multiple sources (here, here, here and here) have confirmed that Godaddy’s DNS servers went down for a period of several hours on Sunday, potentially because of the daylight savings time switch. In theory, every domain name registered with Godaddy was affected, representing one of the the largest single points of failure in Internet history.
So far, Godaddy hasn’t made any official comments about the reasons behind the outage except a short statement citing technical difficulties.
SXSW Interactive 2007: Day Two
(Read SitePoint’s coverage of day one of the SXSW festival.)
After an evening of dedicated celebration and networking, your faithful reporter and his band of merry men found rising in time to attend early morning sessions to be a considerable challenge.
However, undeterred, they fought through fatigue, crapulence and poor weather to press on in true dedicated fashion to bring SitePoint’s readers the very best of SXSW Interactive. Here are my highlights from day two:
- Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Mobile Web… But Were Afraid To Ask
This was one of the sessions that I was most looking forward to. The mobile web is fast becoming a reality, and the number of different devices and browsers is eclipsed only by the number of opinions on how best to tackle this brave new world.The presenter, Brian Fling, is director of strategy at Blue Flavor, and from the content in his presentation it became immediately apparent that these guys really know their stuff. I’ve always been a fan of Keith Robinson’s musings, so it comes as no surprise that his colleagues are smart and articulate.
Brian’s talk was both practical and engaging. As author of the dotMobi mobile web developer’s guide he is well …
SXSW Interactive 2007: Day One
As I mentioned last week, the SitePoint team has endured the 17 hours flying time (and a cruel seven-hour layover at LAX) to touch down in Austin, Texas for SXSW Interactive 2007.
We’ve been busy soaking up the atmosphere of the biggest web geek conference in the world (note: statement based entirely on experience and observation, without any checking of facts) and our clever ploy to give away books for beers has so far proven remarkably successful. Let’s just say that a lot of books have been given away, and it’s still only the first day!
Here are some highlights from a sampling of the panels that I attended today. I’ll only blog about panels that I really enjoyed or learned something in–reporting that a panel sucked is boring to read.
- The Influence of Art in Design
Hosted by the consummate gentleman Dan Rubin, this was one of those panels to get the creative side of the brain firing on all cylinders. While the panelists didn’t reveal any revolutionary techniques, what they did was inspire the artists and designers in the audience to think outside the box when searching for inspiration for a web site design. I know that when I’m stuck in a …
Internet Explorer 7 - The State of Play
An earlier version of this article appeared in the SitePoint Tech Times #160.
In the Tech Times #158, I asked for your experiences adapting sites to support the newly-released Internet Explorer 7. Here are a couple of interesting responses I received, along with some information that might help you to deal with this new browser.
From Angela (emphasis mine):
"I tend to stick pretty closely to the standards recommendations, and test pretty thoroughly, so I didn’t find a lot of surprises with IE7 (It probably helps that I’m a pessimist!). Conditional comments make it easy and intuitive-ish to deal with problems. I’m not a fan of IE by any means, but IE7 hasn’t been as nasty as it could’ve been."
Conditional comments are definitely the way I choose to approach CSS issues in Internet Explorer, Angela. For the uninitiated, I covered conditional comments back in the Tech Times #131. In short, however, conditional comments let you apply additional style sheets to particular versions of Internet Explorer by using a special form of HTML comment that Internet Explorer will process, while other browsers and development tools will ignore them:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css" />
<!–[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.ie.css" />
<[endif]–>
<!–[if lt IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" …
News Wire: W3C Launches HTML Working Group
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W3C Relaunches HTML Activity
The W3C’s new HTML working group, co-chaired by Microsoft’s Chris Wilson and the W3C’s Dan Connolly, was launched today. The group aims to have the next HTML recommendation out in 2010 (less than 4 years from now), and to converge with the WHATWG effort.
(tags: standards html) -
Quick Apollo Update / Labs Release
According to Adobe’s Mike Chambers, the company is preparing to release the first public alpha version of the Apollo platform. This first release will be focused on Flex developers, with some initial undocumented support for HTML development.
(tags: adobe flash flex) -
JScript IntelliSense in Visual Studio Orcas
The March pre-release of the next version of Visual Studio (code-named Orcas) includes improved JavaScript IntelliSense, much like that supported by other JavaScript-aware editors like Aptana and IntelliJ IDEA.
(tags: software microsoft asp.net ajax javascript) -
*+ tests
James Edwards (aka brothercake) experiments with some CSS hacks that target IE7 only while being perfectly valid.
(tags: css ie) -
W3C restarts HTML effort
Google’s Ian Hickson comments on the launch of the W3C HTML WG on behalf of the WHATWG. “Suprisingly, the W3C never actually contacted [us] during the chartering process.” He also provides instructions on how you can get involved in the new WG.
(tags: html standards)
Got a link you’d …
News Wire: Cracker adds backdoor to WordPress
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WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2
The download of WordPress 2.1.1 was compromised by a cracker that added a backdoor security hole to the blog software. Creator Matt Mullenweg: “This is the kind of thing you pray never happens, but it did and now we’re dealing with it as best we can.”
(tags: php security) -
Adobe Creative Suite 3 To Be Announced March 27th
Adobe will announce on March 27th the next major update to its suite of software applications including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash. The new versions are slated to ship sometime in Spring 2007.
(tags: software wysiwyg flash design) -
New hacker trick may expose Oracle databases
Security researcher David Litchfield has found a way around the permissions system that assures the security of many Oracle databases, greatly increasing the severity of a number of common SQL injection vulnerabilities that affect these systems.
(tags: databases security) -
Apache Tomcat 6.0.10
Apache has released Tomcat 6.0.10, a new major release of the free web server that contains reference implementations of the JavaEE servlets and JSP standards. This is the first stable version to support the new Servlet 2.5 and JSP 2.1 specs.
(tags: java software opensource apache) -
Google is Testing New Adsense Ads
Scattered reports like this one indicate that …
Are your clocks cleaned?
Here in the states most of us ritualistically change our clocks twice a year in hopes to gain more daylight. This practice has been known as Daylight Savings Time and it’s my understanding that it’s also practiced in other parts of the world. Well the US Government recently changed the dates for when Daylight Savings Time would start and end. This caused in some places a y2k like panic and people feared that their software would all of the sudden start reporting the wrong time for lunch breaks. So much like y2k, software makers started issuing patches for their software and operating systems to account for these changes.
For those of you running your own ColdFusion server you’ll need to take note here because there are things you need to do, in order to be ready for next weekend sine the 2nd weekend in March is when the changes take effect.
For ColdFusion to be “fixed” you need to actually update the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which ColdFusion uses to process your code. According to Adobe’s web site the SUN JVM Version 1.4.2_11 fixes the Daylight Savings time issues and is certified for CFMX 7.02, CFMX 6.1 Updater 1 and …
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