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Blogs » Archive for November, 2007
Who Said Beautiful Web Design was Hard?
Not to blow our own trumpet (most of you know anyway) but earlier this year we published a pretty awesome book. Of course ALL of our books are awesome, so let’s just say that this book is super awesome. You’d know it as The Principles of Beautiful Web Design written by Jason “the designer man” Beaird…
No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t improve on Jason’s magnificent authoring job, so we’ve decided to do something a little different. I’d like to introduce you to…
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design – Hardcover Signature Edition
Yep, that’s right: this brilliant book is being released in super-durable and simply gorgeous hardcover format…
Don’t bother looking in your local bookstore or Amazon — these puppies are exclusive to sitepoint.com, and they’ll hit our warehouse on December 17.
There are only 1000 signature editions arriving, and we’re giving you, the SitePoint faithful, a chance to get in first!
Place your order before the 17th and it’ll be shipped the second the books arrive. The sooner you order, the more cash you’ll save…
Here’s how it’ll work:
- Order by December 3 and pay only US $39.95 (save 20%)
- Order …
Google To Abandon PageRank?
The Googlified blog reports that Google Labs are experimenting with a new style of search result customizations: digg-style voting buttons that allow users to customize their search experience. If the experiment is a success, it’s conceivable that the results of such voting could be folded back into the general search results, complementing and potentially even replacing the PageRank algorithm.
From the experiment’s description page:
This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes.
Like it?
This button will move the result to the top of the page and add this orange marker (fig. 1a) next to it so you can easily recognize it. The result(s) you promote will appear at the top whenever you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.
Don’t like it?
This button will remove the result, and it will remain hidden when you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.
While initially an enhancement that is confined to that user’s results, you can bet that Google will …
Internet Explorer doesn’t just suck, it also blows!
I’m spending most of my time these days working on SitePoint’s upcoming Ultimate JavaScript Reference, a task that I can fairly say is eating my brain.
Unlike the authors of the imminent Ultimate CSS Reference, I didn’t have any particular inclination to be nice to Internet Explorer. And I knew I was going to run into bugs and quirks, none of which would be any different in IE7, because the DOM simply wasn’t on the development radar for that version.
Even so, I’ve been nothing short of staggered at the sheer amount of chaotic brokenness evident in its implementation of even the simplest of things.
You may remember, not so long ago, that I wrote about the behavior of href attributes in Internet Explorer, and how for links they come back as qualified URIs rather than literal attribute values. But, oh man … that is so the tip of the iceberg when it comes to getAttribute() …
You wouldn’t have thought it was so hard
In addition to qualifying the value of href attributes on links, IE does the same thing for the src attribute of images.
When retrieving a style attribute, IE returns a style object, rather than an attribute value. Retrieving an event-handling attribute …
The Email Standards Project Launches
As reported previously on SitePoint, the team from Freshview (makers of Campaign Monitor) have taken it upon themselves to improve the state of standards support for HTML email, in both desktop and web-based email clients.
Yesterday that cause moved one step closer to its goal, with the official launch of the Email Standards Project site.
Freshview’s Dave Greiner summed up why we need to push for standards support, and the parallels between standards support in email clients and web browsers in an interview with SitePoint last month:
What we’ve done is we’ve set up a baseline of standards that we think should at least be a good start, for everyone to meet. And we’re currently working through all the major email clients, putting together a wishlist — a top 10. The message is, “If you could do anything, do these 10 things and it will get you pretty close to where we need to be.”
Read the background on why we need standards support in email and what you can do to help, then go read more about this movement or check out what’s next for the Email Standards Project on their new blog (complete with a …
International Semantic Web Conference 2007 in Brief
The International Semantic Web Conference 2007 (ISWC2007) was held in wonderful Busan, South Korea. The pace of change there is astronomical and the people I met were very welcoming. I was very impressed.
There is a growing interest amongst the group that I was talking with to break out of the mould of “white tower” Semantic Web work and to produce real world things. Things that can be used by current developers and that fit into the needs and wants of the vast majority of web developers.
This toolkit doesn’t quite exist yet, but the Linking Open Data group is creating the next generation of mashup tech called meshup. This is data that is interlinked and navigable in consistent ways. Data that ranges from the entire Wikipedia dataset (via DBpedia) to US Census data and Musicbrainz and the paths that connects them all together.
This is an important first step, developers who want to check out this emerging field can’t do it without a useable set of data. Data that not only makes sense but is real world and real value.
Another field that looks promising is the marriage of Google search with Semantic Web technology. An …
SitePoint Giving Away Books Based On Foosball Skills!
If you’re a regular subscriber to Alex’s Design View newsletter, then you’ve probably heard the SitePoint team moved offices recently — we’re now happily ensconced in our swanky new residence in the Paris end of Collingwood. To celebrate the move, we thought we’d throw the doors open to all our Melbourne customers… and have a book sale.
We’ve stuck some CRAZY prices on all our office book stock and the invitation is open to anyone who lives in Melbourne (or will be in Melbourne this week) to grab yourself a bargain. However, in typical SitePoint style, we thought we’d give the book sale a bit of a twist.
You’ve all seen the age-old “Buy two, get one free!” and “Buy one, get the second at half price!” deals that carpet warehouse sellers and CD wholesalers offer. But really, where’s the fun in that?
Here’s our offer: buy three books and you’ll get the chance to challenge one of the SitePoint team members to either a game of foosball or a high speed race on the office X-box. If you win, you’ll get a fourth book absolutely free.
Now that sounds like a lot more fun!
First through the door today was Rohan …
1 in 5 Typo Domains Funded By Google
McAfee’s new report on typosquatting details how 1 in 5 typo-squatted domain names is being funded by Google AdSense.
For their report, McAfee studied 1.9 million typographical variations of 2,771 of the most popular and well known Web sites. Of these, nearly 7% were suspected typo-squatters, defined as domain names registered for the sole purpose of generating advertising revenue from people who mistyped URLs.
The five most highly squatted categories are game sites (14.0%), airlines (11.4%), main stream media company sites (10.8%), adult sites (10.2%) and technology and Web 2.0 related sites (9.6%).
Besides the scale of the problem and its effect on legitimate business, what disgusts me the most is that Google AdWords have no way to opt out of having their advertising displayed on parked domain names.
Addendum: While there are legal routes for trademark owners to recover domain names that are owned by typosquatters, the process is long and expensive. Typosquatting would a much smaller industry if AdSense and other networks took a strong stance against the practice and stopped making it so lucrative.
Google And Paypal To Pay You For Xmas Shopping
Google and Paypal are waging a war this Xmas to convince online shoppers to use their system for paying for online purchases:
This year, Google is offering two frequent-flier miles on any of seven airlines (all the majors except American) for every $1 spent. It also offers $5 to $50 discounts, with minimum purchase, at several dozen merchants … PayPal has fewer merchants but its offer is more lucrative for shoppers in some ways, with 20 percent of purchases credited to the buyer’s PayPal account.
Are incentives like these going to convince you to try one system over the other? And what incentives are you offering visitors to your sites this holiday season?
PHP Manual CLI style 2.0
Harry mentioned the handy little phpm some three years ago. And Sean Coates was kind enough to point out how it could be replaced with a shell one-liner. Doesn’t that just make one love bash?
One thing, I missed with either of the two, was the ability to see the entire manual entry. It’s quite often, that the manual actually holds useful information (Who’d known that!), so I find myself using www.php.net a lot. Or I did, until I decided to do something about it. Now, shell-scripting isn’t what I spent most of my time on, so it’s not with out a bit of pride, that I present to you phpm two-oh.
#!/bin/bash
# phpm
# commandline php-manual interface
# Kudos to Havard Eide and Sean Coates for the original idea
#
# author: Troels Knak-Nielsen <troelskn@gmail.com>
# version: 2007-11-27
#
# dependencies:
# wget sudo apt-get install wget
# sed sudo apt-get install sed
# tidy sudo apt-get install tidy
# xmlstarlet sudo apt-get install xmlstarlet
# konwert sudo apt-get install konwert
# html2text …
Free Rails PDF: Only 3 Days To Go!
If you haven’t taken advantage of the fact that Patrick Lenz’s introductory Ruby On Rails book is available as a FREE PDF, then you better act quickly as there are only three days left!
There’s plenty happening in the world of Rails development, and even before this giveaway I was of the firm belief that this book is the best and easiest way to get up to speed on the Ruby On Rails framework. Plenty of other books assume that you are an experienced web developer who is already writing unit tests and adhering to best practice MVC principles in some other programming language.
Not in this book. Patrick holds your hand through the basics and sets you up with an example application that, once complete, will give you a solid foundation from which you can further your Ruby and Rails skills.
Did I mention there are only three days to go? Seriously, go get it now. Even if you file it away for later.
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