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Blogs » Archive for December, 2007
The Festive Season and Client Demands
As we all enter the silly season, with family events, social evenings and all the fun of Christmas, it’s a pertinent time to reflect on how you deal with client demands.
When I first started out on my own, I worked whenever I could – more so, I worked whatever hours clients demanded of me. This often ended up evenings and weekends, and I started to believe all client work was important and urgent, and it had to be done right now.
Then, after a year, I reconsidered having my mobile number on my business card, and dropped it with the next print run as a test for both clients and myself – would the barrier of not having it close to hand dissuade them from calling on Sunday mornings?
I was relieved to find it did, and more importantly, hardly any of my clients complained. Those that did complain had become accustomed to having me at their beck and call seven days a week. Sure, I could blame them, but I had also trained them into believing I was, so I was just at fault as they were, if not more so.
Now, five years later, none of my staff advertise their after-hours …
HTML5 Working Group Rejects Open Media Formats
The HTML5 spec looks set to introduce new audio and video capabilities into the language, but the HTML5 working group has become embroiled in a debate over the codecs that browsers should support for them.
Nokia and Apple have succeeded in removing Ogg Vorbis and Theora from the current draft, citing patent uncertainties (read: a reluctance to back a standard that has no provision for including DRM).
Manuel Amador has detailed why he believes the decision to omit these open formats to be an “outrageous disaster”:
(Given) the fact that there are widely available patent-free implementations of Ogg technology, there is really no excuse for Apple and Nokia to say that they couldn’t in good faith implement HTML5 as previously formulated.
And Ian Hickson from the WHATWG has responded with his own version of why it doesn’t make sense for Ogg Vorbis or Theora to be included (primarily, because Nokia and Apple are supposedly worried about being sued for using the format).
Regardless of the true motivations, it feels like this is a step backwards for HTML and for digital media in general.
How To Run A Successful Design Contest
Sahar Sarid of conceptualist.com knows how to run a design contest.
Last week he announced the winner of the $2,500 prize money offered via the logo design contest that he ran at SitePoint (the winner was John Wik for this entry).
It’s interesting to look at the process that Sahar followed, as the contest holder, to ensure that he was getting value for money in return for the prize on offer. For example:
- He offered a large cash prize, guaranteeing that the best designers from the community would take notice. In fact, this was the largest prize awarded for a single design contest to date.
- He was clear and detailed in his initial brief.
- He was prompt and thorough in giving feedback to each designer’s submission. In fact, 576 of the 745 feedback posts were Sahar’s — as were many of the 212 comments for the contest — totaling 313,872 characters or about 52,000 words!
- He insisted on being part of the process. This is one factor that many detractors of design contests cite as being a failing in on-spec work: that client communication is taken out of the loop, resulting in lower quality work. By requesting that each designer …
WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has released a last call for comments on the working draft of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0… again:
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group invites you to review the second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft published on 11 December 2007. WCAG 2.0 explains how to make Web sites, applications, and other content accessible to people with disabilities. Please submit any comments on the following document by 1 February 2008.
This second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft is provided for public review of the document now that it has all resolutions from previous comments incorporated. The WCAG Working Group hopes that it has resolved all substantive issues with this draft, and looks forward to progressing to the next stages in completing WCAG 2.0.
Leave your comments on whether you think any progress has been made here at the W3C site.
Flexible Fixtures in Rails 2
As Matt Magain pointed out yesterday, Rails 2.0 is now gold! Not a lot has changed feature wise from the PR (makes sense - features were frozen at that point), although it seems that the new improvements to fixtures managed to slip in to the final version.
Rather than having to map foreign keys in your fixtures using id numbers, you can use fixture names, which makes life a whole lot easier. So you can now write:
users.yml
joe_blogs:
id: 1
first_name: Joe
last_name: Blogs
mary_smith:
id: 2
first_name: Mary
last_name: Smith
websites.yml
website_1
id: 1
user: joe_blogs
url: “http://www.joeblogs.com”
website_2
id: 2
user: mary_smith
url: “http://mary.smith.id.au”
which obviously makes a lot more sense to a human reading it, especially when you have a large number of fixtures across many models.
Let me join Matt in congratulating the Rails core dev team for achieving this milestone - roll on Rails 3!
Facebook Beacon: The Great Privacy PR Stunt
Here’s my take on Facebook Beacon, the recent feature added to the popular social networking site Facebook for informing one’s friends about activities on an external site: the controversy was orchestrated.
Last week the feature was scaled back due to privacy concerns, but I can’t help but think that this wasn’t all part of Facebook’s grand master plan.
Before you get your flame torches out, no, this is not a statement based on fact. It’s an opinion. A supposition based on the fact that Beacon is a disruptive innovation that, by design, pushes the envelope for just how much advertising one can take in one’s personal feed.
I’m convinced that the Facebook team — a team that understands better than most just how to successfully build an enormous community — anticipated this backlash, but decided to run with it anyway.
Developing a Facebook app to promote your site is one thing. But since when did breaking down a walled garden entail breaking down the very last strands of privacy to which users of the Web cling?
The debacle reminds me of a few cliches that occur regularly in the world of politics. One is the phrase “any PR is good PR”. The attention and …
SitePoint Books Rated Best of 2007
Two of SitePoint’s titles have been rated the best web design books of 2007 by Canadian book review site YYZtech.ca.
Rachel Andrew’s The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks (2nd Edition) makes it onto the list. Here’s what the reviewer had to say:
Another book on CSS? Yes, this one (2nd edition) is up to date with the newest version of IE and is well layed-out that makes it an easy read … in an attractive, full-colour package. In addition, there are a number of break-out boxes throughout the book that provide additional information .. with a sense of humour: e.g. the warning sections are illustrated with various items ranging from a bicycle horn (look for) to a hand-grenade (caution).
Also on the list is Shirley Kaiser’s Deliver First Class Websites: 101 Essential Checklists. From the review:
As you read the chapters you get the idea that a whole lot of experience was brought to bare- looking at the footnotes on just about every page, they are full of references to other sources readers might investigate if they wish to learn more about a particular point.
A team of hard-working staff (commissioning, editing, marketing, etc) …
Rails 2.0.1 Released!
While the SitePoint crew were busy sunning themselves by the pool on our annual Xmas trip, the Rails core team packaged up version 2.0 of the Ruby on Rails framework and released it on the world. I expect the team probably had a fairly stressful weekend putting out a few fires (understandable given this is a major release). The result of their hard work is that, after only a couple of days, version 2.0.1 is already upon us.
If you’re using Ruby Gems, update your Rails install by typing:
gem install rails –include-dependencies
Our resident Ruby guru Myles Eftos has covered what’s new in Rails 2 and how you can best prepare for upgrading, so be sure to read up before you take the plunge.
Microsoft Names IE8, Bill Gates to ‘Look Into’ Transparency
This tidbit from the road just south of Perth as most of Team SitePoint heads for its annual Christmas getaway.
Microsoft has officially announced the name of then next version of IE: Internet Explorer 8. Okay, okay, it won’t win any awards for originality, but at least the announcement provides definitive and public confirmation that the browser is being worked on.
The announcement comes just a day after my own chiding on this blog of the company’s inability to announce even a name for the new browser. Though I’ll admit this is entirely coincidental, what is not coincidence is Molly Holzschlag’s conversation with Bill Gates on the matter at a private preview of plans for next year’s MIX08 conference.
MOLLY HOLZSCHLAG: I’m very concerned about this, because being the person here that’s supposed to be the liaison between designers and developers for the Web and the browser conversation, this conversation seems to have been pretty much shut down, and I’m very concerned as to why that is, and how we can correct it.
BILL GATES: I’ll have to ask Dean what the hell is going on. I mean, we’re not — there’s not like some deep secret about what we’re doing with IE.
MOLLY HOLZSCHLAG: …
Microsoft and Mozilla Disagree on Browser Security
Microsoft and Mozilla are locked in a war of words over whose browser has the better security track record. All Web developers seem to care about, though, is that Mozilla just released the first public beta of Firefox 3, while Microsoft has yet to say much of anything about IE.Next.
One year on from the release of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft’s IEBlog has posted The First Year of IE7, summing up the accomplishments of the browser:
According to internal Microsoft research based on data from Visual Sciences Corporation, there are over 300 million users are experiencing the web with IE7. This makes IE7 the second most popular browser after IE6. IE7 is already #1 in the US and UK, and we expect IE7 to surpass IE6 worldwide shortly.
Tony Chor, Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft, went on to discuss IE7’s achievements in the realm of security:
According to a vulnerability report published today, IE7 has fewer vulnerabilities than previous versions of IE over the same time period. What’s more, the report showed that IE7 had both fewer fixed and unfixed vulnerabilities in the first year than the other browsers we compared.
Obviously, this sort of claim was bound to ruffle a few …
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