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Blogs » Archive for February, 2008
RESTful Rails. Part II
For those of you who have been waiting with baited breath to read the second installment of my RESTful Rails blog post, wait no longer! Although it started as a blog post, it ended up being expanded to a full blown article entitled Rapid RESTful Rails App — No Really!.
In the article you will learn how to build a basic tumblelog system (source code in included). So if you have been looking at REST and thinking it was black magic, head over and give it a read!
Table-Based Layout Is The Next Big Thing
The recently-launched SitePoint CSS Reference (and its print version, The Ultimate CSS Reference) contains extensive coverage of some of the more obscure areas of CSS. One such area that is going to become very important with the release of IE8 later this year is CSS tables.
For years now, enlightened designers who have embraced CSS layout have had to bend over backwards to produce complex designs that would have been trivial to produce using the HTML table-based layout techniques of the past.
The lengths to which designers must go to produce, say, a simple three-column layout using CSS techniques are so extreme that many web designers simply give up on CSS and resort to HTML tables for their layout. The Tech Times #142 and #143 were devoted to this issue.
With the release of IE8 coming this year, the stage is set for all that to change. IE8 will be the last of the major browsers to add support for CSS tables, which will enable designers to use table-based layout techniques without misusing HTML table markup.
To demonstrate this, I’ve produced the following 3-column page layout example using CSS tables:
…
IE8 Version Targeting: Microsoft Considers Feedback
In the Tech Times #183 I covered Microsoft’s plans to support browser version targeting in IE8, which will default to rendering a web page the same as in IE7 unless Microsoft’s newly-proposed <meta> tag instructs the browser to render the page in the browser’s new “super standards” mode.
Also as previously mentioned, these plans have ignited a debate within the web standards community. While some leaders like Eric Myer and Jeffrey Zeldman have come to embrace Microsoft’s approach, many respected voices like Jeremy Keith continue to cry foul, particularly over Microsoft’s plan to forever render HTML 4.x documents as they appear in IE7 unless they contain the new X-UA-Compatible <meta> tag.
Far from clear cut, the issue continues to divide the community, and Microsoft is listening intently. Just a week ago, members of the Web Standards Project (some of whom were involved in working with Microsoft to develop its browser version targeting plan) got together with Microsoft’s Chris Wilson for a round-table discussion about the community’s reaction to the company’s plans for IE8, and some of the ideas that have been proposed to adjust those plans for the better.
The discussion is certainly worth a listen (or the transcript …
Gmail’s CAPTCHA Cracked
It has emerged, not long after a group of hackers cracked the Windows Live Mail’s CAPTCHA, Google’s Gmail CAPTCHA has also been hacked (possibly by the same group).
Hacking Gmail is a huge scalp for the hackers, it gives them:
- use of the gmail.com domain name — a domain name that is unlikely to be blacklisted by spam filters.
- access to a wide range of Google services
- hacker kudos
Not to mention; due to the volume of Gmail users – they are going to be hard to track.
Should we worry about this?
Yes and no.
Google will undoubtedly fix the immediate threat, but the bigger issue is that CAPTCHAs are being hacked more and more successfully. For instance, since July 2007 the HotLan Trojan has created more than 500,000 spam email accounts with Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail.
With no end in sight for the arms race between the hackers and developers. CAPTCHA’s days seem numbered, (I for one would be happy to see the death of the CAPTCHA [as it currently stands]). But, what will be the next solution?
What methods are developers going to have to introduce to combat the hackers?
KittenAuth? And ultimately …
The Week in ColdFusion: 20-26 Feb: it’s a little AIRy around here
The RSS tubes were clogged this week with news of the 1.0 release of Adobe AIR, the desktop client for rich internet applications, and Flex 3. It’s exciting news for sure, but I probably didn’t need to read about it 40-50 times over! Fortunately, I managed to find some ColdFusion news out there too…
Before I get to that though, it’s worth noting that with all the fuss and focus on AIR and Flex, some developers have voiced concern yet again over Adobe’s commitment to the ColdFusion language. Jared Rypka-Hauer got a chance to quiz Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, on that very topic, and was pleasantly surprised with the candour of the responses he received.
Want to know why Adobe evangelist Adam Lehman likes ColdFusion? Check out his “30onAIR” spots – then check out some of the others being showcased on the 30onAIR web site. If you feel moved to contribute your own 30 second video on why you love ColdFusion (or Flex, or AIR, or anything Adobe-related really), just post it on YouTube and tag it with “30onAIR” – and if all goes smoothly, it should appear on the site. Adobe have been sending little USB …
The Web’s $100 Million Secret Economy
In a market that’s set to top $100 million in 2008, the SitePoint Marketplace has been independently ranked the #1 source for buying and selling web real estate.
Jon Wheatley has begun producing monthly stats on the average prices of sites sold on some of the more active online marketplaces:
I had a script developed that crawls the content of some of the most active website marketplaces and grabs the sale price of each web property sold. I then took that information and created some average figures.
Wheatley compared web site marketplaces in terms of their average listing prices and overall dollar volumes, with the SitePoint Marketplace ranking 900% higher than its closest competitor.
The analysis showed that sitepoint.com had a total of $3,911,992 worth of listings between 495 individual auctions during the month of February, with an average listing price of $7903 per auction, compared to $805.73 for the next closest competitor. In fact, the SitePoint Marketplace’s listing prices totalled $3.9 million for February alone – more than all the other competitors combined.
If you haven’t started dabbling in online real estate, there’s never been a better time to do some reading and …
The Ultimate CSS Reference!
Regular readers will no doubt have heard of the new SitePoint CSS Reference site that we launched a few weeks ago.
We’re pleased to announce that a limited stock of The Ultimate CSS Reference — the hard cover print version of this indispensable reference — is now available!
The Ultimate CSS Reference, by Tommy Olsson and Paul O’Brien, is the definitive resource for mastering CSS. In its 440 pages, the entire language is clearly and concisely covered, along with browser compatibility details, working examples, and easy-to-read descriptions.
This book’s hard-cover format ensures it will be enjoyed for years come, and the beautiful interior design of the book makes solving your CSS problems a breeze.
The Ultimate CSS Reference is a comprehensive resource that you’ll come back to time and time again.
Stocks are limited, so don’t miss your chance to own a book that gives you all the CSS knowledge you’ll ever need…
Are Your Customers Promoting You?
In this post I am going to discuss, how going that extra mile with customer service can make a big difference to the bottom line of your businesses.
Recently the exhaust broke on my car. I needed to get it fixed, but where? Did I take it to the nearest or cheapest place?
Nope. I took it to the place that had repaired the exhaust on my old car 4 years ago — 115 miles (185km) away. Why?
Customer service.
Last time I went there, not only did they do a first class job with the exhaust, but they also went the extra mile with customer service.
- they stayed open past their normal closing time, so we could pick up the car (as we were running late)
- they fixed another minor issue at the same time for no extra charge
- they were friendly and customer centered
- they made the tiresome irritation of a broken exhaust into a positive experience
- they even made our little boy’s day by letting him have a go with a remote control car
At the end of the day – I, as the customer was made to feel special and not like a “walking wallet”. They did what they said they would do …
CouchDB on its Way to Becoming an Apache Project
CouchDB has been mentioned a few times on sitepoint.com (here, here, and here) but this year brought some exciting changes for the project. Firstly, on New Years Day, Damien Katz announced that he had accepted a full-time position at IBM to primarily work on CouchDB. The intention being that CouchDB would remain an open source project, donated to the Apache Software Foundation and licensed accordingly. The second big development was that on February 12 CouchDB was accepted for incubation by the Apache Software Foundation. So it looks like CouchDB is definitely going places.
On the development front Damien recently demonstrated some tantalizing map/reduce functions in JavaScript to generate some useful views from the database. Anyone else intrigued by a database that primarily uses JavaScript, JSON, and plain old HTTP?
Microsoft Wipes Out Open Document Formats
With its announcement on Thursday that it was committed to interoperability, Microsoft successfully sent OpenOffice.org’s OpenDocument formats to an early grave, presenting its own file formats as the industry standard that everyone should support.
OK, so Microsoft’s .doc, .xls and .ppt file formats for word processor documents, spreadsheets and presentations are pretty much the de facto standard these days already. But with Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie’s statement that Microsoft would be opening up the technical specifications defining these file formats, Microsoft has taken a big step in consolidating them as the industry standard for exchanging data.
Much of the news commentary last week was focused on the statement that Microsoft explicitly would not sue open source developers for connecting to Microsoft software. But the bigger story here, in my mind, is the fact that by explicitly making these APIs freely available, Microsoft are essentially turning their own file formats into standards, removing any real reason to keep open document formats such as the OASIS consortium’s Open Document Format (the default file format used by the OpenOffice.org suite) alive at all.
A bunch of questions come to mind, including this: just how far is Microsoft prepared to go in making …
