01.30.10
Posted in Design, Tech, Web
at 11 pm
This whole tempest-in-a-teapot over Flash on the iPad/iPhone platform is silly.
1) Any site that shows a ‘missing plug-in’ error is seriously behind the times. Planar.com’s Flash banner drops back to a JPEG with a clickable image map. Anything else would be criminal. (But, don’t look at our Control Room site just now…) The same fallback plan should be made for ANY plug-in: SilverLight, QuickTime, Java.
Mantra #7: If it’s not HTML + IMG, then it should have some back-up in case the content isn’t available.
2) Adobe makes money on authoring tools, tools of creation. When Robert Scoble asks Can Flash Be Saved he left out a crucial distinction: Flash the Authoring tool (and Flex, I suppose) vs. Flash Player the plug-in software for a multitude of platforms. All Adobe needs to do is re-target the Authoring tool to put out Canvas-based HTML 5/SVG/SMIL/JavaScript.
Suddenly they are free from having to support the development of the Player. Maybe they can even volunteer to A) Contribute to the open-source toolkits that would improve the H5/S/S/JS stack to the point where it reaches parity with Flash’s current features, B) add that support directly into the Flash Plugin for IE8, thereby removing one hurdle to getting that stack adopted universally.
Adobe can save Flash, that’s who.
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09.26.09
Posted in Media, Meta, Web
at 6 pm
I’ve been working on getting my WordPress/Twitter/FaceBook spaces working together and I think I’ve hit on a pretty good system.
It comes down to two sides: how do I publish things and how do other people read and stay up with that stream (as underwhelming as it is.)
For the first side of the coin, I like to publish three different types of content: Super short stuff and pithy comments which obviously fit into Twitter’s paradigm quite well. For timely commentary on things and longer thoughts, WordPress is a good choice and is the latest in a long series of journaling and blogging software tools that I’ve either used or built myself. Finally, longer form pieces essays or research or archival stuff seems to make more sense as web pages on my personal site.
For the audience side of things, I’m seeing 4 or 5 different methods that people use to keep up with individuals. Web site reading from bookmarks would be one (Hi Mom and Dad!). People who do a lot of web reading might use an RSS feed reader (Hi Micah!). Others may rely on Twitter to keep up with me and some others may want to keep an eye on things only through FaceBook. There are other channels like MySpace, but the ones I’m listing here seem to be the right ones for my audience.
So what have I connected? 1) I’ve connected FaceBook to Twitter using Twitter’s application. Next I added TwitterTools to my WordPress install and that takes care of cross posting between Twitter and WordPress entries. So now I can post tweets and they show up in my FaceBook status and they show up in WordPress on a once daily basis. (This might be annoying to some, so I’ll have to keep an eye on this and perhaps reduce the re-post rate to once a week or so.)
As for research and essays, I’ll post them to my site and then make an annotation here (as I’ve usually done over the past few years.) So if we follow the chain, 1) a page added to my site leads to 2) an announcement on my WordPress blog, which 3) triggers a Twitter tweet, and then finally 4) updates my FaceBook status.
Hmmm.
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03.23.09
Posted in Media, Tech, Web
at 8 pm
It seems that by adding a little extra code to my .htaccess file was all I needed to finally get the WordPress app running on my iPhone. The answer was in a thread on the WordPress support site. This applies to v2.7.1 at least in my case. This thread titled xmlrpc.php 403 Forbidden error noted a (now closed) MSN Groups thread with the answer. Fortunately ‘mkenney’ the OP included the actual code:
[Files xmlrpc.php]
SecFilterInheritance Off
[/Files]
(Just change the square brackets to angle brackets and slip this into your .htaccess file)
My efforts were complicated by my web host who turned off access to the file but made it look like a “404 File not found” error rather than the real error: “403 Forbidden” which sounds far more ominous.
The way to discover this for was to open the URL to the xmlrpc file directly in Safari and then bring up the Activities window which showed the text “forbidden” that was otherwise hidden from view. What tangled webs, indeed.
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04.16.08
Posted in Tech, Web
at 10 am
From the History meme, which I find kinda fascinating. Here’s mine, with the command split into three lines for display purposes. If you try this, you should put it all on one line.
history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END
{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’
| sort -rn | head
72 ping
72 ls
63 curl
62 cd
37 cal
32 whois
20 ssh
19 man
15 sudo
7 traceroute
I would suspect this is a common set for most web developing people. That ‘cal’ entry is because I often want to pull up a quick calendar for the year to check dates, but I don’t want to open iCal. Terminal is often open so it’s an easy reach to type ‘cal 2008′ or somesuch.
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03.03.08
Posted in Tech, Web
at 3 pm
IEBlog : Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8:
We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.
Yay. Nice of them to come to our senses.
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02.20.08
Posted in Design, Media, People, Tech, Web
at 12 pm
While everyone else is getting ready for SXSW, the WebVisions board has been busy getting this year’s edition ready to go. I’m really excited that Jeffery Veen is back. His presentation (5 or so years ago) was one of the best ever and even though we usually don’t have return speakers, Veen is one of the few that I’m truly glad to hear again.
WebVisions: May 22 – 23, 2008 – Portland, Oregon
Media, technology and consumer trends visionary Lynne Johnson will join WebVisions to deliver the Thursday keynote address. Lynne is the Senior Editor and Community Director for FastCompany.com, a leading website and community for people passionate about business ideas that also offers the complete content of Fast Company magazine. She also writes a technology blog following web, media, and consumer trends for FastCompany.com, and guest blogs for techPresident and Black Web 2.0.
An internationally sought-after sage, author, and user experience consultant, Jeffrey Veen will return to WebVisions to deliver one of the event’s keynote addresses. Currently a Design Manager and project lead for Google’s Measure Map project, Jeffrey is returning to WebVisions to share his vision for the future of the Web.
At this point, WebVisions as an event runs really smoothly. We get a good set of volunteers returning each year, and my Tech Crews are always on top of things. I’m the stage manager and try to make sure that each speaker is prepared and comfortable, the audience is undistracted, and the volunteers understand that the audience members are expecting to have a great experience and we want to give them an outstanding experience.
WebVisions is incredibly cheap and for the quality of the speakers and the location, it cannot be beat. I hope you’re coming!
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02.02.08
Posted in Tech, Web
at 1 am
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4″ />
Ah now there’s the rub. This whole thing with the X-UA-Compatible HTTP header has been basically portrayed as how the web creation community can bail Microsoft out of a tight corner that it got itself into. With both Zeldman and Meyer supporting this and many, many people railing against it, I’ve been trying to figure out where I stand in this. Here’s my gut reaction and how I got there.
- It makes perfect sense for Microsoft to do this.
- It makes perfect sense for everyone else to ignore it.
1) This is the next version of DOCTYPE switching. No it is not. DOCTYPE switches were not simply a method to choose a rendering engine. Using the DOCTYPE to switch to ‘standards’ mode worked well because using it made the pages markup more valid. It was a situation where the hand of standards was slipped into the glove of DOCTYPE. X-UA-Compatible does nothing of the sort. It simply adds more information to the header of a page. (Interestingly enough, this is exactly what HTML5 is shooting to *reduce*.)
2) “IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4″ Exactly who designated IE as an ‘official’ abbreviation for the browser from Microsoft? And who said that FF was adequate to represent all of the multitude of Gecko-based browsers out there? Talk about arbitrary. I would hope that Microsoft would put forth some sort of official registry for these “browser codes” like we have for MIME types and for Unix communication port numbers. At this point, this is going to be as helpful as User-Agent strings…
3) What IE=7 really means What Microsoft is stating with all of this is that they are happy to designate IE 7 as being their final answer, their best effort to present what I’ll call “IE7HTML”. Much like HTML 4.01 or XHTML, this is a specific flavor of HTML. Our friends in Redmond are also declaring IE7HTML as the final version of HTML. This stems from the idea that all pages that are not designated with IE=8 (or 9 or 10 or ‘edge’ or whatever) will default to IE 7′s rendering engine. So that’s it. HTML 3.2, HTML 4.01, XHTML can all be put out to pasture because IE7HTML will be the default way for MS’s browser to render the World Wide Web.
4) Smart for Microsoft This is incredibly intelligent for Microsoft. Here we have a great language (IE7HTML) that can be used to present Web Pages and is really good at Documents, and can be forced into use as Applications. The IE7HTML language works with all of that ‘interesting’ code those goofy guys working on Word used for their ‘Export to HTML’ function. What a bunch of comedians over there! Who can forget such funny tags as “<o:p>”?
But then, when IE7HTML becomes ‘old news’ or too limiting, where will we go next? HTML5? HTML6? No! We will need to abandon HTML entirely, because unless the web creators write code that specifically tells IE to use a later rendering engine, it will always default to IE7-style rendering, sending us right back into the arms of IE7HTML. In order to break out of it, we’ll need some new web technology that doesn’t use HTML at all… What about Flash? Oops! Flash requires the OBJECT or EMBED tags from HTML. I wonder if anyone has a technology that displays rich graphics and advanced (ie Desktop Application-style) interfaces. Well golly gee! Someone does! And it’s a good thing that it’s being fostered by a company with such a passion for open communication and shared standards.
Gosh isn’t it funny how selecting the default rendering engine to be the outdated version caused Microsoft’s last best chance of controlling the web to become a viable alternative?
5) Ignore it and it will go away. In this case, the old sarcastic admonition might be true. If no other browser respects this X-US-Compatible tag, and if only a small minority of web creators and Microsoft tools support this, the overwhelming majority of the web will continue to evolve and grow and adapt to new technologies. Looking 10 years down the road, the bulk of the web will use new technologies. The IE browser family and later generations, by defaulting to the IE7HTML rendering, will become increasingly outdated. It will certainly be able to read old and outdated web sites, but yet again Microsoft will have painted IE into a corner. They will then create a new browser (Windows-Yahoo-Live Explorer anyone?) that will skip forward to modern era web pages.
6) Is there any chance we could have a <sarcasm> tag added to HTML5? I’m actually serious about this.
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01.25.08
Posted in Life, People, Web
at 10 pm
From Jock:
Lemur-Labs – Who Are You?:
It is quite possible that half of the reason that people watch the various editions of CSI can be attributed to the brilliant choice to play The Who during the opening. The selection of Who Are You? is especially brilliant. It speaks directly to the core of any criminal investigation: establishing identity.
It’s cool to listen in while the wizard makes up his latest spell… Even cooler when you get mentioned. : )
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01.20.08
Posted in People, Web
at 12 am
Ben, another suggestion on how to respond to this question…
Q: “How much does a Web site cost?”
A: “How much does a book cost?”
This usually sets the stage pretty well since people start to understand the possibility that all web sites may not be the same size, even though they are viewed through the same browser window…. This tactic has worked well for me in the past.
(I didn’t think it was that pithy…)
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01.19.08
Posted in Design, Media, Web
at 11 am
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