Yes, yes, I know that Internet Explorer 8 is still in beta testing. Despite that and the fact that I permanently run my browser in IE7 emulation mode, I have still seen a few problems here and there while surfing the web. The biggest one so far is probably whatever problem it is that completely stops me from using Google Maps.
Have a look at the screenshot and see for yourself the horrors which I was subjected to when trying to plan a little journey of mine.
As well as not seeing any actual mapped journey (just a couple of markers), the map also broke out of its usual confines and the zoom controls were obviously on acid or something. Cool. I wonder how it’ll look if I print it out…
You would have hoped that Classic ASP was a long-dead dinosaur, but not so. Recently, I have been working on a large website written mainly in Classic ASP (VBScript) and I’ve been getting to grips with some of the absolutely atrocious code that I’ve seen.
There is a lot of database interaction on the site, and a lot of the server-side SQL is written in a way that basically invites injection attacks. As well as that, database connections are arbitrarily unclosed and input is mainly unchecked. This is code that I would have been comfortable with 10 years ago, when people on the web were more trustworthy.
In order to get around some of these problems, some code was inserted at a later date to force ASP to carry on processing after an error. This was mainly put in to stop errors from showing up on a production site. However, the side effect is that when there is a fatal error, processing carries on infinitely, or rather until the time hits the timeout. When a lot of these happen at the same time, the server can easily be slowed down, and in fact this was a problem we experienced recently with an attempted denial of service attack.
At the moment, I am working on migrating a lot of SQL code to use parameters which fixes a lot of the errors, such as type checking, quotes and prevention of injection attacks. As well as this, the cloaking code has been taken out, and instead we have a 500 error page which sends an email with the error. At least with this, users gets to see a meaningful error and we get to know what happened without the server going down.
As a result, we initially received a massive number of error messages which would have otherwise been hidden. I spent a lot of my time rummaging around legacy code fixing these errors, which consisted mainly of variables not being declared before being used and form input being too long or of the wrong type. However, these errors have now died down and it’s good to know that we now have a site which has less errors and better performance.
The standards compliance (or lack thereof) of Internet Explorer has always been a talking point and object of ridicule of the web community, and Microsoft has received its fair share of criticism regarding this important point. With Internet Explorer 7 (the first major update in many years), Microsoft started to put it all right with things like alpha PNG support, better CSS and tabs which users of other browsers had been enjoying for a long time.
With that release, Bill Gates himself came out to apologise for the lack of work on IE and promised a major update every 12-18 months from now on. A year has passed since that date and until recently, there was precious little news about Internet Explorer 8. However, the IEBlog recently posted up a little news item which put a nice smile on the faces of many people who had been ridiculing IE previously. Internet Explorer 8 now correctly renders the Acid2 test, the de facto test of compliance. Opera has supported it since version 8, as has Safari and Firefox as of version 3 (currently in beta).
This might not sound like anything groundbreaking, but putting it into the context of Microsoft’s previous allergy to standards and compliance, it really is something to talk about and the developers have to be congratulated for this step. Hopefully, it’ll be the first of many announcements in the same vein.
Ever since finishing my first year of university, I have been hard at work earning some money to pay my rent and bills for next year. As a direct result of this, I have neglected my websites and blogs for quite a while, first because I was revising for exams, then because I was doing my exams, then because I was just lazy, and finally because I was working. Now, I have a couple of weeks before I have to return to the hectic university life for my second year as well as my new part-time job and volunteering.
I have just finished creating a website for a client and that means I have some free time. I’ve used some of this to assemble my computer from scratch. I’m still installing software onto it before I move all my documents over and start working on it. I thought that this move to a new PC would be a good time to take care of my websites as well as some more fundamental things.
My first priority was to cull my hundreds of daily emails, most of which are spam and the rest of which are rarely useful. So I unsubscribed from loads of mailing lists that I no longer followed, including the W3C HTML Working Group. I also got rid of a lot of my RSS subscriptions. These should buy me some more time!
Now, onto the websites. wackomenace is probably going to get my largest overhaul. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but I have some rough plans. The Metablog will stay on Movable Type along with my Reppery blog, both of which will hopefully be updated much more frequently now that I have some more time.
Finally, I’m going to give oogyNetworks a complete overhaul. I have a few ideas for web scripts and products that would be quite good to market under the oogyNetworks brand, and so I’m going to create a nice website which will host these products once I get around to actually creating them!
Microsoft has been busy these few weeks and months. Not only with software updates to Windows, Office and Exchange, but also the rollout of what is probably its most ambitious web project since Internet Explorer: Windows Live. As we all know, Windows Live is an umbrella for all kinds of weird and wonderful services competing with just about every major web company out there from Maps (Google) to Expo (eBay).
Most of all however, Windows Live is a search portal, as its home page reveals. Microsoft has been very diligent with searching recently. Ever since Google took the search baton from the “golden oldies” (Altavista and MSN Serch to name but two), Microsoft has been trying to find a way to get it back. Even though recent surveys show an upturn for Live Search, there’s still a long way to go before Google feels remotely threatened. This is why Microsoft is now turning to twists on the now stale search paradigm.
Ms. Dewey was the first really different offering - web search based on Flash. The sexy “webmistress” probably helped too! But it was obviously the wrong time for Microsoft to sit on its laurels, which is why it has been innovating to the extreme these couple of years.
tafiti is what I saw yesterday and it’s what prompted me to write this post in the first place. I haven’t had the time to look through it properly, but from what I can see, it shows Microsoft beginning to “get” what people want, if nothing else. Based on its Silverlight “Flash killer” technology, tafiti takes ideas that have already been done and presents them in a new interface. Multiple searches, storing and sharing results have all been researched before, but they’ve never been intergrated together with a search engine, packaged into a flashy website and presented to everybody. I’m thinking that it’ll be a boon for students research complex topics, who’ll be able to open multiple searches, find what they’re looking for, and then store the results and share them with their peers.
Now I just have to find something to search for!
Is Facebook becoming too much like MySpace? That’s what people have recently been asking, mainly after Facebook released its applications API and allowed anyone to code and display applications within the previously surgically clean interface.
It is well known that offering the chance of interface customisation to users nearly always ends up with a wide spectrum of results from the meticulous and beautifully crafted to the downright blinding. For good examples off the top of my head, consider MySpace, Geocities and Microsoft FrontPage. While Geocities and FrontPage may be pardoned because as web page creators, they have to offer some level of customisation, MySpace certainly cannot.
Facebook has done well with its conservative and non-changeable interface, and MySpace would be good to follow its lead. However, considering the large user base that it has, any changes will come with their own share of complaints at the “lack of freedom” offered. However, this main difference between the two most popular social networking sites also affects their respective audiences. While Facebook’s users are considered to be more professional, grown-up and well-off, MySpace users are generally younger and less inclines to worry about interface design judging by some of their profile pages. Twenty audio and video files playing at the same time is something that MySpace users are used to, while in the Facebook world, it would be unheard of.
The development teams also contribute a lot towards these stereotypes and audience inclinations. MySpace is seen to be more sloppily coded than Facebook (indeed, MySpace’s general default design and mixture of ASP and ColdFusion code alludes to this) and this gets reflected in profile pages.
The big question after all of this, however, is “Is Facebook becoming too much like MySpace?” Like it or not, this question has generally negative connotations (most Facebook users are proud of its clean layout) and the answer is not as clear as it would seem. User-created and installed applications have added some clutter to the interface as well as introducing inconsistencies (some coders code more sloppily than others), but there are still some limits to what people can do. The banning of auto-start videos and restrictions on code help preserve the general layout (unlike MySpace), but the very fact that Facebook encourages third-party apps while MySpace is only too keen to ban them really shows which one is the more flexible and customisable. You might not be able to change the layout of your profile page, but the fact that you can rearrange it and add to it means that you don’t need to anyway.
It’s my view that it’ll take a lot for Facebook to even get close to MySpace’s complete lack of organisation or taste on profile pages, and applications certainly don’t move it any closer.
Careers fairs are always popular events at universities around the world. They are a good opportunity for student to meet prospective employers and ask them all the pertinent questions that students ask, like how far the office is from the nearest pub, or what the salary’s like, or what the perks are…
Virtual careers fairs are a natural extension of their real-life counterparts. The benefits of holding a careers fair online are many: employers have to spend less to attend, they can be spead over long periods of time, and students can access information at a time suitable to them, to name but three benefits.
However, there do not seem to be any commercial-grade virtual fair applications to allow educational establishments to be able to run their own fairs. A few universities have to date made their own custom applications, but I think that a general purpose one that can be customised may be welcomed in the education sector as an easy way of getting information to students as well as getting them interested in work and also the careers services that many universities run.
I bit the bullet and installed Movable Type 4 beta today. I was one or two security updates behind the current version anyway, so I thought I’d try out the beta and see what it was like. I think I can safely say that I’m not disappointed.
Most of the work seems to concentrate on the look and feel of the dashboard, which has been completely redesigned. The interface is more AJAXified and everything looks better than it used to. The installation procedure was also painless, and as a bonus, none of my data (backed-up of course) was lost during the transfer! I didn’t even have to do any editing of configuration files - the installer took care of it all, as well as upgrading my database and removing some unused templates.
One major difference that I’ve seen so far is that now you can make pages just like you can in WordPress. Previously, I split my site into two Movable Type “blogs” - one for the static pages, and another for the Metablog. I used index templates for some of the site and blog entries for many of the inner static pages. I could now theoretically combine these two blogs using pages, but I’ll probably leave that for a while, see what the final released version lets me do, and then go on from there.
They always say that you shouldn’t run beta software in a production environment, but what can I say - I’m writing this in a beta version of Movable Type running on a beta version of Microsoft Windows Home Server! I just can’t resist the urge to try out new things.
Yesterday, I wrote about my updates to vCardMaker. Today, I’m going to tell you about all the headaches that Internet Explorer 6 has caused me throughout this update, and about some of the problems I hadn’t spotted earlier on.
To date, I have had the following problems:
- Opacity of objects
- Fixed positioning
- Positioning within a
float
- The background of
fieldset legends
- The overall size of text when using keywords for size
- Width attributes
- Disabled items in
select boxes
select boxes showing through divs placed on top of them- Non-support of the
onclick event on objects inside a select box
Phew!
Also, I hadn’t noticed that Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t support the onclick event on select boxes, so Internet Explorer users wouldn’t have been able to enter data in optional sections of the form that are hidden as default. Sorry! I’ll get that one fixed as soon as possible.
To date, vCardMaker has been one of the most popular features on this site, as shown by my site’s statistics. However, conversely, it’s also been the least-updated tool on the site - the last time it was updated must have been close to a year ago.
The script was starting to creak behind-the-scenes and an attempt by me long ago to split off the interface and mate it with a third-party back-end proved unsuccessful. Everything got left to rot. It must have been the gradual drop in popularity that prompted me to resume work on it, coupled with the general lack of having things to do at the moment.
Up to now, I’ve done quite a bit of work on it, dedicating the best part of two days to back-end work. However, the interface hasn’t escaped lightly. Just some of the features that I suspect will be popular include collapsible sections, more meaningful field labels, large text boxes and improved support for Internet Explorer 6 (trust me, it hasn’t been easy!)
I have also AJAXified the whole interface with an overlay that displays the resulting vCard and any error messages. I debugged the PHP back-end and removed a lot of errors as well as porting the whole thing to PHP 5. Finally, I’ve added the ability to get your vCard emailed to you. I also tried (unsuccessfully) to bring back the download option - it’s been a problem ever since I introduced it - but I’m not giving up on it just yet.
There are still a few Internet Explorer quirks to sort out and the download option to fix, and then it’s onto the new vCardMaker Wizard (presents a simple interface with only the important fields) and the vCardMaker API to allow third-party scripts to access vCardMaker and make their own vCards. I’m also planning to start using cookies to allow users to store their favourite configuration of collapsed sections and options.
The subject of this post comes from some of the things I’ve read and thought about for the last few days, and I thought it would be interesting to share these thoughts.
Yesterday, I discovered fortuitous. It’s a blog all about doing business online, but some of the ideas can also be used in a personal context. The post I’m referring to is the one about living with web applications. It probably struck a chord with me because I’ve actually been heeding some of the advice given for a couple of months now.
I’m one of the Internet generation. I grew up when the Internet was growing up, and I’ve been fortunate to witness many of the highs and lows of the Internet throughout the years. I’ve also been an avid user ever since I persuaded my parents to get our first dial-up connection sometime in the last millennium.
So, a month ago, I started wondering why more of my information wasn’t actually online. Until recently, I downloaded my email using POP, held an offline calendar in Outlook, had a custom-made online to-do list and a browser add-on for viewing feeds. I decided to finally embrace the Internet completely and move some of my life onto it.
Continue reading "Netizens" »
While finishing off the last parts of my programming work for university, I posted a reflection on my department’s collaborative blog, RedGloo. I noticed that over the past few days, as the deadline has been looming, people who I never even knew took the course had started using their blogs, if only to post their own reflections. This is because the reflection carries marks with it.
At other times, the blog is very quiet with only a few people posting regularly (one of them being me and the others being mainly staff and the odd older student). It’s therefore interesting to see that attaching 5 marks makes so many people dash to the website they’ve probably never been on since fresher’s week when they had to sign up.
I posted an article on the blog wondering why more people weren’t using the blog more regularly to post their comments and views on programming or more general computing issues. I got a comment from a fellow student that summed it all up: there are too many social networking and blog sites already out there that take many people’s time, and there is no time left for “minor” blogs like RedGloo. Even so, lecturers say that they’ve learnt a lot from it that they are going to take forward and incorporate into the modules for future years.
On a related note, I was tweaking my friends list on the homepage, and wondered who else I knew who had a website that I could add. I browsed through my Facebook friends list, but couldn’t find anyone who did. For computing students, this surprises me, since I would expect many of them to have at least a personal one-page site or maybe a blog. Maybe the time will come…
On another, still related point, I have decided to expand my student activities online - I will soon be opening up my previously closed portfolio of sites to students. Until now, I only designed a few, select sites, mainly for friends and the odd small business or organisation. From now on, I’ll be marketing my web design services to students, starting at the University of Reading. Also, I will soon be opening up a free-of-charge PC help site for University of Reading students and also offering my help with computing problems, which I’ve already been doing to an extent recently. More on this coming very soon!
Yesterday I wrote an article about the “joys” of using ASP.net and its associated technologies as part of my Imagine Cup entry.
After writing that article, I received a lot of help from one of the university’s Microsoft Student Partners, who’s an expert on SQL Server and .Net. With his help, we sorted out most of the SQL issues (apart from a few ones which are related to constraints on the database) and also the form submission problem I discussed in the previous article.
It turns out that Internet Explorer, hard as it may be to comprehend, is actually more standards-compliant in this one aspect than Mozilla Firefox. I had a search form inside the all-encompassing server-side ASP.net form, which it didn’t like, and with good reason, since the HTML standard does not allow nested form elements. However, this does now mean that all form-related elements have to be ASP.net ones, since they need to use the ASP.net server-side form.
I also managed to sort out a weird JavaScript problem which also plagued Internet Explorer. This time, it was to do with mootools’ addEvent function, which doesn’t seem to work in Internet Explorer when applied to any object except window. I resolved this by reverting to code to ye olde style document.getElementById(element).onfocus type code.
Here we go again…
As part of our group’s Imagine Cup entry this year, we have to program our application using Microsoft technologies, which basically means ASP.net, C#, the .Net framework and SQL Server. However, being from a PHP/MySQL background, I inevitably found this a little daunting to think about, but nowhere near as bad as the experience has actually been.
To be completely honest, first impressions count, even with something as geeky as a new programming language, and so far, my initial reaction has been one of horror and disbelief. Yes, it can only be one thing: ASP.net forms.
Just for a second, imagine a normal bog-standard HTML form. It would have an enclosing form element containing input elements and a submit button. When the button was clicked, it would submit the form to the address given in the form element. Sounds simple, no? Well, actually not if you’re trying to recreate the effect in ASP.net.
For some reasons, Microsoft didn’t think it important enough to ship Visual Studio with a built-in form element to drag and drop. Maybe this is because most page have to be enclosed with server-side form elements, but I’m not sure. In any case, I dragged and dropped ASP.net text boxes for a form, and then a submit button. I wrote the code behind the button to submit the information to the SQL Server. Sounds simple enough.
After many problems with SQL Server authentication (which were admittedly our fault), I found that, very ironically, Mozilla Firefox worked fine with the form, submitting the information as I would expect it to, but Internet Explorer didn’t do anything at all when the button was clicked.
I searched on the internet for hours, pulling my hair out trying to sort out this stupid problem. I tried every solution under the sun, but nothing worked. In the end, I gave up and went to lunch, but if this is the direction that everything is going to be heading in, then I can see ourselves getting into major trouble as the deadline looms…
For the past couple of days, I’ve been trying to tame Google’s AdSense adverts on my site. I decided a few months ago to gradually introduce a few non-intrusive Google adverts to the site as a precursor to a course I’ll be doing at university during the summer.
I’m a bit of a standards freak, and I serve all the pages on this site as proper XHTML with the correct MIME type of application/xhtml+xml (except for Internet Explorer, but that’s a whole different ball game). However, lo-and-behold, Google’s adverts don’t work with pages served like this, since they use some outdated JavaScript techniques to inject the adverts into the page.
I searched up and down (ironically using Google’s web search) to find a solution to this problem. The best I’ve found so far is to include the adverts on a separate page marked up as regular HTML and served as text/html, and then include this in your (valid) page using an <object> tag. It seems a little backwards, but it does the trick well enough.
Don’t you think it’s time that Google joined the 21st century and supported valid markup?
Since web cookies were invented by Netscape all those years ago, they have had one large flaw which has gone unfixed for years on end. Now, you might think, if this flaw is that large, then why hasn’t it been fixed before? Well, it’s a story all about numerous RFCs, cookie implementations and the mess that is domain registration rules.
Basically, each domain registry gets to decide how people can register domain names under their top-level domain. Some have chosen to allow direct registration of second-level domains (e.g. .be for Belgium) while some have decided to only allow third-level registrations (e.g. .co.uk for the UK). What this means is that there is no algorithmic method of working out which top-level domains allow second-level registrations, which only allow third-level and which allow a combination of both. While this may not sound too important, it has an important side effect for cookie setting.
What it means is that the web browser cannot effectively decide at which level cookies are allowed to be set. Therefore, the rule followed is that no cookies can be set for top-level domains (such as .com). However, this means that people can actually set cookies for second-level domains where they shouldn’t be able to (such as .co.uk). PayPal actually does this, and it means that its cookie gets sent by the browser to every single .co.uk website. This is, of course, a major breach of security, but one which has been difficult to plug for a long time.
Now though, Mozilla have come up with a method of deciding where cookies can and cannot be set. It is called the public suffix list, and it’s basically a text database of every single top-level domain and at which level cookies can be set. Checking against this database will allow the browser to decide whether to allow a cookie or block it.
I am one of the volunteers currently working on this project, and hopefully with the co-operation of the registries, information in cookies will soon become that little bit more secure. Mozilla also hopes to distribute this file to other browser manufacturers, to allow them to secure their cookie handling as well, as a service to the public.
This seems one of the latest attacks to hit the already quite battered anti-piracy industry: The Pirate Bay announced a couple of weeks ago that it intends to buy Sealand, a disused UK military sea platform which was declared an independent state by a former armed forces member in the 1960s.
The principality, as it is called, has been used in the past to host web servers for various hosting companies which wanted a stable place to host their equipment without the restrictions of national laws. In one English court appearance, Sealand was declared to be outside the control of the UK since it was outside territorial waters. However, the UK subsequently extended these waters, which now cover the platform. There is an ongoing debate as to whether Sealand is really immune from UK laws and jurisdiction.
The current owner has declared his intention to discuss the sale of the platform to The Pirate Bay, who would then use it to host their BitTorrent trackers outside the control of the Swedish authorities, who recently carried out a raid on The Pirate Bay’s hosting facility and confiscated computer equipment.
The Pirate Bay says that this will allow their trackers to be run without the ongoing fear of arrests and confiscations. If the sale falls through, the organisation has said that it will investigate purchasing another uninhabited island and establishing an independent country there to host the equipment.
There is a donation facility on the Buy Sealand website, which also hosts a blog detailing the current status of discussions. To date, more than $18,000 has been donated by Pirate Bay users towards the purchase.
The anti-piracy industry will really have to work on this one, and there is quite a good chance that it will not be able to do much difference if The Pirate Bay’s servers are deemed to be outside any country’s jurisdiction. Wouldn’t it just be so much easier for everybody if they had a second look at the DRM nonsense and various restrictions they are placing on content which is fueling the surge in illegally downloaded content from sites like The Pirate Bay?
Those of you who’ve been using vCardMaker may have noticed that there has been little in the way of updates for many months. This is mainly because I’m at university, and most of my time is taken up with working and partying :)
However, my Christmas holidays are fast approaching and I’m going to use the opportunity to apply lots of very significant updates to the service. Many of these updates are features that I’d like to see in the service myself, as well as requests from users and a few new things I’ve thought up.
You’ll have to wait to find out what many of them are, but don’t worry. The wait isn’t long!
Have you ever wanted to have a feed of your MySpace comments so that you can find out when someone’s left you a new one? Well now you can. Derek Punsalan has written up an article about how to create a feed of your comments. It’s free and very easy to set up, and you can even password protect it if you like.
Three days ago, Andrei Herasimchuk, the well known ex-Adobe interface designer wrote an open letter to Adobe, posted on his blog, with regards to the poor state of typography on the web.
The gist of the letter is that Adobe, as a typographical leader, should release maybe eight to twelve core fonts into the public domain, so that they may be integrated into operating systems and other software, therefore making their availabilty nearly ubiquitous and allowing web designers to use them.
For Adobe, any consequences which may amount to a small loss of revenue from selling licenses to these fonts will be more than catered for by greater support of their actions by many designers around the world, who will, for the first time, be able to confidently use fonts other than the usual Arial, Georgia, Times New Roman and Verdana (most of them released by Microsoft in their Core Web Fonts package, since discontinued).
Talking of Microsoft, Jeff Croft has also replied to Andrei’s post, but this time urging Microsoft to distribute some of their newly-commissioned fonts Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel more widely. Currently, they are set to be shipped with Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. He also urges Apple to license these fonts from Microsoft and include them with Mac OS X.
Although I’m not a typography connoisseur or expert, I fully support both of these calls as I can see the immense benefits that it will bring to the web community at large. Having more than one or two fonts to reliably use will make every designer’s job so much easier and rewarding, and will make the web a much nicer and prettier place.
Recently, spambots have been trying to make my life difficult… Whether it’s creating new users and posting spam to forums that I manage or sending spam messages using my contact form, they’ll always find a way to annoy people. But no more!
I received quite a few spam messages last week from my contact form, and that got me thinking about how to stop them. I’ve read that the usual “type the letters you see” trick doesn’t work any more since lots of bots can now read the text inside the images. While I was thinking, I remembered an article about displaying random colours and asking the user to name them. Since spambots can’t (currently) decipher colours and name them, this is an excellent idea.
However, I couldn’t find a script that would do this job, so I went about writing my own. The result is the Random Colour Validator which chooses a random colour, displays it, and then validates the user’s response. I’m going to apply it to my contact form soon, so feel free to try it out for yourself. if you have any questions, there’s always the (now protected!) contact form.
My sites have always been ICRA labelled, and I recently moved over to their new RDF labelling system.
However, labelling means that you have to always make sure that all your pages fit in with their labels, and make new ones as the content changes. This is why I’ve now updated my labels for the writings section to inform people that some of the content there may not be suitable for all ages. I’ve also added alerts to all concerned pages, and appended their links with graphics to make sure that everybody is clear about their content.
According to the W3C, XHTML should be served with the application/xhtml+xml MIME type rather than text/html, which is used for plain old HTML, or application/xml and text/xml, which some people (incorrectly) use instead.
Until now, I’ve served my pages with text/html as Internet Explorer does not support application/xhtml+xml and offers your pages for download rather than displaying them as it should.
I found an article yesterday which details a way in which you can serve your pages with the appropriate type depending on the browser. A sample PHP script was also included. I took the script and modified it to serve my purposes, and now my pages are served as application/xhtml+xml if the browser supports it, and text/html otherwise.
Continue reading "The perils of MIME types and XHTML" »
BlogMinistry is a blog dedicated to helping ministries, Churches and other such organisations to gain a foothold on the internal and the blogging phenomenon, and use it to their advantage to spread the word of Christianity throughout the world.
I’ve recently been invited to join the BlogMinistry team as a blogger in order to discuss blogging, content management and forum software, give recommendations and generally chat about best choices for ministries and Churches taking their first steps on the internet.
I’ve just written my first article for BlogMinistry all about the self-hosted Movable Type and WordPress blogging tools, so go over, have a look and leave a comment if you like it or have anything to suggest!
I found Slice of Sites the other day while browsing on magnolia, and at the time, there was a slice of a site with no guesses. As soon as I saw the slice, though, I got the site and I was 99% sure. I submitted a guess and woohoo - it came out right! I think I’ll take part in this more often!
According to YouGov, I have more than one brain. Of course, I have known of my superior intellect for a long time, but more than one brain? ;) If it couldn’t get any worse (or maybe better!), they all have the same degree of sexiness. Apparently. Don’t believe me? Have a look at this:
Click on the image above for a larger version showing the website.
UPDATE: (24th July 2006) I got an email from YouGov today, and I’m pasting it here so that you can see it in full.
Hi Ruben,
Thanks for your email.
Unfortunately there was a power cut in the central London area which caused technical problems with our computers (and therefore, our surveys). Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience you may have experienced.
Kind regards,
Louise Nilsson
Panel Support
YouGov plc
I still don’t understand how a power cut can lead to brain sexiness :)
It seems like I just can’t finish updating all the web software I rely on to run my websites… In the past week, I’ve had to update two Mint installations, WordPress and Movable Type to their respective newest versions.
Hopefully, the update-a-thon’s finished for now…
According to Valleywag, Lycos is set to shut down the web coding help site Webmonkey in a few months, quoting an anonymous source from within the company.
If this is true, then it will be another major blow to those who use sites like Webmonkey to get a foothold on the world of web coding and design. The site has a rich archive of well-written and engaging articles which are set to be deleted out of all existance. Granted, some of them are now quite out-of-date, but with Webmonkey’s budget allegedly so low, I’m not at all surprised. There are even broken links on the homepage, which doesn’t bode well at all.
Continue reading "Lycos to shut down Webmonkey?" »
Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers cannot discriminate between the traffic that they carry on behalf of their customers. They have to provide a neutral pipe, so to speak, and allow their customers to make their own choices.
Until recently, this principle was guaranteed by US federal regulations, but these were recently repealed, paving the way for a new piece of legislation which is currently passing through the Senate. If this bill becomes law, then it could open the doors to internet service providers charging web companies to offer preferential and faster access than competitors. For example, Yahoo! might have to pay in order to get its search pages displayed faster than those of Google. The end of the free and open internet, at least in the United States, could be endangered.
More about this story is available from CNN story by Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist (link courtesy of John Gruber).
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