Category: web

Photos from Jenny’s Wedding

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Well, it's been a couple weeks since Jenny's wedding and I’m ready to post some photos. (Oh, and I’ve also signed up for Flickr. Nifty, eh? Well, more to the point, Bryan was generous to give me a Flickr Pro account. What a nice guy!)

I was only there four days and I took just 18 photos; I’ve posted 10 online. If nothing else, I was reminded once more that my camera really likes daylight and doesn't take kindly to underlit indoor shots. Still, I can’t complain too much — the indoor shots were at ISO 800 and they turned out less badly than I thought they would ;).

Standard photo-entry text: All my photos are released under a Creative Commons license which roughly states that you’re free to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. Also, I’ve resized all the images to 1280-width before uploading them as it can be a bit hard to get your head around a full 5 MP image. However, if you want the full-resolution version of any images, just ask.

PS It’s semantic geekiness time. I was thinking about including one of the photos inline within this post but I just couldn’t decide on what CSS class to give it. I initially considered “img.photo” but what if I included an inline image in a later post that wasn’t a photo but rather screenshot or something? My current favorite, in fact, may be “img.inline-image” but, then again, they wouldn’t really be inline in the CSS “display” sense (as I had planned on floating them in one direction, at least for now). Maybe “img.image-inside-post” or “img.featured-image”?

I’ve Setup a Del.icio.us Account

Ashley Bischoff4 Comments

You may have heard about the social bookmarking site del.icio.us but, if not, you wouldn’t be the only one — I only wrapped my head around it a couple weeks ago. As you may have guessed, the basic idea is that you can store all your bookmarks on a centralized website and assign them keywords or “tags” as they’re called in del.icio.us-land.

Then, all the links and usernames are linked together :). So, you can:

  • ... click on one of that tags which you've given a URI (say “CSS”) and see all the other sites with that tag.
  • ... click on a link and see who else bookmarked it
  • ... click on a link and see what tags other people gave it

But, other than linking everything together, del.icio.us is fully RSS-capable. A quick primer on RSS, in case you hadn’t heard of it: RSS allows subscriptions to websites and with an RSS reader (such as the web-based Bloglines), you get a notification when that site/blog is updated.

So, you could “subscribe” to a tag if you wanted to (such as “steelers”) and you’d receive a notice in your RSS reader every time someone tagged a link with that word. Or, each user’s account is also RSS-readable, so you could subscribe to subscribe to (say) John Smith’s account (or my account) and see each link that he added.

Of course, you could subscribe to your friends’ accounts and view links as they bookmark them. Or, you could follow a tag for one of the links which you added to del.icio.us, see who else bookmarked it, and then subscribe to his/her links — for instance, if you like motorcycles, could click on one of your links which had the tag “motorcycles” and then click through to one of the accounts of someone else that bookmarked that link. And, maybe you'd find some useful links of interest on that guy's page (even if he didn’t tag them with “motorcycles”).

As I wrote this entry, I also looked around to see if anyone else had given a straightforward explanation of the del.icio.us concept. I found this thread at Ask.MetaFilter and there, gwint lists quite a few advantages of del.icio.us in one of his posts, but I didn’t want to paste all of that here without his permission.

There were also several recommendations in that thread for this article entitled “Us.ef.ul — A beginner’s guide to The Next Big Thing” and I would have quoted a few bits of that but that article ends up rendering about 2000 pixels wide in my browser and I couldn't really make my way through it. (Then again, I’m running the Firefox build from two days ago, so the odd layout may not necessarily be the authors fault.)

At any rate, I’d recommend giving del.icio.us a try. For what it’s worth, my account is “handcoding” there and there are several Firefox/del.icio.us integration tools (in addition to a del.icio.us-supplied bookmarklet which works just fine as well).

IE7 Beta Due This Summer

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

In an apparent policy reversal, Microsoft has said that it will release a beta of IE 7 this summer (Microsoft previously said that IE updates would only be available with Windows upgrades). Details seem to be scarce at the moment, but a Q&A with Mike Nash, their Corporate VP of Security, revealed this much:

“We’re very excited to announce at the RSA Conference today that this summer we’ll release a beta of Internet Explorer 7.0 for Windows XP with Service Pack 2, which will have even more enhancements to security and privacy protections. These enhancements align very closely with the three core tenets of Microsoft’s security approach that I mentioned earlier. Internet Explorer 7.0 will be the most secure browser we’ve ever released, building on and surpassing the success of the SP2-enhanced Internet Explorer 6.0. We don�t plan to ship it until it meets our quality bar, which we�ve set pretty high. […]”

So, while it looks like they’re primarily focusing on securing their browser (which isn't a bad thing), I’m hoping that they’ll improve IE’s standards compliance as well — oh, what I wouldn’t give to be able to use adjacent sibling or attribute selectors.

Mozilla Update — Daily Builds are Ok Again

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

As a Mozilla/Firefox enthusiast, I often run the daily builds (well, the daily optimized builds). Since development is underway continuously, this allows me to get the latest features as soon as they’re available. The only downside is that occasionally a check-in for one feature breaks something else.

That was the case with the April 16th check-in for some “Tree widget refactoring” (whatever that means) which busted a couple things. In particular, Firefox would crash when entering text in an input field. And since that’s a fairly common thing to do, the daily Firefox builds were virtually unusable. Sure, there was a workaround where you could prevent the crash if you turned off form-autocomplete, but I’d rather stick with an older build than turn that off.

So, for the next two-and-a-half weeks, I just stuck with my April 15th build (without the bug) until they finally fixed this in yesterday’s builds (why it took so long, I have no idea). In any case, today’s builds are back to normal and better than ever — URL bar autocomplete is now available. Though I haven’t tried it yet, this should mean that the URL bar can be configured to autocomplete as-you-type (like Mozilla) in addition to presenting the usual list of likely matches.

In other Firefox news, the Flash Click to View XPI has been updated (and it’s now called Flashblock). The basic functionality is still the same — Flashblock adds a placeholder over any Flash content which can then be activated by clicking on it. And, while older Flashblock versions used just a gray box for the placeholder, the current placeholders have a more polished look which includes the background color of surrounding elements. In case I’ve explained this poorly, there’re also screenshots.

HTML Altimeter Bookmarklet

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

I heard about this an intriguing HTML Altimeter bookmarklet via Asa (or “Topographic View”, as the author calls it). It’s a bit hard to describe, but it essentially reassigns the CSS background for each element on the current page to represent the number of nested elements at that point.

Level zero starts at black and each additional nested element gets closer to white (with 16 shades in total). To make use of the bookmarklet, visit the author’s page and drag the “Topographic view” link to your Personal Toolbar. Then, just click that link to see the effect applied to the current page.

As you might expect, well formed CSS-based sites barely get out of black, but table-based layouts can easily approach pink (the color designating nesting past 16). All the same, though this bookmarklet is good for an easy laugh at the expense of poorly built sites, I’m not sure if it has any practical development applications :-/.