« August 2006 Entries »

Geotagging

Flickr added the ability to geotag your photos the other day. Being a big time map geek, I’m all over this one.

Two nights and 900 photos later, all but a few are now mapped. (As with all things Flickr, they made it easy enough to become a compulsion.) I have a few notes and a couple of suggestions.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (25) | posted to Technology, The Industry

SEO Excuses

While I tend to write off the Search Engine Optimization field as an ethical quagmire where the bad are out to pollute the common waters for their own gain, and the good are little more than technically-savvy marketers, there’s clearly an amount of science and depth to it that I don’t understand.

Case in point, a recent demonstration of its effectiveness by hijacking the top 5 search results in Google for the term “five seo excuses” to form a top 5 list. And because the order is so precise, the URLs spell out an extra little message. The buzz it’s generating means you’re too late to observe the effects first-hand, but I can vouch for the accuracy of the screen shot in the prior-linked post.

Impressive demo to be sure. It shows that SEO techniques have evolved into a formidable tool that’s of obvious value to many businesses. (I’m still glad that’s not what I do to put food on the table, though.)

Comments Closed (26) | posted to Business, The Industry

Mighty Mouse Reviewed

Comments Closed (134) | posted to Technology, Usability/IA

New Headaches?

Over on the IE Blog today, Markus Mielke summarizes the CSS changes made for Internet Explorer 7. We’ve known about most of these for a while now, but there were a couple of surprises to me - 1px dotted borders at last, as an example.

What I’m experiencing in testing these days is much along the lines of what I’ve been hoping; namely that after I finish creating my page in a Gecko-based browser, loading it in IE7 for the first time isn’t a horrible mess. It’s actually quite close to being perfect in many instances. IE6 is another matter entirely, which is no great surprise.

But I’m curious. Despite these upgrades, surely there must be some things that don’t quite work properly. What strange new behaviour do we have to look out for in IE7? Are there things that work as expected in IE6 that don’t in IE7? With all these steps forward, how many have been made back?

I’ve uncovered one so far, anyway. Using the overflow: auto easy clearing method, IE7 can act a little strangely. Compare this test page in IE7, and then in IE6 and any other browser. Only IE7 gets it wrong. (The code may seem a touch redundant, but I assure you this came about in a real world scenario).

Any others you’re aware of? It’ll be interesting to see what else falls out of the tree once we start seriously shaking it.

Comments Closed (38) | posted to Browsers, CSS

Virtual Machine Tips

A quick follow up to yesterday’s post about Parallels. When you create a virtual install of Windows on your Mac, Parallels creates a file. Your OS, applications, and data all live within this file.

Upon installing (and activating) a fresh copy of Windows and all your various applications, make a duplicate of this file. It’ll be a gigabyte or two in size, depending on how much you’ve added, but you can easily store it on a backup drive or DVD.

There are a few reasons to do this. If you’re worried about exposing your Mac to Windows worms and virii, you now have a backup you can restore from at any point. Just move any important data out of the corrupted Windows install, delete it, and make a clone of the backup. Whether that’s easier or harder than maintaining anti-virus software on your copy of Windows entirely depends on how you use it. It’s easier for me, anyway, since my data lives on the Mac portion of my hard drive.

Or if you take the IE team’s advice to heart and decide to maintain multiple versions of Windows for the purposes of testing multiple versions of IE (something I’ve yet to be convinced is necessary, by the way), you can simply clone a few copies of your backup and vary your IE installs between them.

This is all possible with Virtual PC as well, incidentally. The files are much larger, though.

Comments Closed (17) | posted to Browsers, Software, Technology

Parallels

Browser-testing in Windows, on a G5 Mac using VirtualPC:

1. Save your latest change.
2. Cmd + Tab to switch to VirtualPC
3. Go get a coffee while waiting for a response from your virtualized copy of Windows.
4. Hit Refresh in the top-most browser.
5. Go get another coffee while waiting for your virtualized copy of Internet Explorer to render the page. Take your time, you’ve got plenty to spare.
6. Come back and check the results. Didn’t do what you expected, did it? That’s IE for you.
7. Figure out what to change in your code, then go back to 1 and start again.

Net time: an ice age or two.

Brower-testing in Windows, on an Intel-based Mac using Parallels Desktop for Mac:

1. Save your latest change.
2. Cmd + Tab to switch to Parallels instantaneously.
3. Hit Refresh in the top-most browser.
4. Come back and check the results. Didn’t do what you expected, did it? That’s IE for you.
5. Figure out what to change in your code, then go back to 1 and start again.

Net time: a blink of an eye for the refresh, but the bug-hunting still takes just as long as ever.

Because the second list still contains a few steps, it’s very difficult to convey to you just how fast Parallels runs. Click through to this YouTube demo for an example, though you’ll need extra software in the form of Virtual Desktop Manager or similar for the same effect.

Windowed or full-screen however, Parallels allows you to switch to Windows, refresh the browser, and get back to your actual work all within the space of a thought. Testing for Windows used to be drudgery under VirtualPC; with the sheer speed of Parallels, I’m actually enjoying browser-testing right now (though the novelty will die off soon, no doubt).

I’m becoming more and more convinced that the new Intel-based Macs are the ultimate web designer’s companion, and I’m clearly not alone in my thinking. Unix, OS X, and Windows all together in a convenient glossy white plastic finish? Sign me up.

Comments Closed (47) | posted to Browsers, Technology

Geek Etymology

An interesting question came up the other day — why do I name my hard drives the way I do? I currently run two partitions on all my machines (and name them consistently), and a pair of backup Firewire drives:

Sparkle

The main OS & applications partition

Shine

A secondary partition to store any personal data, a system which I vastly prefer over the default of dumping all my files into my user folder.

Gloss

The main backup drive.

Glitter

The secondary backup drive.

You may see a thread here — I operate under the business name of Bright Creative, so the drive names are alliterative synonyms derived from “Bright”. (With the [questionable] added bonus that Sparkle & Shine was a hit by a local band in the 90’s.)

I suspect drive names, and the reasons why people come up with them, could be a fascinating conversation. Let’s get it started. Tell me what you call your drives, and why.

Comments Closed (203) | posted to Ephemeral, Technology

ClearerType

A nice new feature of IE7 I noticed last week: ClearType is now a browser-specific feature.

When Windows XP was released in 2001, Microsoft launched ClearType as a way of smoothing on-screen fonts. Great, except for some reason, it was off by default. Most users never found the setting to enable it, so for the past 5 years, we’ve still had to assume users are seeing ugly pixellated fonts on the web.

But Vista aside, even in the forthcoming IE7 for XP, ClearType is a browser-specific setting and it’s enabled by default. Combine this with IE7’s presumed quick march onto user’s systems, and we’re going to see a whole lot of ClearType in the near future.

Nicely done, IE team.

Comments Closed (48) | posted to Browsers, Typography