Above the Fold: The Blog

Well, Spam Karma 2 seems to be working beautifully. 12 pieces of comment spam were harvested today without a single one hitting my inbox. The plugin sent me a little digest note to tell me how much it caught, a useful tool that will allow me to check it until I’m confident that it’s doing it’s thing properly, and every bit was obnoxiously evil spam. My email account was threatening to drown under the stuff, so this is good news.

The irritating side of online life has been happening on my fannish website. A kid decided to hotlink straight to a graphic on my site to use as her icon/avatar for a forum. The graphic that she linked to was an icon that I created specifically for people to use as their avatars if they want, but I do state that people should download and save a copy if they want to use it rather than hotlinking.

The most annoying part is that this kid had actually managed to write a script that bypassed my .htaccess file. The forum was for a popular boyband and I managed to track down which icon she was using, so I’ve simply changed the file name on the server. I made a quick check this evening and she has now changed her icon - using one that’s she’s obviously downloaded and saved onto the forum, rather than hotlinking. Hopefully she’s at least learnt that web masters pick up on that kind of usage pretty quickly - that forum was very popular and my web stats went utterly insane, which was an immediate give-away that someone was hotlinking.

I haven’t had someone bypassing the .htaccess before (usually I just get a giggle from the people who have a big “Hotlinking is bad manners!” graphic in the middle of their web page), but it’s certainly taught me that there is a way around practically any protections you attempt to put into sites. Particularly if the culprit is young, determined and obsessed.

My only questions is…why did she chose a Doctor Who icon to use on a Green Day forum? It wasn’t even a David Tennant icon!

Today I logged into my computer after not checking my abovethefold emails for a few days because it was too darned hot to even think about turning on a computer that would pump hot air into my room for hours. It was not a good sight to see twenty comment notifications from this blog arrive, all of them spam. Four of those arrived in the space of six hours this morning. Wordpress has no filters built in for this stuff, but this is where the beauty of plugins comes in.

I thought about getting a plugin that would add one of the captcha picture tests to the comment page. It’s a useful way of filtering out the spam bots on registration forms and password retrievers for Yahoo!Messanger (although I’d argue that Y!M has got their capcha things set to be much too viscious) but seemed too fiddly and unwelcoming for a blog. I also considered setting this blog to only allow comments from registered users, but that’s definitely overkill. What I looked for was something that would filter out the spam, enable me to check the filters every few days in case it caught legitimate comments and only use captcha if the comment is borderline and needs further verification. It should be completely invisible to real users - ensuring this blog is accessible and usable.

As an experiment I’ve downloaded and installed Spam Karma 2 to start dealing with this because it filled all those requirements and gave me more control than I thought I’d get. In the three hours it’s been installed, it’s caught three pieces of spam already and none of that hit my inbox. Score!

Of course, the really interesting bit will be seeing whether real comments get through so I’m always happy to have some experimenters.

I had a post in my head about the death of free content on the Internet and possibly a Chicken Litten type story on a recent LiveJournal kerfuffle, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. I need to get the hot air box turned off!

Life would be much easier if all instant messaging systems could talk to each other. I can’t see that happening any time soon, but it would definitely be an improvement on the current system.

This thought was inspired by spending 45 minutes getting my Yahoo account reactivated so that I could discuss a website with a client. I hadn’t used Yahoo for so long that I’d forgotten my password, but the process for recovering my password makes breaking into a nuclear missile silo look simple.

The good side to it is that I’ve now got proof of how useful applications like instant messaging are for doing things like client briefings. My client lives in Los Angeles and she’s trying to get a resume site working for her sister, who is a film editor. For me this is an exciting project - the actual layout element of the site is nothing new, although it will be fun to design, but it needs to have demo reels incorporated so I’ve spend the last few days researching how to embed Quicktime movies in a website. With an odd touch of co-incidence, A List Apart’s latest edition has a tutorial on an accessible, standards-based method for doing exactly that. It gives me a good place to start when the client gets the files to me, which is all I really need.

The purpose behind this post is the chance to waffle a little about how cool it is that I can now have transatlantic clients thanks to the various web apps out there. In fact, with all of these facilities at my fingertips there’s absolutely no reason  to restrict my potential clients to people within a 30 mile radius of my house. I could potentially talk to clients in LA, Bangkok or Melbourne just as easily as I can to the ones just down the road. Possibly it’s even easier - that IM conversation with my client has been saved off-line so that I can go back to refer to it when needed and I didn’t need to take copious notes as I usually would.

With facilities like this at our beck and call, is there any reason anymore why small companies need to remain local companies?

CSS Zen Garden is one of my favourite sites for inspiration and I thought that it was time to point out a few of my favourites from the site. It’s one of the sites, along with Eric Meyer’s, that first demonstrated to me how powerful CSS is and the sheer beauty of the designs that can be accomplished with it. I suspect that these are most people’s starting points in CSS, whether you’re a pure designer or more of a coder/developer with a love of beautiful design like me. I am indeed geek enough to own “The Zen of CSS Design” and it is rather thumbed through because it manages to look gorgeous while providing dozens of hints, tips and concepts for things that can be done.

The part of me that appreciates clever ideas adores the CSS Zen Garden concept of one HTML file and hundreds of potential CSS designs. It’s often a good reminder that what I’m attempting probably isn’t impossible (although it might seem like it) but will need a bit of cleverness. And designers shouldn’t let coders say it’s impossible - our job is to make those gorgeous designs work as functional websites, hopefully adding to the site rather than dulling it down.

But I digress and now return to the point.

Top of the list of favourites is Museum. I love the surface simplicity of the black and white design, with all the detail that’s there when you look more closely. The page flows, it’s interesting to look at and the text has become a part of the design and shape of the page.

Dead or Alive is another black and white design that’s fun as well as good looking.

CSS Zen Ocean isn’t one of the official designs, but it’s great fun and demonstrates some interesting uses for transparency in PNGs. The designer has also made it as cross-browser compatible as possible, despite IE’s current lack of support for alpha-transparency in PNGs, by targetting IE with GIF replacements. Looks best in a modern browser such as Firefox, but I like the creativity in this one.

Bonsai Sky is another design that shows off some special effects in CSS - check out the window border and the little guy on the right hand edge of the screen.

Gemination needs to be viewed in a CSS-standards compatible browser such as Firefox or Opera and then in Internet Explorer to understand why it’s cool. It’s a great demonstration of how different the CSS support is in the two types of browsers and for once that has been used as an advantage, targetting different designs for each. Lots of the techniques used in this one can be ported out to hack around IEs bugs and get sites looking right in both browsers, but I like the way that the designer has gone in the opposite direction to produce completely different designs.

I’m sure that I’ve missed lots of the ones that I wanted to point out, but I think that I covered the basic reasons why I visit the CSS Zen Garden regularly.

In other slightly exciting news, I am going to be designing a website for a Canadian film editor. Very exciting prospect there.

CJ Cregg from the West Wing, that is.

It sounds slightly odd to have a fictional character as a role model, but if you’re a geek with an interest in politics who trends towards the liberal side of the political spectrum and feels strongly about ethics, there aren’t a huge number of good role models out there. Hence my regular declaration that I want to be CJ when I grow up.

CJ believes in things and actually tries to do something about them. The fact that she leans towards the liberal side of the spectrum certainly helps for me, but how many people out there actually put the effort into doing the things that they believe in? She does this even when it’s not going to be great for her career, asking the questions that she shouldn’t ask. Of course she has to spin what she learns for the press and there have even been episodes when she’s had to be a little vague with the truth, but CJ herself needs to know.

She chose to work for someone because she believed in his ideals.

CJ looks fantastic, but isn’t always graceful. She’s occasionally a dorky geek, she gets things wrong, she deals with it and moves on. I admire her for her imperfections as well as her cool moments.

CJ seems to know everything. It’s an illusion, I know, but if I could only know that much about my chosen fields…

I could list a dozen other reasons why CJ is a great role model, but I suspect that I’ll fall over the edge of calm analysis and into the realm of scary stalker woman.

I keep trying to think of real life women that I can honestly call role models and come up blank. Anita Roddick sold the Body Shop to L’Oreal, of all companies. Most female celebs have had more than a few moments when I cringe and wonder how they can be so stupid. Susan Sarandon is probably the best pick out of the celebrity females - she isn’t afraid to talk about what she believes in and go on protests even though she’s probably lost roles due to it.

Web development is largely male dominated. The few high-profile female web geeks out there haven’t had a big enough influence yet for me to really feel passionately about them as role models.

So I’m left wanting to be CJ Cregg when I grow up. I have a feeling that the growing up part of my life might never end.