Above the Fold: The Blog

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.

I am reluctanctly admitting that JavaScript isn’t as bad as I remember it. I distinctly recall tons of browser sniffing, JavaScript error messages and thoroughly ugly coding practises. That’s still what I usually see if I’m silly enough to go into a script archive looking for something.

But this DOM Scripting book is painting some really elegant coding. No inserting dozens of things that can’t be validated. XHTML Strict does not like onload or onclick events and I’d had no idea that I could put all of that in my external script file - it was one of the many things that kept me away from the stuff for the past couple of years.

There’s an emphasis on graceful degredation, something that is particularly important if you’re interested in accessibility. That means that, if your JavaScript functions aren’t working in your user’s browser for whatever reason, your page should still work even if the functionality isn’t as wizzy as initially intended. The example they’ve used in the early parts of this book is a really nice image gallery script (I’m probably going to be fiddling with it a little further and adding some styling to put into the gallery on this site) that updates a placeholder image in the page dynamically or just takes you straight to the image if the script can’t work. Much better, to me, than half a dozen JavaScript errors and an end result of never seeing any images.

The last time I attempted to learn JavaScript, there were lots of functions that only worked in certain browsers, absolutely no mention of statements such as document.getElementByID and all the examples did such useless things as putting scrolling messages in your status bar (kill those!!) or changing how half the browser worked without good reason. And it was all shoved into the HTML document with no mention of external files, promising hours of updating if any of the script ever needed changing.
I may even be converted to thinking that really good, well-formed JavaScript is a lovely thing.

In the spirit of National Liftsharing Day, shouldn’t we also have National Telecommuting Day? Far too many employers still refuse to understand why telecommuting could be a good thing for them and their primary objection is too often that they don’t trust employees to do the work. I’m not sure about other workers, but I generally get more done if I’m working from home than I do in the office. I tend to work longer and more intensively without distractions. We have the tech to do it well now, so shouldn’t more employers be actively looking for their staff to work from home a few days a week?

It turns out that upgrading WordPress is much less painful than I’d assumed.

But to return to the topic, I’ve decided that it’s time for yet another stab at learning JavaScript. Why haven’t I managed this before? Well, it’s certainly not lack of programming ability!

My trawl through the first couple of chapters of “Dom Scripting” by Jermey Keith has reminded me of why I fall away each time. The language has a similar structure to most of the C-type languages such as Java, C++ and PHP. Now, I’m familiar with all of them so those initial chapters always teach me the structures that I already know. By the time the interesting stuff appears, I’ve moved onto learning something else that I can find a more immediate need for.

I’ve been a web denizen since 1999 and at that time JavaScript was essentially The Evil Language. Any website that implemented it had dozens of errors and it was usually put in as a “woo I’m clever” thing rather than for anything actually useful. Over the years, I’ve developed a fairly intense dislike of bad JavaScript and it’s only been over the last couple of years that JavaScript has been used well and unintrusively. The standardisation of the DOM has certainly helped here.

I genuinely enjoy learning new things, but unless it’s a college thing I usually focus on the things that I have an immediate use for. I’ve never had any need to use JavaScript in anything that I’ve worked on and the odd bits that I have used were picked up from magazines or tutorials and I’m good enough with languages to adapt things to what I need. PHP, on the other hand, I could see a use for which is why I sat down and learned it last year. I had a project in mind for it and it’s turned out very well.

JavaScript, though, is a necessity if I really want my web career to go anywhere so it’s time to hit the books again. This time I’m going to get past the “here is a variable, look at this for loop” section and actually find the stuff that I can use in the real world.

As an aside, am I the only geek out there who infinitely prefers using a for loop over a while? My colleagues at work seem to adore their while loops, but in all those cases a for loop would have been easier to read and maintain. Hmmm.

Today I learned that I have visitors to my big site from further afield than I’d imagined. I’ve always known that I have visitors from the USA, Canada, Europe and Australia, but the Geo overlay from Google Analytics is showing hits from Singapore and Thailand. I can’t quite decide whether GA is accurate there or whether that’s the results of web proxies and unfortunately I’ve never had access to geographical splits before to be able to judge. It’s still rather interesting, though, and I’ll be keeping an eye on that.

I also learned that the majority of visitors to this site are based in the UK. Oddly, none of them so far use Macs but I’m sure that when I’ve got more than two days of data this will rectify itself.

A nice feature is the ability to download any of the data in several different formats, so that I could do further analysis on data if I so desired or insert graphs and charts into presentations. Again, none of the hosts or free packages that I’ve tried have offered that facility and I could see that being one of the selling points for big companies.

Being able to see how long people are spending on pages will also be useful. The site hosts a variety of content so I’m going to be interested to find out what people spend time on and what people gateway through quickly. And knowing the proportion of new and returning visitors is an important measure that I’ve never had before - the big site has lots of content, far more than can be absorbed in one visit, so I’ll be intrigued to see whether I’m getting mostly one-off visitors or whether there really is a decent sized core audience.

In other Google stuff, I introduced mother to Google Talk this evening. It was much less traumatic than I thought it would be. Now hopefully she’ll be able to talk her sister through it and they’ll be able to do more transatlantic gossiping.

I also took a tour around my father’s company’s new website. I’ve only had a few minutes, but it’s a definite improvement on the old one. It looks much better, more professional, and actually has a consistent design across the pages. An accountancy firm needs that kind of trustworthy design, I feel.

From an accessibility point of view, there are still some big improvements that could be made but it’s at least much better than it was. The horizontal drop-down navigation built in JavaScript is supplemented with a good sitemap and browsing it with images and styles turned off wasn’t too painful. There are elements that could be improved - web designers really should be trying to move away from tables used as layout - but at least it’s worth the money they paid this time. It will be going live next week and I’m going to be making gentle inquiries (*snort*) about it’s success not long after.