Above the Fold: The Blog

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!

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.