CogBlogged Tagged ‘web dev’

Another interesting web add-on I looked at today is snap “preview anywhere”. It is essentially a service, you enroll a web site URL, it generates a line of JavaScript that goes in the HEAD of your site’s pages (or better the single header template file). But what does it do? It adds a function so that every hyperlink in a page can be a graphic preview to its destination. So when you mouse rollover a link, you can see, before you click, a small window version of that site, and it may convince you whether or not it is worth really following through with that click. As a test, I “snapped” CogDogBlog today, so a previous post has a link to http://www.openaugment.org/. In the old web, you’d have to make some guesses based on the hyperlink’s text itself, the context in other content, and perhaps some guesses by seeing the [...]

After much, much too long, I am able to focus back on our Drupal work for the NMC web site. Things are looking promising for version 5, so today I tried my hand for the first time at an upgrade, using the just released beta 1 version of Drupal 5. Beyond the usual steps of backing up directory files and databases, the process outlined is easy– I needed to log in as admin to the two Drupal 4.7 sites I have; then empty the drupal code directories, upload the new code, and then add back in my site settings. Then I had to run the update script for each. The first one went smooth, as it should, since all I had was a stock template waiting for the new code. But when I went to update the second one, all kinds of MySQL errors were vomited out to my screen. [...]

On a few project front I am wrestling with trying to pick the “best” web video format. Some have boiled it down to selecting the “elusive” best format. In my previous work at Maricopa, e.g. for our digital storytelling collection, I had settled on providing video as streaming Quicktime, .mov, (we had an X-serve server running QuickTime Streaming) and streaming Windows Media, /wmv, (one of our colleges provided us some streaming space on their Helix server). Late in the game, we added as an addition, iPod video versions (.m4v) as a podcast. Long, long ago I was also encoding video as Real Video, but that n was dropped with nary a complaint. SO now on my new Second Life project for NMC and looking at our other NMC video content, i am trying to sort out the best strategy, finding it as clear as Mississippi mud. Most people have a [...]

Well shoot, I thought Google Calendar was going to be a killer app. I had set one up for our NMC Second Life blog site, hoping the calendar sharing features might allow others we give access the ability to schedule their events. Well, it does do that. But noted by someone in an email who was asking about sorting, I now see by looking at the raw XML, that the items are dated not by the event date, but when the entry was last updated… and that sort of sorting is pretty useless for using RSS unless you just happen to edit your calendar in reverse chronological order. That is just squirrelly weird… the event dates are lumped into summary and item descriptions, which throws up all kinds of new coding challenges to parse and sort. I cannot find too much use for this kind of calendar feeding. So in [...]

Almost by definition, RSS, in its full XML glory, is ugly, and I have said before, “unsuitable for human eyes”. it is machine language, and there is no reason a person should look at it very long (geeks aside): But I’ve known in the back of my mind, it does not need to be so, as shown by the feeds displayed at Feedburner, e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/cogdogbloglab– that is the URL you can use anywhere RSS is accepted, but viewed in the browser, well it looks like a nice pretty web page. Peek at the source, and you are back in code-ville. Howzit done? Through the magic of XSLT, a means to transform XML with stylesheets into something easier on the eyes, By no means do I really understand it, and the more I looked, the more complex it grew– it is almost a logical language in itself, that is.can be used [...]

I am about shoulder deep in trying to learn Drupal as intended for a new platform to implement for the NMC web site- obviously since it can do so much, it lends itself for creating a multi-faceted site with customizable themes, separate domains for different projects, and all the 2.0-ish tools you’d hope are in the bucket. And it falls into my previously proven success at following the paths of others. I am not quite as ready as D’Arcy is to jump his blog from WordPress to Drupal (but my hat is off to him for doing so, and quickly). WordPress does all need for the blogging here. But the ideas I have for the NMC site call for much more than just blog tools and wrangling WordPress to other forms, and Drupal sure seems like a natural fit (I’ve spent a lot of time looking at features of other [...]

As I clean up my web site directory, 14 years of accumulated stuff, I start wondering just how many web sites I had set up for our offices’ various projects and events. Not to be horn blowing, but I am staggered to see that I found 260 different event web sites dating back mostly to the late 1990s. In the early days, these were hand spun HTML, lots of table tags, and pretty much static information. Around 200, when I picked up PHP, I came up with a series of scripts I could more or less copy/paste to do online event registration using static text files. These worked well for capturing registration, sending emails to participants, providing exports to our staff’s FileMaker databases, but there was continual minor changes on every iteration. Moreover, by being essentially separate little database, we had no way to do overall stats, and worse, for [...]

New reference for web design CSS junkies, and a nice example to demonstrate web pages need not be collections of boxes: The Elements of Typographic Style Apple to the Web: Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style is on many a designer’s bookshelf and is considered to be a classic in the field… In order to allay some of the myths surrounding typography on the web, I have structured this website to step through Bringhurst’s working principles, explaining how to accomplish each using techniques available in HTML and CSS. The future is considered with coverage of CSS3, and practicality is ever present with workarounds, alternatives and compromises for less able browsers. It’s a work under progress, and as a nice touch, the author is providing an RSS feed for updates. But it has an air or elegance, and a look of “this is not your typical web page”. Now [...]

Here are some web site gripes I’ve been storing up. These are not meant as criticisms of the work and content people are posting, but things that may affect the usefulness, usability, or even return visits to your sites. First up, you as the person who created a web site for yourself, for your organization, are the best at knowing what your site is about, its purpose. Everybody else is going to be guessing at first glance. I have seen more than a few web sites, where my Blink level experience does not give me a clue as to what a site is. But even worse, when I am sharing a web site with others, and especially when I am tagging and adding sites to my del.icio.us collection, if I cannot locate a 1-2 sentence explanation of the site, it makes it pain down in the nether regions to do [...]

This month marks the 12th year since I hoisted my first HTML file on a web server and flicked on the switch. Since then, my master directory of web content files has something like 50 or 60 thousand documents, a sprawling metropolis of stuff. In talking recently about our web sites, I realized in the last year, my development or addition of new project or event web sites is driven my a goal of creating fewer, not more web pages. This is largely achieved via some solid lessons and methods re-used in PHP, where an entire web site can have 1 template, an external library of functions and code bits, and sub directories of content files. I do some with database, but quite a bit is done with just arrays of data, or content plucked from text files. This is one of the things weblogs quietly achieve for us, managing [...]