Thursday, June 18, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Just a bit of a rant...
Well lately it seems I have been delving into the world of web development. In fact I recently published my first site. Well by first I mean I did it on behalf of a business, but the general concept is the same. Now certainly I knew there would be hurdles to overcome in doing this, but there were some that I found particularly frustrating and I thought I would share them and how to overcome them in order to aid future users in the same situation.
- Cross compatibility - OK now I know what your thinking, of course cross compatibility is an issue and yes I know that... But my major issue here was with a little friend called Internet Explorer. Now we have all heard of how IE is not standards compliant, and I took this into account. However when It came to testing on previous releases of IE I ran into a problem, how can I test cross compatibility on say IE6 when Microsoft will not let me install it over my IE8 (for obvious reasons). Well this caused me quite a dilemma, from what I hear IE6 still has quite a user base (yes believe it there are some people out there who have not partaken in the sheer joy that is tabbed browsing not to mention FF). So how could I test this, well after some searching I happened upon a little program called IETester. Basically this great little program lets users test their code using the engines of various IE versions. This saved me a lot of time, and if you are striving for cross compatibility (which you should) then I highly recommend it as a testing tool
- Dynamically Changing CSS - CSS to me is a great tool, however for a long time I was struggling with it. You see what I wanted to do was change the way my page looked based on the links my user clicked. Now again this sounds easy enough, just a matter of having a different style sheet for each page right? Well that's the catch my site was load once, that is to say all content was stored on the one page, with different parts being displayed as necessary. This of course meant I could not have different style sheets for each page, so how then do I change the page style. The solution javascript (as if no one saw that coming). To put it simply to charge a CSS attribute dynamically use the style command withing your code e.g. document.getElementById(id).style.visibility = "visible";
- Everything Else - Use Dreamweaver! Provides code validation, cross compatability validation and much more.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
The Ever-changing Face of the Book
It seems that recently Facebook had a bit of a facelift, no pun intended! The reactions to these changes have seem to be largely negative. It seems that most users did not want Facebook to change, and were in fact quite happy with the previous design.
So why the change, well by and large it seems as though the makers of "the book" are on a quest to conquer all the known universe of social computing. Having seemingly trumped it's most recognizable competitor myspace, the most recent upgrades seem to push the social networking giant, now the most popular in the world according Compete, towards the goal of drawing more users from what was until now a very different service; twitter. The updates have essentially changed the facebook layout into something similar to a twitter feed. Well ok the two are not exactly the same, twitter still maintains its uniqueness, but the general concept seems to be moving towards creating a veritable competitor it.
Now what's the problem with this you ask? Well conceptually alone nothing, the problem is rather the implementation. It seems that in it's efforts to do to conquer the world of social interaction, Facebook becoming more or less a collection of sites sites, rather than a single entity. In this collection we see, as mentioned aforehand, tittwer (the homepage), myspace (the profile page), flickr (the photos page), youtube (the videos page), blogspot (the notes page) and of course the boxes page, which seems to have become a spot to place anything that does not fit into the above categories. This attempt to encompass all is the largest problem facing "the book", as by continually adding more features it slowly leading to an online world that which is so large that the user becomes lost trying to find what was once just a click away.
Todays facebook is a farcry from the original release way back in 2006, but given the piling clutter it is important to remember that it was these innovations combined with constant change and direct assaults on it's competiors that led Facebook to be as popular as it is today. Certainly myspace was once the king of social networking, but it made the mistake of doing what Facebook didn't; sitting on old designs to long and not innovating. The fact is that constant change is needed to stay a live in the online market, however it is important to ensure a clean transition into the future that to maintain an interface that preforms well and avoids diverging too far from what users require.
So why the change, well by and large it seems as though the makers of "the book" are on a quest to conquer all the known universe of social computing. Having seemingly trumped it's most recognizable competitor myspace, the most recent upgrades seem to push the social networking giant, now the most popular in the world according Compete, towards the goal of drawing more users from what was until now a very different service; twitter. The updates have essentially changed the facebook layout into something similar to a twitter feed. Well ok the two are not exactly the same, twitter still maintains its uniqueness, but the general concept seems to be moving towards creating a veritable competitor it.
Now what's the problem with this you ask? Well conceptually alone nothing, the problem is rather the implementation. It seems that in it's efforts to do to conquer the world of social interaction, Facebook becoming more or less a collection of sites sites, rather than a single entity. In this collection we see, as mentioned aforehand, tittwer (the homepage), myspace (the profile page), flickr (the photos page), youtube (the videos page), blogspot (the notes page) and of course the boxes page, which seems to have become a spot to place anything that does not fit into the above categories. This attempt to encompass all is the largest problem facing "the book", as by continually adding more features it slowly leading to an online world that which is so large that the user becomes lost trying to find what was once just a click away.
Todays facebook is a farcry from the original release way back in 2006, but given the piling clutter it is important to remember that it was these innovations combined with constant change and direct assaults on it's competiors that led Facebook to be as popular as it is today. Certainly myspace was once the king of social networking, but it made the mistake of doing what Facebook didn't; sitting on old designs to long and not innovating. The fact is that constant change is needed to stay a live in the online market, however it is important to ensure a clean transition into the future that to maintain an interface that preforms well and avoids diverging too far from what users require.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
The First Post
Well then, this is my first post on my first blog. Yes, I know what you are thinking "what the hell is with this guys blog name". Well it is actually my student number for my university. Now I know that using my student number as my blog title is not very creative but, in my defence, I am studying software engineering so the lameness comes with the territory. In any case the creation of this blog was required for a course I am studying; so really the name makes sense.
So what do you talk about in your first blog, when in general the concept has never really appealed to you before. Well I have absolutely no idea. Of course I could go the way of the typical blogger and regurgitate what goes on in my everyday life. But honestly are there not enough of those blogs around already? No, I think I shall try to find a slightly less personal topic to talk about on a regular basis, I just don't know what that is yet. Perhaps I will come up with something after some deliberation on the matter; perhaps not, we shall see.
So what do you talk about in your first blog, when in general the concept has never really appealed to you before. Well I have absolutely no idea. Of course I could go the way of the typical blogger and regurgitate what goes on in my everyday life. But honestly are there not enough of those blogs around already? No, I think I shall try to find a slightly less personal topic to talk about on a regular basis, I just don't know what that is yet. Perhaps I will come up with something after some deliberation on the matter; perhaps not, we shall see.
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