Matts Blog

So I’ve been doing my daily reading and pondering upon these readings… of news articles of course. Cloud computing cropped up in one of the articles, among the fan-fair of OnLive a cloud-computing gaming system which basically means the player doesn’t need a real computer in their home or place of joy. Instead its all done through the internet, now cloud computing is by definition a bit more wider and often used for more useful work-like applications.

I wondered how reliable it really would be to have everything in this cloud, such as security, up-time, accessability, functionality and what-not. Is it really suitable to rely so heavily on a network like the internet? Regardless of infrastructure issues, there is an issue of relying on something which could given the right circumstance risk bringing everything to a halt through one big fault. It may be why applications are still sold on disks and hosted on a business’ server rather than sent down the tube.

What redundancy systems are there, can 100% uptime be guaranteed all the time? Take for example an MMO called Guild Wars, at one point in time this game had immense troubles in Europe and the United Kingdom, users either couldn’t connect or had intermittent connectivity. This was all due to one of the links between Germany and the US – the main connection between the two or some hardware fault was the cause, but this kept up for a week.

Repeat that scenario with an important application that your company relies on for everyday business and you’ve got one business not able to provide service for a large amount of time to its customers. Just like we thought we’d stop relying on paper, although its still in common usage even today for many things – I doubt we’ll stop relying on local systems to provide the quality of service we demand/require.

Cascading Style Sheets, how I love thee. Every time I think there is something I can’t do… a little google brings up a nugget of information which doesn’t seem to appear on the usual channels. For example today I wanted to make all text input fields in a form a certain width, many a time do I forget about attribute selectors… for example:

input[type="text"] { … }

or

input[type="password"] {…}

Although I’ve remembered this little feature, an often overlooked and unreferenced trick has no end of use. Often when you use a divide tag to wrap around other divides it seems to forget it is supposed to wrap them, often looking ugly in early stages of debugging. I remember reading a complicated fix for this, when one CSS guru just said…

#wrap { overflow : auto }

Pop, it remembers its supposed to be wrapping and hops to it.

I’ve also tried to get some standard practices into my work, for example including comments in unclear or complex markup. Placing all my colours in the head comments should I need to change them later (using Find + Replace), and if that wasn’t enough – I’ve started alphabetizing any style properties, all of them result in clean and easily read markup, of course keeping the XHTML markup clean helps too.

Furthermore, I’d like to share some Firefox Plugins which might make any web designers life easier:

• Fireshot – allows you to capture a part of the rendered browser screen or the entire web page into a single image.
• Colorzilla – allows you to color-drop a certain part of the page (even images) so you can easily get RGB/Hex numbers.

Hope you find those addons useful, I certainly do.

And don’t worry, I don’t make a habit of getting over-involved in April Fools

Only a couple of weeks ago did I even realise (or think upon) the idea that the family business’ website probably has IE6 users, a sudden and all too real problem for some of my design techniques. It is a well known and well hated fact that Internet Explorer 6 is out of date, has terrible website support and doesn’t really follow proper web-standards.

So when I realised I had produced PNG images, used div tags and unusual aligning the first thing I wanted to do was make sure the sites appeared as they should in IE6 – not being a browser I normally checked consistency with, thankfully everything was for the most part ok.

While I have a large percentage of visitors using up-to-date browsers (there are some search engines in there too), there was a minority of users still using early browsers, probably featuring a huge amount of security holes. I plead to anyone still using a version of Internet Explorer 6 or less, or even early versions of Firefox, upgrade – you can find out the version usually by going into ‘help -> about’ a version number should be somewhere in there.

You will be loved by the website designer/developer community and hated by all hackers and virii producers. Ok, perhaps not so strongly but you will be doing the online world a favour!

I’ve been doing a lot of research today, more than I had expected to do; turns out I love producing websites and will happily spend hours doing so. I’ve not been able to devote a lot of time to the graphical side of things but I have produced some basic HTML forms with a clean CSS layout, ready for insertion into a large scale project whenever I need them.

Aside form that, I’m posting to share some of the places I have found on the internet which have proven to be full of knowledge nuggets and inspiration; particularly in the realm of Cascading Style Sheets and their uses.

For starters, I wouldn’t go anywhere without my CSS and XHTML references, luckily w3schools has them free for access to anyone; so I needn’t worry about losing them, unless I don’t have an internet connection. XHTML Reference and the CSS Reference; that site also has some very handy free tutorials for getting started in website design.

One of my new favourite sites comes in the flavour of Smashing Magazine, one of my new favourite sources for web 2.0 style trends and tips/tricks on making CSS do magic things. It also has some general style ideas, resources and I believe fonts; nice for those beautiful banners.

If there would be just a small number of must-try articles I would point anyone towards it would be these:

• Holy Grail of CSS Layouts

This tutorial will give you a good idea of using div tags to format your site, its a little tough to get your head round initially; but that soon wears off when you realise what is going on.

• Accessible Forms

Accessible Forms will give you a little experience in making use of lists for formatting, although do step with trepidation; the CSS and XHTML don’t initially match until you stick the class on the form (nothing else). You may also notice the idea of only affecting elements within another surrounding element.

I hope you all find this useful, if you have any questions let me know

Its been a rather hectic week, trying to get round a new way of working for Macromedia Flash player (and as a completely new user to it, it doesn’t seem to be the most accessible piece of software). I’ve also mucked about with Macromedia Dreamweaver, the WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for websites.

And while I still wouldn’t choose MM Dreamweaver as my primary way of working websites, preferring the total control a good old text-based editor gives me; it did impress me in other aspects. It didn’t try to assign standards to everything under the sun (i.e. creating comment blocks for you to fill in), and it did respect that I prefer using external style sheets (rather than using them in the header). Although I’m sure there are plenty of reviews much more comprehensive than this.

I’ve managed to dip my toes back into Guild Wars, but the days of playing it all day are long gone. I ended up spending a weekend trying to get xfire ingame video capture to record sound (on Vista), only for them to fix it the following Monday night. Sacred 2 has been the major time sponge, nothing better than a bit of mindless monster killing. Currently downloading a Far Cry 2 patch in preperation for its arrival in the next few days.

So be prepared for a rant or a review, maybe a bit of both.