I was perusing Derek Featherstone's blog the other day (entitled Box of Chocolates, which immediately got my attention!) when I came across two articles of interest about success in business:
Five Business Mistakes I’ve Made
Ten Smart Moves to Improve your Business
You know what they say about Leopards... well at least you can get a table to change its stripes with a bit of DOM scripting.
It's a fairly trivial problem, but seeing as I'm pretty green when it comes to unobtrusive JavaScript, it's somewhere to start!For the record, my stripeTables script looks like this:
function stripeTables() {
if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return false;
var tables = document.getElementsByTagName("table");
for (var i=0; i<tables.length; i++) {
var odd = false;
var rows = tables[i].getElementsByTagName("tr");
for (var j=0; j<rows.length; j++) {
if (odd == true) {
addClass(rows[j],"altrow");
odd = false;
} else {
odd = true;
}
}
}
}addLoadEvent(stripeTables);
And this is highlightRows:
function highlightRows() {I thought getting the Class attribute and storing as rowclass would allow me to reset it to what it was before the onMouseOver event, but sadly the table rows become unstripey once they are moused over!
if(!document.getElementsByTagName) return false;
var rows = document.getElementsByTagName("tr");
for (var i=0; i<rows.length; i++) {
var rowclass = rows[i].getAttribute("class");
rows[i].onmouseover = function() {
addClass(this,"highlight");
}
rows[i].onmouseout = function() {
this.setAttribute("class" , "rowclass[i]");
}
}
}
addLoadEvent(highlightRows);
The only other way I can think of doing it is writing some sort of subtractClass script to complement addClass, but seeing as this will almost certainly involve hideous regular expressions, I'm rather shying away from that.
Anyone have any ideas what I'm doing wrong?I've recently signed up for Upcoming.org so I can keep an eye out on what's in the pipeline in the near future. Two events caught my eye, coincidentally on consecutive evenings (all we need is a third one and they'll be like London Buses...)
Thursday 19th October
Web Standards Group Meeting # 2 where Microformats will be discussed. See Muffinresearch.co.uk for more details.
Friday 20th October
London Geek Dinner, special guest Molly E. Holzschlag. See the Geek Dinner website for more details.
Both events look like a good evening; perhaps I'll see some of you there.
The d.Construct Backnewtwork has a neat feature which hooks into the Flickr API and pulls out all suitably-tagged images of the conference. Then when you click an image, it appears in a rather sexy overlay window.
I've been looking for some time, for an unobtrusive javascript method of displaying a photo + caption in a popup, as I have several sites which require this feature, without needing to go for the overhead of dynamic pages or a page per image. Trouble is, most of the methods I've found haven't been friendly if you turn off JavaScript!
The latest issue of .Net magazine (#154) also has a tutorial on Lightboxes (Javascript Image gallery widgets), so I thought I'd give Lightbox JS a try.
It works great straight out of the box, is dead easy to inplement, and will let you customise quite a few features. If users have Javascript disabled, they still get to see the content (the larger image when you click on the thumbnail, albeit in a boring vanilla window), so it's fine from an accessibility standpoint. And I'm pretty sure it's the very same method the backnetwork uses.
I knocked a quick gallery together, which you can see at the Playpen #2 page.
Blogger has a new beta version out and is inviting bloggers to move over from their existing account. This involves signing in with a Google account - either using an existing one, or signing up for a new account.
Using systems in beta can be a "fun" experience - you might be the person to come across that little-known bug which completely ruins your day! Or you might find that all the new features are worth the little rough patches while everything gets ironed out.
I'll admit I'm dithering over whether I should jump ship and go for the beta release. There are certainly some great new features like the ability to restrict read access and add "labels" (tags to you and me) for searching and categorising your blog posts. OK, these two are features which other publishing systems like WordPress have had for some time (and I know of folks who have defected to WordPress from Blogger in the past due to these deficiencies).
One "hidden" benefit is their new dynamic serving of pages. In the past, you had to "Publish" each new entry or the whole blog when you made changes, to give the static HTML pages which made up your blog. If you forgot to republish, the changes weren't seen until the next time you republished. This was pretty tedious and took quite a while if you had large blog. In the new version, changes are made to the database immediately and each page is served dynamically on the fly at each request. No more waiting for the spinning logo to finish its whirling!
My ideal scenario would be to move just one blog (probably the RugbyMad one) and play with it for a bit to see if I have any problems, before moving this blog too. But it's not clear from the support info if I can do this - effectivley, both blogs are linked from one account, and I think it's the account I'm moving and not the blog specifically.
Anyway, if you're interested in what new features are in the beta release, here are a few links for you to digest:
Inspired by Jeremy Keith's piece at d.Construct the other week, I've finally dipped my toe in the water of fiddling with APIs - and like many, I decided to go for a Google Map.
It helped that there was a tutorial about that very subject in .Net magazine (issue #153), but when I tried it out, it wasn't working properly. I checked my typing repeatedly for spelling errors, but couldn't find why the map was rendering OK but the overlay bubble was not. Firefox's JavaScript debugger kept coming up with some weird error message about XML mismatches on a line which didn't even exist in the file!
So I turned to my newly acquired tome by Chris Heilemann (see, Chris, after your earlier teasing, I did go out and buy it!): Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and AJAX. Sure enough, in the AJAX-based chapter at the end, I found Chris' take on Google Maps.
Between that, and the Google Maps documentation, I finally figured out how to make a map, add custom marker, and have the info bubble pop up when the marker is clicked. You can see my bit of fun on the Playpen #1 page
There was a dangerously-tempting bookstall at d.Construct the other week, and I found myself buying two books which have been on my To Be Read list for a while:
Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and AJAX - Christian Heilmann, Apress
I think it will be an excellent companion for the DOM Scripting book I've already read by Jeremy Keith. Will do a proper review when I've read this in more depth.
Blog Design Solutions - Andy Budd et al, Friends of ED
Great advice for customising your blog. Not just in terms of look and feel, but also advice on hosting your own blog, setting up testing environments, databases etc. I hope to give this blog a "lick of paint" in the near future!
I've also recently finished Dan Cederholm's excellent book:
Bulletproof Web Design - Dan Cederholm, New Riders
This one is a must-read for anybody seriously contemplating standards-based web design. Dan takes common table-based solutions (which can still be seen in the wild), explains why they are not bulletproof, and then reworks the solution in a standards-based way. I was very impressed with the session he did for @media in June, and this takes things even further. A great reference for bulletproof techniques.
Roger Kondrat over at TechWinter has two excellent Podcasts about usability and accessibility - two areas of particular interest to me.
To listen to the podcasts, go directly to Roger's blog:#1: What is Usability and what does it mean to me? - a discussion with Lisa Halabi, Head of Usability at WebCredible.
#2: What is Accessibility and what does it mean to me? - a discussion with Trenton Moss, Head of Accessibility at WebCredible
They both make excellent points, and give sensible advice for those wishing to convince clients or superiours of the value of good usability and accessible sites.
It amazes me that, with so many positive benefits to using semantic XHTML and CSS, (not least the "freebie" benefit of much better SEO for your site), some company'sdesign mindsets are still rooted in tables and inline code soup.Roger Kondrat over at TechWinter organised the second Blogger/Web2.0 Mixer Event last night, and a great success it was. About 40-50 bloggers, startups and web entrepreneurs got together for chat, beer and chips, at All Bar One in Soho.
I met some interesting people, including:Thanks again to Roger for organising the event; keep an eye out on his
blog for future events (I'll almost certainly mention it here too, when
there's more info to pass on).
Otherwise known as the dConstruct Party...
But first, I'd like to say what a great time I had at the conference. Some really informed and informative speakers; nice venue (apart from the pokey seats) and plenty of subjects to get the braincells working. And of courese, plently of opportunity to meet like-minded geeks for beer, chat and crazy golf!
Here's some of my pictures taken around the after-party.
[Sunset over the wreckage of the West Pier]
[Bright On Neon. OK, bad pun]
[Ross and his Paps on the crazy golf circuit]
[Who ate all the pies? A conference-goer wishes to remain anonymous]
You can see all my d.Construct/Brighton images at Flickr.
I met some great people, amongst whom were:
[Stop Looking At My Screen!]A presentation by Jeffrey Veen
[Jeffrey Veen gets excited talking about his old job at wired.com]
Jeff Veen's presentation where to start? He's a very charismatic and engaging speaker, and this was no exception. You can download his presentation slides from his website. But here are a few bulletpoints.
Three criteria you should think about before producing a site:
[The best products are the most desirable]
[What could happen to Amazon by the year 2050...]
[I'd like a can of coke/soda/pop/other (delete as appropriate)]
[Create New Country?!?!!]
[Mind The Gap mapping]A presentation by Thomas Vander Wal
These tags are important because people will use their own vocabulary to tag, which is meaningful to them. Tags can add perspective or context, and can make up for missing meta data.
The interesting things happen when you see tags in relation to the
Dual Folksonomy Triad: 
[Thomas explained The Dual Folksonomy Triad]
There is always a tension between Consumer/Folksonomy vs Businees/Taxonomy. A business might wish to call their latest widget by the model name, MyFantasticWidget. But real consumers out there often refer to it quite differently, with emergent vocabulary. They might want to call it "DeadCoolWidget" instead. Business ignore such folksonomy at their peril.
I hope Thomas will post his slides to his blog in due course.
A presentation by Derek Featherstone
[Derek waves his arms and steadfastly refeses to use the phrase "web 2.0"!]
Derek is an accessibility expert who is trying to get the message across that, even in a web2.0 world, accessibility should still be a goal, and and achievable one.
The web now is moving towards functionality and applications, and away from the document-centric approach. To make apps accessible, it is vital to separate the app into three distinct areas:
A presentation by Aral Balkan
Poor old Aral drew the short straw and was in the "graveyard shift" straight after lunch. I think he got us all on his side straight away by holding his hands up and coming clean:
["Don't shoot me, I'm a Flash developer!"]
Now I must confess that I'm no Flash guru. I have built one site with Flash5 (it was a long time ago!) and did a minimal amount of ActionScripting for that, but Aral's knowledge and experience was way beyond mine! So I didn't take too many notes, I just tried to watch and keep up :-)
A presentation by Jeremy Keith of Clear:Left.
Jeremy was very enthusiastic about the fun he's had meddling with APIs. He started off by explaining little about REST. I thought, "oh, no, something else I don't know about" but it turns out that REST is pretty much what the "normal" web is all about:REpresentational State Transfer
Huh? Well, that more or less describes bog-standard web stuff: links, images, pages etc.
Then there's SOAP, Simple Object Access Protocol
Jeremy compared the APIs for four major sites which he has experimented with, and rated them for power, documentation (help) and his measure, "joy" of use. The results were as follows:
[Mashed - that's what most of Brighton would be if you dropped a 100KT bomb on the Corn Exchange] The oft-cited Chicagocrime.org site, a prime example of mapping + other stats, was actually written before the GoogleMaps API was released! Sounds like hard work. Other geo-tagged fun sites included:
Overheard in New York + Google Maps = Overplot
[where are all the celebs to be found in NY?] And finally, the most important point is that your mashups are only ever as good as your data. What happens if you look up Brighton with Yahoo maps instead of Google...
[oops! what happened to Brighton?] Jeremy pointed us to some useful resources for getting started with APIs:
References from Jeremy's slides are available on his website.
A presentation by Paul Hammond & Simon Willison, of Yahoo!
Paul and Simon gave us a quick overview of the APIs and offerings available from Yahoo.
[Paul and Simon, a Hacking Double Act]
[ Yarr! ]
[Pimp up my sketch]A presentation by Jeff Barr, "Web Services Evangelist" for Amazon.
Jeff's presentation went into some depth about the range of web services available from Amazon. There's an enormous range, mainly concerned with:
[here's Jeff, doing his stuff]
[liveplasma's view of interconnectedness, for the Rolling Stones]
[basic search for digital cameras brings back a colourful display, grouped by manufacturer. The text filter at the bottom can whittle things down further]
[mouse-over a product and a summary panel about the item pops up]
[baaaaaaa! Sheep #10,000 is a black sheep, of course]I hate getting up early in the morning, so the thought of getting to Victoria (probably a 1½ hour journey for me) for 7:30am to be sure to be in Brighton by 9am tomorrow just wasn't on the cards.
So I decided to come to Brighton straight after work on the train, and consequently I was at the d.Construct pre-meet party by 8pm.
It was nice to meet a few folks beforehand, and socialise before tomorrow's conference. There was plenty of non-work non-geek chat to be had, as well as the usual "what do you do" sort of conversation, it just depended who you talked to.
I had a few glasses of wine, and a small group of us who'd been chatting most of the evening headed back to our respective hotels around 11pm - we all felt we needed our Beauty Sleep before tomorrow's conference - and there's another post-con event tomorrow evening where we can indulge in a few more beers as neccesary :-)
