Whomwah.com

The IE blog has just in the last couple of days posted information titled ‘Standards and CSS in IE‘. Before actually reading it, the title got me excited. There was a word here you don’t often hear associated with IE, Standards. Even as I read through the article things looked good,

In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as we can

The thing is, as you get to the bottom you begin to realise that ‘bug fixing’ is not addressing the things that me as a web developer want them to fix ‘STANDARDS SUPPORT‘. They seem to be once again saying ‘we think the standards are wrong and we’re gonna do it our way‘. This is not helping! How are we ever going to be able to build websites that we know will just work because they comply to standards when the major player in the web market decides themselves whether a standard is good or bad, important or not important. Now I imagine the backward compatibility and making sure the corporate community is happy has a lot to do with these decisions so I don’t expect them to change soon.

I don’t know what to think about the new IE at the moment. I know one thing though from my point of view; I don’t really care if you have tabbed browsing and support for RSS feeds in your new browser, if it can’t render a regular page correctly I won’t be using it.

I have been checking out a newly launched Web 2.0 site named www.blinksale.com. As the sales pitch says: It’s the easiest way to send invoices online, and I think I might just agree with them. I find sending invoices a real pain in the butt, and keeping track of them and making sure people pay on time etc even more of a pain. This Site makes it all so simple and it looks just great. I don’t think I send enough invoices to warrant the monthly charge so I am sticking with the Free option for the time being.

I advise people to go give it a try and see what you think yourselves.

After reading about it a lot, I finally got round to installing Ruby on Rails onto my Powerbook. Oh and for those scratching their heads, Ruby on Rails is a framework for building web applications fast and was used to create sites like Odeo and Backpack.

It was actually a fairly simple process, just a matter of going through the help docs. One thing I will pass on though. Once I had it installed and started and had the built in WEBrick server running. I would go to the URL of my app and it wouldn’t work. Anyway to cut a long story short instead of using http://localhost/myApp, if I used http://127.0.0.1/myApp everything worked. This only took me about 8 hours to work out

I also downloaded the new book ‘Agile Web Development with Rails’. It should be available in print by the end of the month but as I was going on holiday I thought it might be nice to gen up while I was away.

Well, it is indeed a fast way to develop. I had a working app that could easily read write and edit to a database in about 10mins. I am still learning but I am really getting on at speed. Once you’ve got your head around how the framework operates complex tasks are generally do-able in a couple of lines or code. To finish, here’s a great link to a movie that explains how you can build a blog engine in 15mins with Ruby on Rails

Got back from @Media 2005 today. This was a 2 day conference held in a College near Waterloo, London. There were presentations from Jeffery Zeldman, Douglas Bowman, Andy Budd, Molly E. Holzschlag and Jeremy Keith. There were more, of which you can find via the link above.

The first day was not as good as the second; A lot of speaker back slapping and product placement. I couldn’t believe Douglas Bowman spoke about Wired.com. I know it was a very important site when it came out, but it came out 3 years ago and he must have done much cooler and advanced sites since. He made up for it on the second day with his walk through the design and development of Blogger site. Everyone who spoke have their presentations available online which I will link to once I find the URL.

Final point. This conference had all the big names in CSS and Web Standards, and was full of internet geeks and nerds. But the venue had NO internet connection !!

This must have only just happened, but when I posted a link to del.icio.us this evening they have changed the screen I’m greeted with. They have joined the *buzz word alert* DHTML revolution and added the Google Suggest like functionality when you come to add keywords for that entry. I say like as I don’t think they are actually getting the information from the sever but are just looking through the list of tags displayed on the page already and are using that information to decide which tags to suggest you use. This is a feature I have wished for for a while and will make tagging links much easier and more accurate.

It actually looks like a lot of work has been going on behind the scenes at del.icio.us, I will hunt further and post about it if I find anything of use.

Have you checked out Amazon’s use of AJAX, which comes in the form of their Diamond Search. Looks very nice with little sliders an all. Just a shame it won’t work in Safari. Now it’s all well and good having these funky apps with there clever functionality, but surely if you’re not gonna bother making it work at all, in one of the more Standards Compliant browsers then is all the hard work really worth it.

UPDATE: How sad and stupid. The 2005 site has been removed, and the links below will not longer work. Looks like we still don’t understand the web. You can at least get the idea thanks to Web Archive.

Today I put the Glastonbury 2005 site live. There will be more to come from the site approaching and also during the event. The are also portals from 6 Music and Radio 1. The site is 98% (some things are out of our control) CSS which has been a challenge because of the all the browsers we have to support here at the BBC.

You can also subscribe to a Glastonbury RSS feed so you can keep up with all the latest goings on.

I have only just seen this. These guys have hacked google maps and are using it to show flickr photo locations in. This process is known as GeoTagging and this is the cleverest version I have seen; and I might add, is apparently ok with google (so far). I also read whilst snooping that one of the google maps engineers hinted that google may well realease an API for google maps so people would no longer need to hack it. I look forward to this.

I have been using Ta-da Lists for a couple of months to keep track of the list to things I need to do, read, watch extra. It is such a simple idea. If you have never heard of it, it is a simple online way to keep track of all the little things you need to get done. It’s free and well worth checking out.

I see that flickr (after much badgering from users) have changed the way they display individuals images. They used to show the image inside a flash wrapper. Their Ajax guru Eric Costello has now converted it all over to DHTML. It works really well and loads images faster. It’s a really clever use of DHTML, and does many other tricks to boot. You can get a link to a presentation they did on the subject via the link above.