In a recent post Steve Jobs talks about his thoughts on flash and why it is not supported on apple’s mobile devices such as iphone and ipad.

“Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.”

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I felt myself running into the same problems every time when we build websites, no matter which CMS we chose:

• Multiple columns and content areas on websites are difficult to manage

• WYSIWYG editors leave little room anything else other than formatted text and images, such as flash elements, forms etc

So what I wanted was:

• An interface that is fun to use when dealing with complex layouts
• No more limitation for layouts
• Straight forward extendability
• Re-usability of code and components
• Seamless integration in existing CMS Interface an Workflow.

These were my key requirements to start with.

So I started putting these Ideas into code during quiet times in the office and sleepless nights.

Even though, as some of you might know, most parts of the Silverstripe back end system are using prototype as native javascript framework, I decided to use jQuery and the jQuery UI to power this interface.

In a nutshell it lets you define areas in the page template (“Slot”) where blocks with certain content & functionality (“Element”) can be inserted and rearranged.

Elements typically have two main interfaces:

• Input – what the webmaster accesses
• Output – what is shown on the website

My aim was to optimize both:

Provide the webmaster with a clean and simple, but powerful interface.

Based on rules of accessibility, w3c guidelines etc – generate the html output that is, how it should be: clean.

Check it out! http://www.page-elements.com/

Sample usage:

~$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gmpc-trunk/mpd-trunk

For some reason there is no script to remove repositories that have been set up this way.

Luckily the guys from sourceslist.eu (it) wrote a script fixing this issue.

It can be downloaded either as a bash script or as deb package.

After the installation the usage is straighjt forward using the same syntax:

~$ sudo remove-apt-repository gmpc-trunk/mpd-trunk

On a previous post I explained how to build SVN updater script in PHP. This works fine on hosts that allow the webserver runas user to access the subversion binaries, such as Dreamhost.

What if not?

Our favorite hosting provider Webdrive allows our ssh-user access to subversion but not the apache runas user.

What can we do?

In order to avoid being asked to update the working files for website xyz.com every change someone made -> we need a script that executes the command “svn up” via ssh on a remote server!

This script will be hosted locally and the access will be restricted.

Sounds good what are the problems?

Everyone, who ever tried to build a script that connects via SSH to a remote machine in PHP, knows the big question:

“How can I send the password?”

The answer is: “Not“

thanks to ssh key authentication.

Step by step (on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) server:

1. log in to your local webserver [local-server] (the one that will runs the updater script)
2. find out what user apache runs as ‘ps aux | grep apache‘ -> [www-data]
3. log in as this user: ‘su www-data‘
4. create a ssh-key pair: ‘ssh-keygen‘
5. copy the public key to the remote server: ‘ssh-copy-id user@remote-server.com‘
6. enter your password when prompted
7. login to the remote server: ‘ssh user@remote-server.com‘ – you should not be asked for the password anymore -> if not make sure the file “~/.ssh/authorized_keys” has 644 permissions and try again

Thats it!

now all we need is the script:

<?php
exec("ssh user@remote-server.com svn up /home/user/xyz.com");

You can also make the site a parameter-variable by using

<?php
exec("ssh user@remote-server.com svn up /home/user/{$_GET['site']}");

This script should be password protected to avoid having the wrong people playing with it!

This should be easy to adapt for other Source Control systems, such as GIT, Mercurial, Bazaar etc…

Jackie Gillies + Associates carry out building conservation and creative re-use of historic buildings to the highest possible professional standards as well as promoting awareness of building conservation.

The release of the FitPC2 brings us a step closer to a ideal workstation:

• Small (101 x 115 x 27 mm)
• Environmentally friendly (8W at full CPU load)
• Powerful (Intel Atom CPU)
• Silent (fanless)
• Cheap (from US$245)

and of course

• Sexy

$(document).ready(function() {
$('a[href^=http]:not("[href*=://' + document.domain + ']")').click(function() {
pageTracker._trackPageview('/out/'+$(this).attr("href"));
});
});

(please indent them!)

Cheers

In our company we use Subversion for version control.

Using a GUI for Mac gives our more graphical team members easy access to common tasks, such as committing changed files to the repository.

However updating the working copy on a (test-) web server still requires knowlegde of a unix shell and having to log in and running it manually can be a full time position.

After doing some research I found the official PECL SVN bindings. These are still very experimental and a hussle to install.

So I decided to use the simplest solution that just executes a “svn up” on the server and does not require any server-side modification:

exec("svn up ".dirname(__FILE__), $out, $ret);

Which serves perfectly for this purpose.

Wrapping this line in a (30secs) self refreshing file makes sure the working copy stays updated.

And the best thing is:
it does not require anything, except installed svn binaries that are executable for the apache user and write access to the webroot.
Download

When the guys from Fluid introduced us to their vision of their website, we basically had two options on how to realise it:

Flash or Javascript?

After a few internal discussions, in where we evaluated the pros and cons of both technologies we came to the decision to avoid Flash and make use of the powerful jQuery framework.

The following things lead us to this decision:

• Accessibility
• Search engine friendliness

The tricky bit came after this.

Lots of websites (in fact, I could’nt find a single one that was not) that are using scrolling effects like this, have the whole page content on one page. This is from a search engine friendly point of view as well as for the loading time very bad.

So we had to find a way of loading the inside pages “on request”. Therefore we used the jQuery Ajax wrapper which loads and inserts the content when a page is requested.

Another interesting part was to get “The Work” section populated by certain categories of their Blog.

Therefore we used the RSS reader plugin of JOJO which is based on the magpie rss parser library.

What we delivered was the following:

• A Blog for them to write about their daily work based on WordPress.
• A content manageable Website based on JoJo CMS, fetching content from the blog using RSS Feeds.
• A funky animated Javascript interface that is still absolutely usable without Javascript enabled. This makes it search engine friendly and allows the usage of screen readers etc.

What do you think?

The Situation

Its been a while since everybody stopped complaining about the standards compliancy of Internet Exporer 6. In fact there was no way of having a website that was not working in the most popular browser.

However.

Times have changed.

Light in the darkness

The introduction of cross browser compatible Javascript frameworks, like jQuery,  Protoype and Mootools, using halftransparent png fixes like Supersleight as well as using XHTML as the Doctype got the mess under control.

Still the missing unserstanding of CSS in IE causes web designers headaches every day and pushes the cost of websites unnecessary up – limiting the possibilities of introducing other technologies / capabilities such as mobile browsing and accessibility.

How can this situation be solved?

At the end of the day the only substantial solution will be to force users to upgrade / switch by having websites just not working anymore.

This might force Microsoft whether to release IE7 for Windows 2000 or accept the fact of everybody switching to Firefox.

Being a Web design agency, we cant do much other than making clients happy – which implements having their website looking good even on grandmas old machine. (I actually feel bad about writing  these words!)

What we can do is talking to people we meet, recommending the usage of a Standards Compliant browser, such as Firefox and  Google’s Chrome.

The question is…

…should web developers / designers care about browser bugs like the opacity issue in firefox mac?

This would be like manufacturers building cars that drive through water instead of reparing the broken bridge.