I’ve seen some of these charting tools in things like Google Analytics but thought it was just a gimmick, but not only is this stuff entertaining, but makes the data informative and what’s more adds weight to the conclusions.

Thanks to Robbie for this.

This post can relate to so many things - stylesheets, php code, glass fibre moulds - at some point when you’ve gone through a few iterations of an agile like process, you start thinking “If I’d known I was going to end up doing this, I would have started differently”

When you’re so close to completing, yet you know deep down it’s getting messy overcomplex and perhaps not as ‘nice’ as it could be, the decision of whether to leave it as-is because it works or to take the opportunity to rebuild everything before you go any further becomes almost unbearable.

But then I suppose is that not what the perpetual beta is all about, and eventually you get the opportunity to go for v2.0 (or 1.0 even)? In the mean time if it’s not doing any harm, leave it alone - you know it will only open up another can of worms if you start from scratch again!

Not unique to Drupal, but common to any that use cookies to maintain login session information. I’ve met it before, but I just lost an hour and I have a brick shaped imprint in my forehead again, so I thought I’d drum into my head … don’t use underscores in domain names!

So often when using subdomains for setting up dev sites etc., it’s so easy to use site_dev.domain.com or similar. But, underscores are not valid characters in domain names.

Firefox is forgiving, and behaves as you would hope, but IE7, Opera etc. won’t properly set cookies on domains with underscores.

Solution - use hyphens instead e.g. site-dev.domain.com

I’ve always had an interest in photography, and ten or twelve years ago I got quite into the technicalities of black and white film - the zone system etc. I had a couple of Olympus OM-2 bodies, and a crude but workable darkroom. Much fun was had.

Moving house several times I never got around to setting up the darkroom again and it all still sits on shelves (about to go on eBay).

In the mean time, digital photography became more mainstream, and four or five years ago I got myself a Fujifilm F700 which is a compact but capable little number. We’ve had some good times together and I’ve taken some images that I’ve been very happy with, but it still doesn’t encourage the full exploration of photographic techniques.

This christmas, I took advantage of an offer to get a ‘proper’ camera - a Fujifilm S5 Pro - and I’m now starting to invest the time to learn how to use it and express myself. It’s a stunning camera, and I’m so glad I made the decision to get it against other options such as a Fujifilm S100FS bridge camera.

The amazing thing I’m finding is how ‘basic’ the camera feels - it certainly doesn’t make it easy to take pictures without thinking about what you’re doing - but I feel that’s the whole point , and I love it.

I’m still feeling my way transferring philosophies and techniques learnt using mono negative film to digital technologies.

Certain things are the same and surprisingly familiar - focussing, metering, composition, depth of field etc. but, when it comes to moving away from ‘average’ pictures or when you can’t rely on automatic settings is when the fun starts.

I did once know my way around the zone system, and could customise the way I processed B&W film and printed the final image to get a variety of tones and tonal ranges to suit the subject. But how does that translate to digital?

Well the first thing I’m just now starting to get to grips with is that film processing and other darkroom techniques are roughly equivalent to using RAW format and manipulation in something like Photoshop. The image shown here is a bland shot from inside Happisburgh Coastwatch, but it took some fiddling to get it so you could see detail from both inside and outside.

So I’ve an expensive camera - necessary to get a good sensor and image processing software, and Photoshop doesn’t come cheap. In the digital world, to get to grips with the core technicalities of the zone system for instance is quite an expensive undertaking.

But, when I started experimenting ten or so years ago it was much more affordable - you didn’t need much of a camera if you used good film, and it was surprising what good results you could get in a darkroom with some pretty basic kit.

I wonder what the digital equivalent of the pinhole camera is?

In an article on A List Apart ‘Return of the Mobile Stylesheet‘, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux starts by reviewing the ‘ideal’ approach to making a site mobile friendly:

Ideally, site authors would be able to meet the growing demand for a quality mobile experience without changing a line of code. But the reality is that a site designed specifically with mobility in mind will always provide a much better user experience to mobile users, even when they are equipped with the device du jour. It’s not merely a question of network costs and delays or memory and CPU limitations. Rather, the mobile experience merits its own design, as discussed in a growing body of literature, including the W3C’s very own Mobile Web Best Practices, released in July 2008 as a W3C Recommendation. The formula for a mobile experience provided by Little Springs Design sums up the goal nicely: mobilize, don’t miniaturize. Mobile users operate in a very different usage context than PC users, and providing them with an experience customized to their needs is likely to be the best service you can offer to them.

But then he goes on to describe “a first step toward mobile design that uses CSS to maximize interoperability across platforms” asserting that “by starting simple, you can provide a decent initial experience, solicit user feedback, and iterate toward a more mobile-friendly design.”

Shame - because the likelihood is that if you put all your effort into a CSS solution, which is sub-optimal (in my view) because devices still have to load bloated code, and you probably end up with compromises for bot mobile and ‘normal’ browsers amongst other reasons, you’re much less likely to make the bigger step of producing a version of the site optimised for the mobile experience.

Many platforms make it quite simple to do this - there are mobile modules and plugins I’ve seen (and used) for Wordpress, Drupal etc. - if you’ve got server side logic, and preferably some form of content management / delivery system going on, it should be not much more than switching to a simpler theme for your presentation when a mobile device is detected.

But then that’s easy for me to say, because I still haven’t done it in anger to any large extent (yet).

Is Christmas a time for blog posting?

Certainly a chance to review the year, and catch up on things that have been missed. I’ve been lax in not keeping up with progress in mobile content delivery for instance, but it’s not out of choice.

Scanning some emails and posts just now I came across a summary of what’s been hapenning over at the mobiForge (ex dev.mobi) and I feel unbearable guilt that I haven’t tried their DeviceAtlas yet. But I do note with some satisafction that in one article they’re plugging the use of a lightwieght device detection function from  Andy Moore that seems to do a similar thing (but no doubt much better) to what I was playing with a couple of years back.

New Years resolution - make the time to keep up with this stuff, ‘cos it interests me and I’ll need it one day!  (see Perl xkcd strip!)

Sorry to post another xkcd strip, but they just keep hitting home:

http://xkcd.com/519/

I just had to look it up on wikipedia ‘cos it was bugging me - the British equivalent of 11th Grade in ‘my’ terms is Lower Sixth, or in ‘new money’ Year 12.

I’m trying to remember what I was doing that enhanced my life in the Lower Sixth - certainly not Perl which I didn’t discover until much later - I was probably doing good old BASIC and Pascal on an Apple II at that time, and perhaps some 6502 machine code on my Acorn Atom. Now that dates me!

I had an email today from Google saying that one of my Google Analytics accounts now had an Event Tracking feature enabled - unfortunately it’s not an account that has much use so I’m going to have to do something tricky to have a play.

I’m keen to have a go - I use GA quite a bit for a few sites and I really like what I see - it might not be as powerful as some of the big expensive tools, but for most purposes it’s quite good enough.

Having to abuse it a bit to track things like banner clicks, JavaScript events, Flash actions etc. has always rankled  - you never quite managed to properly track these fake page views, it interrupted the limited view you had of user journey, and it gave an inflated value for number of page views.

I had heard event tracking was in the pipeline, and I’m keen to give it a crack.

You know sometimes how the simplest little issue holds you up for days? Well I’ve just had a doozy!

I’m maintaining an inherited CMS application that I’m still having to trust that some of the inner workings ‘works’ because it’s all a bit involved and I’m not getting paid to rip it all apart for the sake of it.

We’re deploying the app onto new servers - something that I’ve done a few times so I wasn’t scared - but this time I just couldn’t get it to work - calling up pages I was getting “Content Encoding Error” messages from Firefox, and generally not helpful responses from other browsers.

The app was using GZIP to compress output where browsers support it using ob_gzhandler I knew, and if I commented out the gzip bits it was working, but that wasn’t something I wanted to do - and I was determined to find out why the same codebase wasn’t working on this environment with almost identical configuration to others that it did work on.

To cut a long story short - there’s a configuration include called at the start of each page that’s not under version control (for obvious reasons), and on this server it somehow acquired a couple of line breaks at the end after the closing php tag, so it started the html output early.  Nothing to do with double encoding or other potential issues I found when Googling.