stressfree - website design

The Flash Risk: Ignoring usability for aesthetics

David — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 17:48:33 +0000

There is a case being heard in a California courtroom at the moment that may have serious implications on the future of pure visual corporate/government websites built on technologies like Flash. There are a number of these websites like this around that typically comprise of a fairly featureless HTML wrapper page for an all-singing and dancing Flash animation. The class action lawsuit brought against Target Corp (the website owner) is on the grounds of its online store not meeting the same accessibility standards as their physical equivalents or California legal guidelines for shopping outlets. Whilst many Flash websites have an HTML equivalent for Target did not and consequently vision and physically impaired users could not purchase goods as screen readers and keyboard shortcuts do not work in Flash environments.

I have never liked Flash websites because their content cannot be easily searched, browser functions like the Back button do not work, maintaining them can be a lot more difficult and it limits the size of your potential audience because of operating system/browser constraints. Flash has its place as a multimedia enhancement for HTML but it should not be viewed as a replacement. Coupled with this ideological perspective the emergence of Javascript-based AJAX and visual enhancements achieves most of the functionality offered by Flash in universally consumable HTML. Although it is uncertain what the outcome of this current lawsuit will be I am sure it will place even further doubt over the applicability of Flash as an HTML replacement or even in the strategy of maintaining a 'rich' Flash website and a simpler, standards and legally complaint HTML equivalent.

CSS redesign saves ESPN 730TB a year

David — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 03:02:56 +0000

The cost of redesigning an old table/image based site around CSS can be outweighed by the bandwidth savings as associate art director for ESPN.com Mike Davidson points out:

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2003/06/espn-interview

In the interview he explains the logic behind the ESPN.com redesign and the massive bandwidth savings they were able to achieve (approximately 730TB a year). Given the actual saving per hit was only 50Kb the huge overall bandwidth illustrates the magnitude of the Web space. Designing high-bandwidth sites with lots of images, table-based design or even worse Flash is just asking for trouble in the long-term if the ultimate objective is to create a popular site. It is no good generating lots of advertising revenue from page views if this traffic ends up costing far more.

Another fix to Joomla's RSS feeds

David — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 02:44:51 +0000

By default Joomla's RSS feeds do not provide an absolute URL to the content item which leaves the RSS looking like the following:
<link>some_piece_of_content.html</link>

This is okay when the RSS source is the host website but if you are running the feed through FeedBurner some feed readers (and Technorati) can get confused. When they get confused the resulting URL to the source item becomes:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/some_piece_of_content.html

Which of course does not work. To fix this edit the /components/com_rss/rss.php file in the Joomla installation directory. Find the line that reads:

$item_link = sefRelToAbs( $item_link );

And add the following below it:

$item_link = htmlspecialchars( $mosConfig_live_site ). $item_link;

This will generate complete URL's for your RSS readers and solve any inconsistancies with the feed readers out there.

'Fixing' Joomla's RSS feed

David — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 22:13:28 +0000

By default Joomla changes all formatting in RSS feeds to CDATA (ie non-html interpretable) fields. This creates ugly and very difficult to read feeds sometimes. To fix this edit the following file:

$JOOMLA_DIRECTORY/components/com_rss/rss.php

Find the line that reads:

$item_description = mosHTML::cleanText( $item_description );

at approximately line 197, comment it out.
This should create more aesthetically pleasing RSS feeds (with working hyperlinks and image tags).

Next go to about line 266 where the line that reads: '$item_link = sefRelToAbs( $item_link );' and add:

$item_link = $info[ 'link' ] . $item_link;

This will add absolute links to your feed which is good when using Feedburner. I recommend using FeedBurner as a frontend to your RSS feeds as not only does it provide useful statistical services it also saves on bandwidth and has options to generate universal (RSS 1.0/RSS 2.0/Atom) feeds to ensure compatability with the various readers.

Very nice CSS replacement for the SELECT MULITPLE tag

David — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:17:25 +0000

The title pretty much explains everything. The SELECT form tag has a MULTIPLE option but in practice this turns very ugly very quickly. This little CSS hack provides the functionality of the tag without the user-interface nightmares.

Nice CSS Graphs

David — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 01:17:17 +0000

Simple CSS based graphs for web display. Far simplier than generating static images or using SVG.

A Great Site with a Funny Name

David — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 21:26:44 +0000

The name is hard to say ten times fast but the demos, scripts and discussion is undenyably fantastic. Extremely useful for leading edge web-based interface scripts and ideas.

http://script.aculo.us/

Great CSS/Javascript Image Resize Script

David — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 21:08:38 +0000

A blog post from AgilePartners describes how upcoming web applications like Fluxiom achieve the dynamic image resizing effects illustrated in their promotional material. It turns out to be very simple (Javascript modifies the CSS image size property) yet the effect is really cool. True 'image resizing' is not employed, large images are downloaded to the browser and then it is left up to the browser's own display engine to perform the dynamic resizing. In a high bandwidth environment this does not matter but for people stuck in 56k modem land it is just one more nail in the coffin for their enjoyable Internet experience. There is almost a need now for web developers to be able to distinguish between low and high bandwidth users in the same way browser or Javascript detection is employed.

Joomla!/Mambo Overview

David — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 08:37:38 +0000

At the moment this site is still on Mambo but when things quieten down I will be migrating across to Joomla! as I have a feeling it will have a stronger development path. I just wrote the following email to my friend in order to give him some information about Mambo/Joomla! so I figure why not post this up on the site so that if anyone else asks in the future the information in close at hand.

Joomla! is a completely open-source fork of Mambo. Mambo 4.5.2 code-wise is identical to Joomla! 1.0 except there's a few security/bug tweaks and different graphics are used. At the moment components/modules are compatible between the two systems but I can see a day when this won't be the case in the not too distant future.

Just a rundown on Mambo/Joomla! terminology, components are big pieces of functionality, modules are small blocks of presentation code and mambots are little background helpers that do a variety of things. The three pieces working together create the full system.
Mambo & Joomla! also provide the following functionality:
RSS feeds, search engine friendly URLs, users/groups, email notification and statistics.

Here are some useful Joomla!/Mambo links:

TMEdit/XHTML Suite: A very good editor for Joomla/Mambo:
http://www.xhtmlsuite.com/index.php?lang=en&option=com_content&task=section&id=4&Itemid=49

Mambo Portal: Lots of useful components & modules:
(you need to register, free, a bit of a pain but no spam)
http://www.mamboportal.com/

DOCMan: A not too bad (but sometimes a little flaky) document manager component:
http://www.mambodocman.com/

Zoom: Gallery component:
http://mamboforge.net/projects/zoom/

Joomla! 1.0 released

David — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 21:59:42 +0000

Joomla! is a completely open-source branch of Mambo, a popular content management system I use for this site. There has always been some difficulty with the licensing of Mambo which has caused friction between the owners of the intellectual property and the open source developers.

Finally friction evolved into a full scale split and now the open source developers have split from the Mambo source tree to create Joomla!, a completely open source branch of Mambo. Right now these two trees are completely the same (save for some aesthetic changes) but it looks like their development paths will be completely separate. This equates to a lot of confusion in the community as to what will happen with all the different plugins and how they will or will not be compatible between the two systems. At the moment we can only wait and see.

I would like to see the Joomla! developers create a more CSS friendly system as at present the underlying code behind Mambo is pretty ugly in parts. At the moment there is MamBoX which complies to XHTML strict but it is running well behind the current version of Mambo in terms of features and polish.

WebSVN frontend for Subversion

David — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 10:52:03 +0000

This morning I had a play with WebSVN to see if I could get a nice user-friendly frontend onto my Subversion repositories. The results were very good and are available for all at http://subversion.stress-free.co.nz. Not only does WebSVN provide a simple interface to Subversion but it also has some very nice RSS and archive tools which makes it easy to track what is changing in a project and download the source without having to worry about Subversion at all.