Blog Standard Stuff

A small techie announcement: I built a tool that lets you type in a whole bunch of sections that you’d have on a page (that would relate directly to ids on the page) including the nesting of each ection and quickly create an XHTML template from it. Head on over to Accessify and see what you think (please add any comments here)

Try out the Markup maker here

Enjoy!

UPDTE: but they are working on it! See my comment below

Dear Bloglines people. I have a problem with this sentence:

"You might have noticed a few fancy little changes we’ve made to your feed tree on the left pane today."

My problem is that the ‘little’ change I’ve noticed is that it no longer works for me at my place of work.

My browser (Firefox 1.5) has JavaScript enabled and most of the time it works just fine. However, there are circumstances where it will not work. It’s the same kind of scenario that broke access to Blogger for me a while back (please do read through the comments there). But to summarise:

• For my company, and many others who use off-the-shelf 3rd party firewall products, certain JavaScripts do not get executed
• I see this an awful lot with AJAX apps that fail to work and many sites that use JavaScript libraries (e.g. a site using lightbox.js works fine, but since they upgraded to lightbox.js v2, which uses the scriptaculous library, it fails)
• If the page contains a noscript alternative, it doesn’t get used - because I do have JavaScript, just some of it is getting filtered

In this instance, it’s a reliance on the dojo framework that is the problem:

Specifically, here’s the problem:

<script type="text/javascript"
   src="/js/r73/dojo/dojo.js"></script> <- BLOCKED
<script type="text/javascript">

<script type="text/javascript"
   src="/js/r73/bl/myblogs_subs.js"></script> <- ALLOWED



I highly doubt that after these upgrades my lone dissenting voice will make any difference, but I can but try. This is increasingly happening and it amazes me that developers are unaware that their web apps can be fundamentally broken by some firewall security policies (I was speaking to PPK at this year’s @media about this very topic and how so many JavaScript developers don’t know of this). They need to test these JavaScript-dependant pages/apps against more scenarios, and that includes instances like this where firewalls stop what they believe might be harmful pieces of code.

My only option now is to ditch Bloglines completely and move to another web-based service that I can use at work and at home. Bloglines has been my lifeline to news updates that I’ve come to rely on, but these updates have killed the service completely for me. So, if you have a recommendation for a service that does a similar thing, please add it to comments. At least I have the option to export my Bloglines subscription data to use in another web-based service rather than start from scratch, but I’ve gotten so used to the way Bloglines works that it’s not what I really want. Bloglines just worked. But now it doesn’t :-(

[Apparantly if I add the phrase bloglines freedbacking you’ll see this. And when you do, I’d appreciate your comments].

• What would ITV do for drama if Robson Green were to fall victim to some nasty head-on collission with a bus type accident?
• How many versions of the Confused.com advert are there at the moment? They got rid of the really irritating one from days of old, thankfully, but appear to be trialling untold numbers of adverts to see what works. It’s all a bit confusing
• Remind me, what was my third point?

Genius. A question that I had to answer as part of a Health & Safety quiz on the company intranet (click on the thumbnail below):

Another similarly-themed highlight was the question about how to get something off a tall cupboard that you can’t reach - one of the options being ‘get something long to nudge it across’. Ah, how I’d love to write some of these wrong answers!

Is it just me, or does Squiggle off Eastenders look like one of the caricatures off Bo Selecta?

I was trying to write a little favelet that loops through a bunch of HTML elements on any page and finds all the id values. Once it’s done, it inserts it into the start of the page for info. Why am I doing this? I wanted to get some stats about what ids we use on our own sites (ie, do we always call the main nav ‘nav’, ‘mainnav’, ‘nav_main’ or something else?) and a favelet seemed like the way to do it. The test page is here:

Favelet test page

Thanks to Simon who sorted out a bug for me (it req’d an anonymous function that I’d ommitted). It now works a treat in Firefox. I can’t be arsed to make it work for anything else, but you’re more than welcome to have a go :-D Also, any other comments to make it work better are appreciated.

I don’t do a lot of ’sites for friends’ and my portfolio is … well, what portfolio? That’s the thing about working for a web team in a big company - there’s very little that you can point to and say "That was mine" and for it to be totally yours and not watered down. Anyway, that’s not to moan and bitch, just my way of qualifying the fact that I basically am designer sans portfolio.

However, I have just built a site for someone I know and wanted to give it a site pimp and helpful nudge for Google and co (cue gratuitous links).

She’s a wedding photographer based in the south west (wiltshire wedding photography) but also does studio portraits and such like.

I’m not after any specific feedback on the design - this is really for her Googlejuice benefit :-) As you were, then …

You know, I wouldn’t say that I am. I don’t go out of my way to get myself seen, but I always seem to ‘do stuff’ rather than let it happen (I wish that were true of my activities on the web, too, in which I’ve been distinctly passive of late - if you excuse the book writing and tech editing that I’ve been doing, that is). But this week I seem to have got myself in print in a few places:

• First there is the book Campervan Crazy, which has the wife on the front cover (and my bus), a piece that I wrote for them inside and, something that I’d forgotten about, a whole-page picture I took back in the mid 90s at a VW show.
• There’s the Vanfest programme cover, something I knocked together in the hope of getting a free entry to the show (which I was not able to take advantage of in the end!) - it won, so my bus made it on to the cover for Europe’s biggest VW van-owner’s get-together.
• There was a piece I wrote in the company magazine (Nationwide’s staff publication) about my book-writing (the Sitepoint book) which featured a picture of me posing in front of the bus with a laptop at the ready (this pic here)
• And the latest is that I’ve just discovered that our wedding photos are going to appear in the next issue of Wedding Ideas magazine (submitting them was Manda’s idea, I should add!)

So, what should I do next week to better that? I have a few days free, might as well make the most of it ;-)