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Archive for the ‘WWW’ Category
Obsessively skinny code
Posted on in WWW.I’ve started using Google Closure Compiler instead of JSMin to reduce the size of my JavaScript files. It’s an obsessive piece of software, finding savings such as replacing the number 1000 with the one byte more compact form 1E3. But those bytes all add up as it’s reduced an 80Kb file to 44kB compared with 51Kb from JSMin.
JavaScript and me
Posted on in Books, My Life, WWW, Work.I’ve been writing JavaScript for almost as long as the language has existed. My first “script” was a simple onMouseOver="window.status='Hello World'" affair back in the days of Netscape 2. I spent the dot.com years writing popup windows and hover images and scrolling boxes and other basic stuff. Then I took a break from doing much JavaScript – this almost exactly coincided with the years that some “proper” programmers took a a look at the language and applied a bit of rigour to it. So when I got back into JavaScript a few years ago I was way behind the curve.
I’ve managed to catch up a little and by using the jQuery library plus a few plugins I’ve done some quite cool things despite not having the sort of knowledge that real JavaScript pros have these days.
I’m a front end engineer, I’m not a “proper” programmer, I don’t come from a programming background and have had close to zero formal training. I only vaguely understand the principles behind object oriented programming and design patterns and so on and I think that I think that they are good things, but I have no real idea of how to apply them to my code.
Speaking of which, unminified it’s 70Kb, 1500 lines and growing. There’s a big refactoring job that needs doing there before it becomes impossible to maintain. But how to start?
Bookwise, I have Jon Resig’s Pro JavaScript Techniques and Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts and a few others. Are there any others that I should be looking at? What about training? Web sites? Blogs I should be following? Where do I go from here?
Very True Mood: 
cranky
crankyAny other Tuesday…
Posted on in Music, My Life, TV, WWW, Work.Today I …
- Had my photo used in a (gay) mockup of a what our Valentine’s Day homepage could look like.
- Had lots of fun combining Ajax, JSON, RSS, JSP and jQuery in various combinations.
- Moved the breadcrumb trail from just inside the main content area to just before it … in many, many templates.
- Wondered whether any of the ARIA landmark roles was suitable for a block that contained a breadcrumb trail, a print button and an RSS feed button.
contentinfoor nothing seem to be the options. - Told my boss that I needed to refactor all the JavasScript (that I had written in the first place) on the whole site.
- Wasn’t ill enough to go home to bed, maybe tomorrow. (Damn this really quite good immune system!)
- Boggled at the photos of Ben Dalby in a straight jacket!
- Spent most of Survivors thinking about the benefits of CGI vs something actually decent looking when it came to collapsing buildings.
More skipping to broken accessibility
Posted on in WWW.A few of you may remember this sterling piece of work from last year. Well today I found a very similar case on another site.
<a href="#mainsection" class="skip">skip to content</a>
<a href="#topnav" class="skip">skip to main navigation</a>
<a href="#topnav" class="skip">skip to main navigation</a>
- “skip to main navigation” is repeated twice…
- but does nothing as “topnav” is not present anywhere on the page
- The skip links aren’t wrapped in any form of structure (thus also requiring the class=”skip” on each link)
The site claims to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional but has 76 validation errors, including a character encoding mismatch between the HTTP header and the meta tag. It calls in 8 external CSS files and 23 external JavaScript files and contains large chunks of commented out HTML (so it will be slow as well as inaccessible).
Compared with this, some of my stuff is not so bad after all.
My Decade Meme
Posted on in Blogs, Memes, My Life, The World, WWW, Work.2000
At the start of the year I was working Wicked Web in Clerkenwell, living in West Norwood and had been going out with pink_weasel for six months. We went on holiday to Boston and Tennessee. WW moved office to Old Street in the spring. I went to Las Vegas for Andy’s stag weekend.
2001
I took Lettice to Budapest for her birthday. WW started laying staff off towards the end of the year.
2002
WW went into liquidation and hence I was made redundant. I became self-employed and started freelancing for many ex-WW clients. Went to the south of France with Lettice’s family – first time I’d ever seen the Mediterranean.
2003
I spent the first part of the year working on a site for the BBC. Towards the end of the year I started doing contract work via an agency which meant that I got a large refund from the tax man, eventually. I went on a falconry day and flew a Harris Hawk. I asked Lettice to marry me.
2004
I started this blog and spent several months working for the Home Office.
2005
I gave up freelancing and started work at Visit London. I started cross posting this blog to LiveJournal and joined LibraryThing and Last.FM. I moved house to larger flat, ten minutes down the road from the old one, and Lettice moved in. We got married and went on honeymoon in Canada. 
2006
I learnt XSLT. 
Lettice also started to work at VL. I joined Flickr
2007
Relaunched visitlondon.com with a new CMS, clocking up a stupid number of days off in lieu in the process. I did jury duty. I joined Facebook. We went to Dublin and Amsterdam.
2008
We went to Venice. I learnt JSP and jQuery. I joined Twitter
2009
We went to Barcelona and tried to buy a house. I grew a moustache for charity.
NaBloPoMo FAIL
Posted on in Blogs, Memes, My Life.
The sidebar says that there are 25 posts in November. But 5 of those are the automated weekly posts of Twitter updates. And 2, including this one, were actually written a week into December and backdated.
Not good. Worse than last year in fact. I fail at blogging.
Getting web site developers to RTFRFC
Posted on in WWW.The + sign is valid in the local part of an email address. Please fix the validation on your sign up form.
From now on I’m going to keep track of sites to which I’ve had to send a variation of the above message. There are only two reasons for disallowing it: technical incompetence and a failure to read the RFCs; or malice in not wanting users to identify spammers or sellers of email addresses to spammers by disallowing tagged email addresses.
Fixed
- monitis.com
Pending
- demand.five.tv (29/11/2009)
Why is this stuff still in my brain?
Posted on in Browsers.Yesterday I was doing a YoGov survey (referral link in case anyone fancies signing up) and got a question which asked me to list as many web browsers as I could. I think I may have been near the tip of the long tail on that one – I wonder if anyone else included Amaya?
Memory 0.2
Posted on in My Life, WWW.Last night I bumped into someone I was at college with on Borough High Street. I knew his first name straight away, but it took me twelve hours to remember his last name. And then five minutes to find him on facebook…
The online, social, networked, web 2.0 world hasn’t completely eliminated the need for human memory