Wired News: Unleashing the Web Police

Wired News: Unleashing the Web Police:

Article about the websites of Bush and Kerry, but I thought this snippet was interesting:

"In the end, it may not matter what kind of information appears on the candidates' websites, as long as they have a cool design. So says a 2002 Stanford study called 'How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility?' commissioned by Consumer WebWatch, which is affiliated with Consumer Reports. Although most Americans claim to know which factors to weigh when attempting to gauge a website's credibility, it appears they don't. The Stanford study showed that people are frequently 'distracted by superficial aspects of sites that had little to do with the depth, breadth or the quality of the content.' Nearly half of the study's participants -- about 46 percent -- rated a site's credibility based primarily on its design or look."

Cork 2005 - European Capital of Culture

Cork 2005 - European Capital of Culture

Ah yes. Cork. Capital of Culture 2005.

"Cork's designation as European Capital of Culture in 2005 inspires us to celebrate our past and anticipate our future; it accepts our individuality and adopts our spirit of community. It will demonstrate to all our vision of a confident 21st century city."

It brings a tear to my eye. "adopts our spirit of community." Beautiful. "our vision of a confident 21st century city." Moving.

And yet, wait a moment... site developed by rehabstudio - based in Belfast! Cork, this cultural capital, this city that has such community spirit, this 21st century city with such vision... it can't produce a web development company versed enough in the cultural sphere to execute a site for the occasion???

"The Cork 2005 Programme will include the best in Architecture, Crafts, Dance, Design, Film, Food, Literature, Music, Sport, Theatre and VisualArts." (emphasis added)

While technology may not be a key element to Cork2005, design and visual arts are... and surely with such modern vision and community spirit a local company could have been found to develop the website?

Well it seems not.

Please note I have nothing against rehabstudio, I simply think it might have been more in keeping with the spirit of Cork2005 to have sourced a Cork web development company.

Wired News: The Incredible Shrinking Comic

Wired News: The Incredible Shrinking Comic

hmmm... now how do we get BifSniff Cartoons out to mobile users...?

robotsdontexistsmall.mov (video/quicktime Object)

robotsdontexistsmall.mov (video/quicktime Object)

Same people who did Lego Spiderman did this. I like it. Not sure why. Maybe because it's 2.22am...

Lego Spiderman

Lego Spiderman

Wow... a lot of effort went into this... and what exactly is the point? Just for fun? Lego promotion? Spiderman promo? Both?

Thanks again to #!/usr/bin/girl whose blog I found this on!

Wired News: Changing the Face of Web Surfing

Wired News: Changing the Face of Web Surfing: "Oxford University math graduate Matthew Somerville was only trying to do fellow movie fans a favor when, flummoxed by the 'highly inaccessible' website for Britain's Odeon cinema chain, he decided to redesign the service himself.

Out went the JavaScript, cookies and confusing menus that had muddled many visitors looking for movie times. Somerville hosted a slimmed-down, simplified imitation on his own server, which garnered praise from many users.

The cinema chain, currently for sale in an auction that has seen bids reach 380 million pounds (about $710 million), even fixed bugs on its site after being alerted by Somerville -- then served him with a terse cease and desist, claiming he was breaching copyright and data laws. Under legal pressure, he reluctantly killed off his unauthorized Accessible Odeon Website this week, counterclaiming that the official site breaks disability discrimination law."

Brilliant article. And he's not the only one, apparently there are several instances recently of users giving usability overhauls to the sites they use!

BifSniff Stuff | CafePress

BifSniff Stuff | CafePress

Just set this up. Now I just wait for the dollars to pour in... we're gonna be rich... rich beyond our wildest dreams...!

Skipping over navigation links - Dive Into Accessibility

Day 11: Skipping over navigation links - Dive Into Accessibility

Having managed to develop the fixed-width centered site for Fota House, myself and Tom R decided it was better to go with the more accessible and more adaptable design.

So I went back to the design with the content width set to 35ems.

But I decided, after getting some feedback from people that the navigation was not great. The original design had the Main Navigation running across the top and the Sub Nav running down the right hand side.

I implemented a new design which has all the navigation at the top of the page divided into three columns. The three columns are Main Navigation, Sub Navigation and On This Page navigation.

That way all navigation is grouped together and the user has a visual representation of where they are in the site as the current page will be differentiated through colour.

However, the drawback is that the amount of links needs to be variable and scalable therefore it was not possible to use absolute positioning, which means the links are coded in the html before the content - something I was trying to avoid.

According to Dive into Accessibility, Google gives more weight to content closer to the top of the page, which is another reason to present main content first.

Until I find a way to put the links at the top of the page in a scalable way I have implemented a 'skip navigation' link which is rendered invisible by CSS. That way text readers etc can skip past them.

Wired News: Cool Ways to Give IE the Boot

Wired News: Cool Ways to Give IE the Boot: "The bad news just keeps coming from Microsoft -- this week alone the company released a patch for seven new security vulnerabilities, three of them affecting the company's Internet Explorer browser and described as "critical" flaws by Microsoft. [...] No program coded by humans will ever be 100 percent secure, but we can make malicious hackers' lives more difficult by using a variety of browsers. Having 94.73 percent of all Web surfers using one application provides too big of a target, and the problem is compounded by Microsoft's unfortunate insistence on tying Explorer so tightly to the Windows operating system."

I've already given IE the boot, I browse now with Firefox and am very happy with it. This Wired article gives a couple of other contenders if you want to move away from IE.

IE Doubled Float-Margin Bug - CSS fixes and workarounds

IE Doubled Float-Margin Bug - CSS fixes and workarounds

Couldn't figure out what was going wrong with my design for ages, Then came accross this.
Aaaaaaaarrrrrrgh. At least there's a simple fix...

Fota, CSS, Centered site

Well, I spent some time looking at having the site centered in the browser window and have managed to centre the site if I use fixed width.
I will continue to play around until I see how far I get with centered, fluid.

Centered fixed-width means I have to rethink the navigation areas. Using this method means using relative positioning and having the items html coded in the order they appear on screen. This means logo, main nav, content, sub nav. Which is not ideal when using a screen reader. If I can find a way to improve for screen readers I will.

Also, the text content is fixed width - currently at 450 pixels. Which is fine for medium font size but does not resize when user changes font size.

The advantage is control over display, but is this really an illusion when that control has to be relinquished anyway once the user changes font size or resolution etc?

It *will* look better on some or even most displays, but it's not as adaptable/accessible.

COLLATERAL - Michael Mann Film.

COLLATERAL This looks ridiculous but I like Michael Mann, and I like Tom Cruise's hitman look...
Shot on Digital apparently.

Tom Raftery - Tom Raftery's IT views

Tom Raftery - Tom Raftery's IT views

Tom usually lets me know of any interesting tech related goings on directly but from now on the rest of you can check his new blog!

He mentiones an interesting article on the BBC site which says "The number of people using Internet Explorer (IE) has dropped by one percent in the past four weeks"

Fota House

Well, I have finally come up with a design I am happy with for Fota House.
It validates with the W3C Markup Validation Service (as XHTML 1.0 Transitional) and the W3C CSS validator.

I have also taken care to make it as accessible as possible, and I have tested the template design in the Lynx viewer

Can't show a preview of the site, have to wait till it goes live but just wanted to share a few thoughts on the design while they were fresh.

I experimented with a completely fluid design but as mentioned before the line length often was just too long. It was hard to read and the nature of the content of the site just meant it didn't look well at all. I also played with completely fixed site but found it hard to settle on an optimum width - 760px width seemed to be a popular one, but among some of the more standard conscious 647px seemed popular. 720px meant that if you had browser sidebars open at 800*600 then horizontal scrolling occurred. But 647px fixed looked a little squashed for the amount and type of content I anticipate being in the Fota site.

Also with fixed width when one increased the font size it would result in only a couple of words fitting accross the content area.
In the end, many, many style sheet designs later I settled on a content area set to 35ems. While this is a 'fixed' size it scales with the users font setting and is roughly the generally accepted ideal line length. (see the previously mentioned article I found while searching on this)

The navigation areas - main navigation and sub navigation are absolutely positioned. The main nav is positioned at the top of the page and the sub nav is a set number of pixels from the top and 35ems from the left so that it is on the right hand side of the main content and it will nudge over if the font size is increased. I placed it on the right hand side because it looked right, it felt right and when I researched it I could not find any argument for placing it on the left hand side. A lot of sites are moving navigation over to the right hand side rather than the more conventional left because it makes more sense to be closer to the scrollbar. According to Nielsen it also prioritises information correctly. This article was interesting in relation to placement of navigation.

I also played with having the site centred on the page or over to the left side. Both methods are used by many popular sites. I initially wanted to be centred, but ended up on the left hand side. Why?
Well, one reason was that by having fixed positions for the navigation I could place the html code for the links at the bottom of the page but display them at the top. Why would I want to do that?
Well, according to W3C "Navigation bars are usually the first thing someone encounters on a page. For users with speech synthesizers, this means having to hear a number of links on every page before reaching the interesting content of a page."

Centring the site on the page doesn't seem viable with the current design. An offset graphic which was important to the design, using padding and an indent looked fine in Firefox but didn't work at all in IE. Also the nav on the right side caused massive problems in IE. I may well revisit this and see if I can come up with a way to centre the site, but for now I am happy with it where it is. Let's see if you agree when it goes live!

Background images for bullets - CSS

Listutorial: Tutorial 1 - Background images for bullets - all steps combined: " HTML bullets can be replaced with graphic images using "list-style-image". However, the placement of these images is inconsistent across most modern browsers. There is also very little control over how the bullets appear beside the list items."

Simple enough little tip, but useful for more control over how list items look.

Fluid or fixed?

In designing the FotaHouse website I come accross the old issue of fluid or fixed design.
Fluid design is one that allows the content to expand to fill the screen whatever the resolution.
Fixed design is specifying the width of the site.

Each has i's own set of problems. Theoretically I like fluid design but in practice it suits text based sites sites better than it suits a site like Fota where there is a need for many visuals.
Odd as it may seem fluid design can be more limiting than fixed-width design as the template for the pages tends to have to be a very simple one.

Anyone got any examples of well designed fluid sites with a graphically rich design?

Fixed width has problems when it comes to various browsers, resolutions and devices. Not to mention legibility due to line width.

Here's an interesting article on that one though:
Max Design - Ideal line length for content

More to come as I explore!

Audioblogger: F.A.Q.

Audioblogger: F.A.Q.]"You call the number, record a post, then your blog is updated with an audioblogger icon and a link to your recorded audio. Super simple."



Probably some really interesting uses for this. Can't think of any though. Plus, you have to call a US number.

BHODemon 2.0

BHODemon 2.0: "Given that (a) BHOs can do absolutely anything to your system, and (b) they are often installed without your knowledge, there is a distinct potential for abuse by vendors. The problem is, until now you had no way of knowing which BHOs are on your machine, who put them there, and what they do. This is what BHODemon does - it lets you easily manage your BHOs, and tells you what each BHO on your system is doing."

This is a very cute tool. Especially given the latest security warnings on IE where a file posing as a gif can install a BHO on your system which will grab secure details from IE itself (such as credit card info) before they are encrypted - and you simply have to visit a site for the BHO to get installed.

Download the above tool and you can keep an eye on BHO's already on your system and also be notified of new BHO's attempting to install.

Schoolchildren to be RFID-chipped - silicon.com

Schoolchildren to be RFID-chipped - silicon.com

A primary school in Wakayama are implementing RFID's that are placed in schoolchildrens bags or clothing to track them and protect them.
One of the readers comments attached to the article is as follows:

"Can you imagine the chaos that could be caused by naughty children swapping schoolbags or items of clothing, or stealing items and then placing them in dangerous locations?"

Which points out just one of the shortcomings of the system... is this yet another 'solution' which doesn't actually address the problem? Surely it will simply create more complications for the school, more admin nightmares etc when the time, energy and money could go into (as another reader points out) educating the children about the dangers that exist.

With this type of 'solution' isn't it a handy way of getting people early and educating them to have very low level expectations about privacy later in life?

Be interesting to see how it pans out.

All My FAQs Wiki: Center with CSS

All My FAQs Wiki: Center with CSS

Handy tip.

I had links set as block-level elements and I wanted to centre the block-level elements in a div without centering the link text itself.

So I was arsing around with text-align of the div set to centre and text-align of the class for the link set to left. This worked fine in IE but not in NN. Then I found this tip and it all made sense. :)

NYPL: Style Guide

NYPL: Style Guide

Handy and quick reference regarding web standards.
Linked from WaSP.

SAY NO TO CAFEPRESS!?D -- we were a success! TOS was changed thanks to everyone's efforts! --

SAY NO TO CAFEPRESS!?D -- we were a success! TOS was changed thanks to everyone's efforts! --

Interesting article regarding Cafe Press. interesting because we are looking at them as a possible way of selling t-shirts etc on BifSniff.com

Web standards & Accessibility

I am begining the redesign of the Fota House website. The design will be done to web standards and so a beautiful CSS design is required. As such I am revisiting some of my favourite css and accessibility related sites and am taking the opportunity to post some of them here.

CSS Zen Garden - a great site designed to show that CSS does not have to be a limitation in design.

Glish - a great starting point for understanding CSS layout.

Accessify - great resource with tutorials, articles and relevant links.

Lynx Viewer - nice tool which gives you a rough idea of how your pages will look in a text only browser.

Webstandards.org - great place to keep up to date with latest news and views.

VisiCheck - ok of limited use, but interesting idea - what will your page look like to a person with common colourblindnesses.

W3 accessibility guidelines - self explanatory!

Bobby - great tool for testing web pages for accessibility issues.

Well, that's it for now, more as I think of them or come accross them!

SecurityFocus HOME Columnists: Time to Dump Internet Explorer

SecurityFocus HOME Columnists: Time to Dump Internet Explorer

I am downloading Firefox today. Finally. Been meaning to for a while now.

Ruritania - a security parable

Ruritania

Wired News: Speed Past Pesky Security Checks

Wired News: Speed Past Pesky Security Checks: "Marcia Hofmann of the Electronic Privacy Information Center says her greatest concern is that the program will create two classes of travelers.
'Having a program that designates certain people as more trustworthy than others creates a setup where everyone else who doesn't sign up for the program is not trustworthy,' Hofmann said.
Tien also expressed concern about the breadth and use of information that would be collected if the project were later adopted nationwide.
'Given the recent history of passenger data and privacy by the airlines and the TSA, we should have no confidence in their ability to be honest with the public about how they are going to use that information or how they are going to safeguard it,' Tien said. "

Latest on US Airport Security.

The Adventures of ACTION ITEM!

The Adventures of ACTION ITEM!

more unsavoury cartoons

n e i l s w a a b . c o m

RSS Aggregator

Wanted to find a way to define RSS feeds I was interested in and then filter by keywords and display results on a site... in looking for a solution I found this:

RSS Aggregator

uses Feed on Feeds which in turn uses Magpie.

Not sure if it quite does what I was looking for - don't know if it's currently capable of filtering , I don't think so. But it does manage all your feeds and updates them at a preset interval. Also the guy who did it took Feed on Feeds and made it CSS driven so the style is customisable and he also has a public page where it displays unread items, latest items or todays items. There's bound to be a way of including a filter if you had the time/inclination... I'm sure I'll return to it when either of those become available to me!

Pop-up program reads keystrokes, steals passwords | CNET News.com

Pop-up program reads keystrokes, steals passwords | CNET News.com

Radiohead - Amnesiac

Amnesiac on CD Wow

I didn't like this album at all when it came out... then it grew and grew and grew on me. Now I think it's incredible. I like it better every time I hear it.