Rob's diverse findings

.. is it still spreading?

Now, I am blogging about browsers. Let's revisit an older post. In January of this year I posted about the spread of Firefox as reported by the XiTiMonitor. There are new numbers available. Let's compare the old and the new ones.

The old numbers

The new numbers

Overall we see a little increase in percentages, although some countries have dropped a little bit (Ireland, United Kingdom). This is mainly caused by the fact that XiTiMonitor now used measurements of an entire week and not just one Sunday as in the previous report. And in this report they also show that the share of Firefox usage in the weekend is slightly higher than during the week. Firefox support in companies is still a problem.

Other countries have gained a bit more than average, Romania, Ukraine.

Here is link to an English version of the XiTiMonitor Firefox survey in PDF.

So, is it spreading?

I think that the numbers in this latest survey are more to the point. (The previous 'Sunday-only' numbers were rightfully questioned by FirefoxMyths.com/.)

I think, it shows that Firefox has taken a steady beachhead in Europe. The trend will show in the next reports as we can then compare the same type of numbers.

Tags:

• firefox
• XiTiMonitor
• spread
• europe

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Roho Products - Web design - Steenwijk

This post originally appeared on an external website

.. I have never experienced one like this

The insurance company I work for is on the brink of launching it new improved website. I was involved in developing the site in particular the XHTML and CSS are largely my work and I also did some of the C# coding. The bulk of the framework was created by our architect in such a way that developing parts of the website was a breeze.

Now we are about to finish this long running project I can do some reflection (our architects has done enough of that already).

Normally

In a normal world in a normal IT project towards the end of it you will find people working hard making long hours and run around trying to get the highly necessary features in before the deadline. In a normal world this is what makes up the last couple of weeks of the project life cycle. It's part of the fun. It's the final blast before we can open up some bottles and admire the product we created. Then after three seconds of leisure it's onwards to a new challenge.

In a normal world in a normal IT project towards the end of it you will find people working hard making long hours and run around trying to get the highly necessary features in before the deadline.

Note, in a normal world this would be the case.

Are you normal?

Since there are hardly any normal companies or even IT departments a project never really runs as planned.

Our website project never ran as planned, since we never were really sure it was planned. Perhaps someone had the master plan, but he kept it a secret in a very dedicated way. So, in a sense it is possible that everything went according to plan. Hmm, that is a discomforting idea.

So, we are not normal, over here. I knew that, but it is just a confirmation. People who work in projects enjoy confirmation. The need it, constantly. Projects are usually riddled with exceptions and issues and conflicts and a constant factor in a project forms a stable basis for happy, hard working project members.

People who work in projects enjoy confirmation.

Constant factors of projects

Projects are always late
This is something we have successfully achieved. Originally we would go-live on 13 September (luckily no year was mentioned, so we could be several months early). 1309 will always be some special for us.
Scope creep always happens
Yep, been there done that. On the one hand we squeezed in some Flash bits late in the project, on the other hand a wrapper and caching services were created because the CMS could not perform as we would have wanted.
Planning is usually infuenced by something trivial
Well, the content of a website is not something I would call trivial but that was how it was treated in the planning. It turned out that this was what was worked on until the last minute. In fact it is being worked on as I type this and my guess is they will still be doing this after the launch.

So, this makes the project quite normal.

What is worrying me

The thing that is worrying me is that in a the great many projects I have been involved in at different companies in different roles is that there always was the constant factor of the "almost-finished-rush" just before the final milestone of a project. You would find to be converting data, making final changes since the production environment was completely different from what it was designed for or you would find yourself moving boxes or telephones or other heavy stuff.

In this project I am becoming completely disoriented. In the last five to six weeks I have solved maybe seven bugs found by our testers and seven bugs found by myself or the other developers.

I miss that rush. That rush usually prevents you from thinking straight. You have to press on to solve issues and meet the deadline and you hardly have time to think about how to solve them.

Now that rush is absent we have time to go over and over the website and we spot many small issues and also bigger ones. Pages that hardly contain any content and things like that. But still, at most annoying for a visitor but it will not cause errors.

Tags:

• projects
• project management
• workload
• launch
• stress
• rush

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Roho Products - Web design - Steenwijk

This post originally appeared on an external website

.. and without any major glitches

Yesterday was the the biggest milestone in the project that had this weird end. The website that we had been building for the last year and in the time before that exploring in several Proofs of Concept. It had been a struggle at times with new technology, getting specifications sorted out, having a deadline before we had any specifications, struggles within our department, new people, struggling with a not very performing CMS and going through burning hoops to get it to perform etc. etc. You know, the usual stuff that happens in any major project. For some reasons they always happen.

Yesterday we had breakfast with champagne to celebrate the event and after that we were allowed to "enjoy the achievement a bit", which meant just staying in and doing as little as we did over the last couple of weeks.

Only the usual little problems popped up that kept some of us from really "enjoying the achievement a bit".

I think we pulled off quite an impressive job, but also think that we have just set a first step on a long road ahead.

Tags:

• web site
• milestone
• live

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Roho Products - Web design - Steenwijk

This post originally appeared on an external website

.. when you do it the right way

"Disclaimer"

I know this blog entry is close to self-indulgence, but it is just a self inflicted boost for my self-confidence. Heck, every now and then you have to tickle yourselves.

OWI Van Lieshout

If you want to laugh, you have to tickle yourselves.

A new website

The website that we launched yesterday is big cooperative effort from the entire department and each one of us has put in their respective special skills into action. This has resulted in a completely fresh site that is ready for the next couple of years.

We have moved away from an all ASP site with frames and table-based layout to fully fledged .NET site with our own framework that spits out clean XHTML and CSS.

This last bit has been my main focus in the project. I must say that I am proud of what has come out of it. There is room for improvement, as always. On top of that one learns new things every day and these new things have pointed me to little bits of code that can be improved.

Let's make things better

Now we have finally finished our deliverable we are fixing the inevitable small issues and are already looking at improvements. During the build we compiled lists of these and now we can at last start making them.

In my area of XHTML and CSS I have started working changing the layout. The site was designed with 800 by 600 pixels as an already overdue requirement. So, right now I am tweaking the site's CSS to make it a 1024 by 768 pixel design. Much to my enjoyment I have already one of the templates working in Firefox and I only have hack a bit to make things work in Internet Explorer.

A couple of things make feel very good today:

• The speed at which I have made the changes
• I have also made some changes to the implementation (background colors and images) are now on more logical elements.
• By changing the implementation I have reduced the number of background images and made some considerably smaller.
• To top things of I have not changed one bit of the XHTML. Meaning that I can drop the changed CSS files and background images on the server and implement the new size!

That's why I am pretty proud of myself.

Tags:

• website
• fun
• separation
• structure
• style
• behavior

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Roho Products - Web design - Steenwijk

This post originally appeared on an external website

.. in modern web design

Maybe I should again apologize for the ''Building websites is fun post I did yesterday. I was maybe cheering to hard for a goal I scored as part of a great team. But once again, I could not have done without the rest of the team.

And it is just such a good feeling that things that you have put together prove to be working in real life. I guess that's why I became a developer in the first place: creating things. That's probably also why I keep up this blog.

Col. John "Hannibal" Smith (George Peppard)

I love it when a plan comes together.

What's all the fuss about?

So, what's all this fuss about then? What did I contribute to the project that works like it should? Why cheering for just doing the job I was hired for? Shouldn't things always work when I create them?

Uhm? Yeah, well, right. Ok, yes, sorry again. I just made another impression that successful development work is something to cheer about loudly and long just because it so rarely happens. Apologies to all colleagues around the globe.

OK, now stop apologizing and tell the handful readers what it was that I did.

What did I do?

In the process of building a new website for an insurance company I was assigned to make sure that the XHTML and CSS coming out of the site was as optimal as possible. More or less self assigned as I thought to have gathered some knowledge in that area. The team was already underway with several Proofs of Concepts of early phases of the site framework and I joined in time to take up my task King of XHTML and CSS. And happily so.

Just before last summer the graphic designs came to us and they were delivered mainly as Photoshop files and some early versions of cut up html. I then started to work on tweaking these to be lighter in markup by stripping out unnecessary bits and making sure stuff showed like they should in the two major browsers of that moment: Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox. I also checked to see if things were reasonable in Opera and on a Mac. But that was only on an occasional basis.

Plan of attack

The old website was a highly successful site (in its market) and was developed some years ago. Since then many tweaks and enhancements were added. The site ran in frames and the layout was largely table based. Good old fashioned Old School web design. In essence nothing wrong with that: it produced very good revenue.

For the new web site we opted to become more up to date. We moved from the classic ASP to ASP.NET and on the client side we opted for XHTML. As configuration was set high over old fashion programming we did not go with the standard .aspx files (in fact we have only one .aspx file). A complete framework was built that has several types of containers for the different types of pages. In the CMS one can pick the right container (template) for the page and the information will then be displayed correctly. There are quite a few webservices running in the background that glued all things together.

My role in this was taking the different page designs and translate these into XHTML and CSS which the other developers could then implement in containers and components of the framework. My most important focus was separating the structure of the page and the styling. The third aspect of a web page: behavior was already being handled by external JavaScript files.

Using the principle of separation of structure (semantics), style and behavior we were able to keep the site very lightweight for our visitors. The users don't for all the clever stuff we did in the background on our servers and load balancers. They just want to get the information quickly.

Structure & semantics

As far as was possible within the framework and the design the html was stripped to the minimum so it was still semantically correct and enough structure to allow the styling to make up the design. This was all implemented in various containers and components that show different types of content and controls. That gave a few restrictions and added a bit of extra fat, but the overhead was small and made for easier development of the server-side framework.

Styling

At first we had a huge CSS file. Later that was cut up into several as not all containers use all styling. We added a bit of intelligence to the containers and let them load extra stylesheets when needed.

We also added a print stylesheet that simply hides all unnecessary stuff like menus and also adds the URL to links through the content() styling. This proofed to be quite a simple approach and gave satisfying results really quick.

"Bad vision" styling

Then there was a little bit more work. The site needed also to be viewable by people with some kind of disability. We added a button for "bad vision" that would link in other stylesheets. The "normal" stylesheets had pixel based fonts and as you know that does not really resize very well in Internet Explorer and also the used background images and all measurements were not relative to font size. Resizing the font in your browser will lead to a broken page layout pretty quickly.

So everything needed to be em based. Then the layout was changed from fixed width to fluid so the browser window would be used to the full at any resolution and not just 800 by 600 the site was designed for originally.

We also dropped a lot of the background images to make it easier to read and added a "skip links" link. (This "skip links" link is hidden in the normal vision site which the more I think about that was maybe not the best decision.)

This special impaired version of the stylesheet did involve some work, but it was done without any changes to the html. The only change is that containers load an extra set of alternative stylesheets.

Benefits

The benefits of separating structure, style and behavior have become really apparent during the development of the different styles. It was very easy to update and also very flexible. I also did some research on bandwidth savings and a saving from between 10 to 20 % is made. That is taking into account the images that are part of the content. During the research I found that these images are nowhere near optimized for the web. SO if we could improve on that I guess that the savings could go up to around 30%.

Conclusion

By separating the different aspects of the web pages we have reduced on time spent making changes and will also save on bandwidth usage. So overall it is the right thing to do, not because it is hot or trendy, but because it saves both time and money.

Go ahead and have look at the new website.

Tags:

• separation
• structure
• semantics
• styling
• behavior

This post originally appeared on an external website

.. smaller or bigger?

In a post today Tony Patton over on TechRepublic discusses Determining a standard screen resolution for your application. He has some point to keep in mind when designing a web site.

• There is a general trend towards bigger monitors with higher resolutions. Multiple screens are close to becoming a common household item as well.
• Never ever use your own screen resolution as the standard.
• Nor the monitors of your colleagues. Both will be probably more state of the art than the old CRT or cheapo flat screen from Joe Average.
• Screen resolution does not equal the viewable area or the browser window size. Most users will not have their browsers maximized on screen.
• It is good to look at visitor statistics, but be sure to sample the right audience. Taking the numbers from a site largely visited by developers will not do when the site you are designing is aiming at pensioners.
• Also keep accessibility issues in mind. The disabled users can use screen readers with or low resolution monitors with odd metrics. You should test, test, test.
• You can use JavaScript to establish the viewport size and serve the client a fitting design.

All in all, a not all too shocking article, but a good summing up of things to keep in mind.

Monitors are becoming smaller, not larger!

In a comment TechRepublic member Wombat Ron then adds the increasing use of handheld and smartphones that have much smaller screens. He predicts that the 640*480 resolution could be coming back into the charts. So, it is difficult to say whether we are moving towards bigger or smaller screens.

Separating content and styling

I think Ron is right, although I think these could be handled by using the mediatype'handheld' to serve special styling through a dedicated CSS file. This is where separation comes back in its full power. With a good design of the structure of your site (the html) you will keep that lean and you can then just as easily serve that to handhelds and adjust the styling so that it will fit on a small screen.

What is wrong in the article?

One thing struck me as quite odd in the article was the example code that was in the article. This code looks at the size of the window to determine what to present to the customer. See code.

<SCRIPT language="JavaScript">

<!--

if ((screen.width >= 1024) && (screen.height >= 768)) {
window.location="high_resolution_version.html";

} else {
window.location="low_resolution_version.html";

}

//-->

</SCRIPT>

Here the principle of separation is missed completely. The users is redirected to another page and I think that it would be more then enough to serve another CSS file.

Separation of structure and styling gives the versatile option of changing the style while still leaving the structure intact. At our new website we have a 'normal' version and an 'impaired' version. The only difference is that other stylesheets are delivered to the visitor. The html stays the same. (Mind you: this does not make the site accessible, there are still plenty of issues that we will tackle soon.)

Right now, I am working on changing the layout of the site so that it strechted from an 800 pixel wide design to a 1024 pixel wide design. I this is all relatively painful as I only need to make changes to a couple of CSS files and stretch a few background images.

Afterburner

What is the most odd really in the 'resolution business' is that apparently designs are made for 1024*768 or 800*600. I hardly ever design the height of a web page. The width is a valid parameter but the height of the page is usually determined by the content and as a designer you have hardly any influence on that unless it is your own site.

I usually design for a certain screen width. Also I have a preference for fluid or liquid designs.

Tags:

• web
• design
• resolution
• separation

This post originally appeared on an external website

.. and got it working

I have a laptop so I can bring that to clients and show some stuff and work at other locations than my home office. As with all computers I have owned after some time the systems can not hold all the stuff you want to take with you and become slower and slower after intensive usage.

As the machine was still good enough for its purpose it was time to give a little boost. I wanted to add some memory (I worked with a lousy 512 MB anyway, which is not very much) and my hard disk was filling up with all sorts of disk images and projects and other stuff that I needed more storage as well.

Just for some extra info: I won a Acer Aspire 6003. I am quite happy with it.

Adding memory

Adding some memory shouldn't be too hard now. On the bottom of the machine is a panel that hides the memory. Taking a screwdriver it is simple to remove the screw and then open the panel. Tada! There is DIMM module. I take this out with care and look at it with interest. It says 256 MB and I have 512 MB total memory. I look inside the opening, but no, I can not find another DIMM. Hmm, this is strange. I have looked at the manual and it says that there should be two memory modules. There are some more panels one that leads to the wireless card and the others are for the battery and de the media drive. Look again in the manual and all over the Acer website but I cannot find out where the other DIMM might be. So, I decide to just replace this DIMM with a bigger one.

Carefully I make a photocopy of both sides of the DIMM so I have with all information necessary to purchase the correct one later. And indeed this came in handy as there are gazillions of memory modules to choose from. I buy a 1 GB DIMM and pop that in and my laptop all of sudden has 1,25 GB of RAM. It was completely plug and play. Unbelievable that things do work like that. Starting up my system is now a lot smoother and faster since there is no swapping going on anymore.

If anyone can tell me where the other DIMM is hiding in my laptop then I might just replace that one as well.

replacing the hard disk

I had already figured out that adding memory would be much less of a hassle then replacing the hard disk. I had one big requirement with this part of the job: I don't want to be busy reinstalling the OS (Windows XP) and all the applications and then for ever patching all the stuff. I wanted to copy the hard disk to the new drive and replace the old disk with the newer one.

I had the following plan:

1. buy an external hard disk casing for a 2.5" drive with a USB interface
2. buy a 2.5"hard disk
3. put these together and hook it up to my laptop
4. copy my hard disk to the new drive
5. swap the drives and smile, smile, smile

I combined the first three steps by finding a cheap complete external 120 GB 2.5" drive with USB cable. This would double the storage of my laptop which seemed enough for now.

So I hooked up the drive and started off with grabbing Partition Magic and created some room on the new drive and then started copying the partitions across. I created a new partition in the remaining free space. This takes sometime so in the mean time I watched some World Cup.

With all copying finished I switched everything off screwed open the external casing (voiding my warranty, but what the heck) and took out the new drive. I then swapped it with my laptop's drive and switched the laptop on.

Aaaargh!

Windows started protesting that hal.dll was corrupted or missing. Googling over the Internet and several news groups I found this to be a common problem happening when people tried to do what I did. I tried several of the fruitless solutions and then tried a new approach.

One workable solution appeared to be making a copy of the existing drive without making any changes to partition sizes or adding partitions in the remaining unused disk space.

I downloaded Casper XP trial edition at Future Systems. It gives me 30 days to try it out, which should be more than enough to tackle this problem. I put my old drive back into the laptop and I told Casper XP to copy my drive to the new drive. It warns me that all info will be lost and then told it would take more than 10 hours to complete. A World Cup hardly ever lasts that long so I decided to just let it run through the night.

The next morning it was finished and thanks to some clever algorithms for copy empty space it took just two and a half hours. I swapped the drives and like a breeze my system booted! Absolutely amazing!

Partition Magic came in handy to stretch the partitions to cover the entire drive and in a matter of another half an hour I had my system completely ready.

Conclusion

Even though there was some problem with copying the hard drive in the end it was quite a simple job. You need to know the right approach on copying your Windows XP installation onto a new hard drive and you need the right tools. Looking back I might not have needed Casper XP I could have used Partition Magic (with the right strategy) or Norton Ghost for that matter.

A job is always easy once you know how to do it.

Tags:

• laptop
• upgrade
• memory
• harddisk
• acer
• winxp

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Roho Products - Web design - Steenwijk

This post originally appeared on an external website