Unintentionally Blank

I have been working on a plugin for WordPress recently that involves the use of custom fields to store data on events and output them on your blog in the hCalendar microformat. I am a big fan of microformats, I look forward to being able to use a program to retrieve contact details, event details or other bits of information solely from a well marked up web page and that is why I wanted to contribute with a plugin that helps people use them.

I am also a big fan of accessibility on the Internet too, so try to imagine my surprise when I came across Bruce Lawson and James Craig’s article on the Web Standards Project about hCalendar’s inaccessible dates. Two movements on the web are now working against each other? Are we pushing in opposite directions and still trying to achieve the same result? Here’s my opinion.

Continue reading “Aren’t Microformats Supposed To Be Accessible?” »

Recently there has been a meme floating around as part of an experiment in getting into the Technorati most favourited list. This was started by Dosh Dosh who is interested in seeing the effects of breaking into the top 100. It is a fair experiment with that respect, I actually added Dosh Dosh to my feed reader because of a couple of other traffic experiments carried out on the site.

While an experiment seems like a reasonable excuse behind the idea, and Dosh Dosh seems to be doing well out of it, lying 13th in the top 100 right now, I am a bit tentative to be drawn in. It sounds like a good idea, get noticed by being lots of other bloggers favourite, but you aren’t really their favourite and it is meaningless. It devalues the Technorati favourites system because bloggers are now adding anyone to their own favourites, even respected bloggers are picking up lists of blogs they haven’t even read and adding them in.

Continue reading “Playing The Technorati Favourites Field” »

HTML is great, anyone can make a website due to the simplicity of marking up a page and the leniency of web browsers. The idea that anyone could be on the lead to the huge growth of the Internet in it’s early days with personal pages and static sites popping up everywhere and again now with blogs and wikis.

As the Internet has grown so has it’s basis. HTML is much more than what IE or Netscape deem it to be, it has it’s own standards, it’s own structure and it’s own meaning. I’m not talking about the intricate complexities of Microformats, just about POSH.

Continue reading “The Internet’s Upper Class Or Why Your Site Should Be POSH” »

Today the City of London unveiled it’s wi-fi network.

The mesh network covers 95% of the City of London to provide wi-fi access to 350,000 people. There’s only one problem, it’s not free! It is, however, a step in the right direction for the free wi-fi that we all hope for. It can’t be long, Norwich has it, Manchester are planning it, I only wonder what the likelihood of a free service is when paid versions are sprouting up now. At least here the first month is free, I might take my laptop to work this week. Then again, I might just stay at my desk at lunchtime and use the Internet there!

Andy Rutledge takes a look at a few similar looking sites.

You would have thought that the marketing arms of each of the featured clones would have noticed that their sites were almost identical to their competitors. Then again, maybe they haven’t changed out of admiration for each other’s design ability. Whichever is true, I would like to see the result if one, like Andy suggests, steps out of line and makes for some originality. Andy only picked up on American department stores, but check out Next, Debenhams, House of Fraser and John Lewis. Again, like Andy suggests, take a logo and put it on another site. You couldn’t tell the difference!

Once more, Gack Ink is open for submissions.

The little Bring Your Own Blog network is growing in both numbers and personality. Get on board now.

This week I produced a relatively simple bit of code for someone to use on a few websites. All I wanted to do was take a contact form that I had already written, simplify it, comment it and send it on. Sounds easy, why wasn’t it then?

I learnt the PHP for creating a contact form last summer. It is one of the obvious things to do first as a contact form is a standard occurrence on any site. After gathering the information from the HTML form all that is really left to do is create the following line:

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

Having completed this, I uploaded a test and tried it out, visited my email account to see the test email arrive and… nothing! I checked and re-checked the code. I eventually found that I had a typo in one variable name, but that wouldn’t have stopped the message being sent, just not deliver any message. Minutes and hours of tinkering and looking on in disbelief with the occasional test passed. Eventually I received an email!

Continue reading “When Even The Internet Is Against You” »