Unintentionally Blank

No time to write a full post today! A few things interested me over the last couple of days though, not just the Macworld conference (which has overwhelmed the blogosphere and crashed Twitter). Here are a couple of links you might be interested in.

If you’re feeling creative and want to make your mark on potentially millions of people’s home pages, Google have opened the iGoogle themes API. Now anyone with skills in HTML, CSS and a little experience with XML can create a theme for the iGoogle home page. If I was feeling creative, I might just have a go…

Now that Internet Explorer 8 has passed the Acid 2 test, along with Firefox 3, Safari 3 and Opera 9, those browser manufacturers need a new challenge. Ian Hickson has been putting together the Acid 3 test, which will test the dynamic abilities of the browsers. There will be 100 tests, and each latest browser is guaranteed to fail at least one of them (it’s part of the criteria for the test). You can even have a go at writing a test as Ian needs 16 more tests to complete the suite. This will be something to watch as browser manufacturers stop feeling the heat over HTML and CSS!

I couldn’t completely leave Apple out of this set of links. I read recently that Google saw a surge in traffic from iPhone users at Christmas. While this isn’t really a surprise, the first thing I did when I saw a friend’s iPhone was go online, the following days showed quite an interesting result. While the iPhone surpassed all other types of phone for visiting Google at Christmas, in the days following it dropped to second place behind Symbian based phones. Consider with this that Symbian phones account for 63% of the market for smart phones and the iPhone only has 2% share. Newer and better mobile interfaces like the iPhone are causing more and more people to use the web from their mobile. If you make websites, you need to consider the small screen!

That’s all for now, hope you are having a good week!

A warning, accessibility, while wonderful, is not the be all and end all of all things web. Brian Kelly of UK Web Focus made that point in a post today using Second Life as an example.

Second Life is a virtual world in which residents can walk around and interact with others. Being primarily a graphical program, visually impaired users may find it difficult or impossible to use. Brian alludes to the idea that institutions may be developing policies that would prevent use of digital resources, like Second Life, because they don’t comply fully with accessibility guidelines.

Continue reading “Don’t Overdo Accessibility!” »

It may be belated, but happy new year to all my readers. Even more belated, merry Christmas! I hope you all had a nice holiday season, enjoyed whatever time off you could, got all the presents you wanted, saw all the family you hoped to (or could stand).

I spent the time visiting friends and family, which was lovely. My girlfriend also got me an Xbox 360, which she is probably regretting by now and added to the distractions which have kept me from this blog in the last couple of weeks.

I enjoyed myself, especially taking a bit of time off from the Internet (but for checking my emails and spam comments from my mobile, which turned out to be invaluable as Akismet missed a couple, obviously taking some time off too). It was quite nice to have some time away from a computer, but it is nice to be back too. I return to routine this week, as I am back to work, so I thought I would couple that with a return to the blog too.

Year In Review - 2007

2007 was my first full year blogging so it seems right to take a look back over what was popular, how the blog has grown and then have a look forward to the coming year to see where I am going.

I have seen a lot of growth in traffic and subscribers this year. Looking over my stats from January compared to December shows that traffic has increased nearly 250% and subscribers have gone from around 20 to around 120. Over the year I have managed to bring in more than 35,000 page views from more than 23,000 visits, figures that I am very happy with and pleased to say continue to grow.

But enough about my ego, how about the content? The most visited pages this year reflect some of my best posts, which I am happy about. The top 5 is as follows:

1. Cross Browser Background Transparency With CSS
2. How To Use Conditional Comments In Internet Explorer
3. My Style Sheet Switcher
4. My Opinions On Using Conditional Comments
5. My Original Font Sizing Script

4 out of those 5 are actually posts from 2006 (I suppose established posts tend to get more results from search engines) so if you are relatively new to the blog, please check them out!

The Year Ahead - 2008

Having been pleased with the growth above, all I want is more in 2008! This means I will be continuing my series on accessibility issues that you may not have thought about and web developer tools as well as more CSS techniques, accessibility issues, scripts and anything else that comes to mind. You may also see a new design soon and I might even upgrade from WordPress 2.2 (yes, I am lazy and haven’t upgraded at all recently). As always, if there is something you would like to hear my opinion about or need help with a technique that I have written about (or even those that I haven’t, if you want to test me), just drop me an email or leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading and being a part of this blog as we start in 2008. I hope to provide loads of useful stuff, so stick around, but I also hope to make more contacts online, so please say hi whenever you want. Happy new year!