Peterbe.com

I've now written a little something that is able to convert a piece of text and make URLs into hyperlinks. Here's an example:

Go to www.abc.com
and foo@bar.com

this becomes:

Go to <a href="http://www.abc.com">www.abc.com</a>
and <a href="mailto:foo@bar.com">foo@bar.com</a>

Findory Blogory is an index of weblogs categories much like Google does with Google News is an index of news. I must admit that I like it. I like it a lot.

The absurd thing is that they're free-riding on an existing layout so that users can skip over the getting-familiar-with-new-interface-stage. As long as the content is different I see no ethical errs in copying the layout like this. In fact I think it can only enhance the user experience. I have done it too, I copied the only menu nav that Google used in my IssueTrackerProduct design as seen in these old screenshots.

This is an idea I've been juggling in my head for a long time. It's a web application where anybody who feels like it can sign up. Once you've signed up you write the email address of your friends and family who you usually forget to keep in touch with.

I'm confident to say I'm not the only one who has a long list of friends in different places on the globe where the best and sometimes the only contact is email. You write a little email every now and then to show your "interest". Or rather, to prove you haven't forgotten about them, because you don't want them to forget you. The problem is that as the list grows your email-sending-frequency stagnates with time. You might even remind yourself, standing in the shower, that it's been months since I last emailed my grand-father but by the time you sit by your computer you have completely forgotten what you reminded yourself of in the shower.

Here's my discussion for a solution

I often find that typing in text in some textarea boxes on webpages that the size of the box is too small and I wish I could expand its size like I can with a running GUI program like Notepad or XEmacs. Here is now my experimental attempt of solving that problem. I've only tried it in Firefox (Linux) and Konqueror (Linux) so far. It did not work in Konqueror :(

The obvious risk is that having controls like this will confuse newcomers; and you can't use excessive and intrusive text to explain what these controls do.

Obviously this needs to be couple with some sort of cookie feature so that the desired size is remembered; but that's not the issue here.

Have a play with it

Oystercard for those who don't know is the modern ticketing system used in London. It's a "swipe" card you can use on buses and the underground.

Anyway, I registered on their website today and it starts like any other registration form with the desired username and password. When I submitted the first form it gave me an error message shown in this picture

This is a good list to keep in mind. It lists lots of different WYSIWYG editors that you as a web master can install so that content managers can update web pages as if they're writing in M$ Word.

The one I liked the most after a quick browse was FCKeditor which is released under the LGPL Open source license

It's so lightweight and simple to use that it might even be worth including FCKeditor in a future release of my beloved IssueTrackerProduct

Intel.com is wrong. When you visit one of Intel.com's web pages with the today most advanced and solid web browser: Mozilla Firefox they tell you to upgrade to ancient web browsers such as Internet Explorer 5.0 or Netscape 6.0. How many years ago was it that these browsers were released?

Shame on you Intel! Fire the person who wrote your JavaScript.

See what I wrote about Jaguar's website a couple of months ago. They're guilty too.

Here's a brilliant example for why frames are evil and should be avoided as much as possible. This site uses about four of them making it scattered with scoll lists.

This site is also quite stupid in that there's a Javascript alert() that pops up every time you roll the mouse over any image. I don't know why because if you need download them you can by simply viewing the source code of the page. What happens is that the mouse is in the centre of the page and when you try to move the mouse across to the menu on the left you're bound to roll over another image and that will force you to move the mouse back to the centre to cancel the Javascript alert.

Think again David.

For all HTML language lawyers out there... I've got a page that is defined as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and in it I use a table that has many <tbody> tags, in these I have a class definition like this:

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>No</th><th>Name</th>
  </tr>
  <tbody class="foo">
    <tr>
      <td>1.</td><td>One</td>       
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

That was not valid XHTML according to the W3C Validator and it took me some time to figure out why. Now I've got it! One has to use the thead tag too if you want to use the tbody tag. Here's an example:

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>No</th><th>Name</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody class="foo">
    <tr>
      <td>1.</td><td>One</td>       
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Worth remembering.

A horrible experience of a website. There are so many bad and ugly elements that you can't even find anything that is actually good about the design. Not a single thing. All the subpages (if you find them) are all different and there's no consistency other than every page being equally crap. The GAA page is also worth a look for laughs.

If you know a bit about HTML, have a look at the source of the page for laughs. 114 "spacer gifs" and absurd use of div tags.

As you might notice little of the text on stradbally is readable, but this page about cats or something is even worse.