A sly flourish or something more loud and ostentatious?
I stumbled across this site whilst looking for a fix for PNG’s in IE6, but keep coming back to it as an example of some awesome jQuery flashyness.
Web sites should be more fun 
February 5, 2009
February 4, 2009
Liferay 5.2 Released
The guys at Liferay have unleashed Liferay 5.2 upon the world.
Liferay is a fantastic Java based portal system. I’m currently involved in a project to deliver a website integrating a CMS system and the Liferay portal. Through development of JSR 168 based portlets written using the Spring Portlet MVC framework, Liferay can enable a huge amount of flexibility to the business to create, update and maintain a hugely complex site with little effort.
As an open source product, it is a shining star of what can be achieved with a focused team. Liferay has become an enterprise level product powering the web sites and intranets of several large brand name companies.
All in all, congratulations are in order for a VERY good job done!
February 3, 2009
John Resig – The Browsers of 2009
How I wish this graph was smaller!
Seeing as I’m currently struggling with IE6 development, I can’t wait until this graph changes… substantially.
The increased cost, stress and pain involved with development for the legacy browser is ridiculous. Here’s hoping that the (imminent) release of IE8 will push more people to upgrade. But I doubt it.
January 29, 2009
Absolute Genius
Extra quick post, just to say that I stumbled across this snippet of Javascript that I think is just absolute genius.
My current project at work is to build a new all singing, all dancing website. Which of course “they” (the business) wants to be compatible with IE6.
Browser sniffing is of course bad practise, but sometimes, there’s no option. Here is a tiny snippet of javascript which only ever returns true if you’re using Internet Explorer, all versions, thats 6, 7 and 8.
if(“\v”==”v”)
December 18, 2008
WordPress 1.7
Just upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. Each release seems to come on leaps and bounds. The new admin interface is fantastic, usable and feature rich.
The ability to automatically upgrade plugins, and to newer versions of wordpress once their released is a brilliant addition, meaning maintainence of the system is now a doddle.
The inclusion of a fair swaith of jQuery helps keep the interface smooth, the code small and compatible across all the browsers.
It’s a very impressive release!
Keep up the good work guys!
September 3, 2008
Google Chrome
It looks like the “Google Browser” finally landed.
Seeing as I am a Google fanboy, I’ve been waiting for this the second I heard it was happening. The fact that they got Scott McCloud to create a 38 page comic detailing Chrome’s features adds bonus points!
From my perspective, the three most interesting features, in order of importance are;
- Separate threads for each tab/plugin/window.
- Javascript compiler
- Open source
We’ve already seen what Firefox’s entry into the browser market has done to the “industry”, it’ll be interesting to see whether Google can shake it up any more.
There are a few things missing though, although they aren’t show-stoppers;
- Ad blocker – Aparently there are adverts on the web, I wouldn’t know, seeing as I’ve been using Firefox with adblock plus since it was released.
- Spell checker – I’m lost without this, where oh where are my red underlines?
So far though, I’m really looking forward to working with Chrome, it’s underlying engine is Webkit, which is also used by Safari. Looks like Open Source cross pollination is the way forward!
May 17, 2008
Wild Wild Wiki
Sites like Wikipedia have had a meteoric rise to fame (and potential fortune) over the last few years. There was a time when a random question was answered with a plain “I have no idea” now it’s generally a question of who can type in www.wikipedia.com the fastest.
In some ways, the prominence of Wikipedia has almost “sullied” the concept of a wiki. When someone says “wiki” it’s the first example that springs to mind, with all of the baggage that accompanies it. Some see Wikipedia as a resource of knowledge, others as a chaotic tangle of mis-truths and flame wars. Some of the fairly recent press on Wikipedia hasn’t helped this image.
This prejudice towards wikipedia spills out onto wiki’s in general, which has made selling the concept of a wiki to the corporate world something of a challenge.
Wiki’s allow communities of people to share knowledge and experience on relevant topics in a structured yet flexible manner. In order to leverage the power of this collaborative resource, a level or order must be imposed on the evolution of a wiki. Wikipedia benefits from a core group of dedicated administrators policing the site, re-writing, linking and trimming the articles entered from the collective conscious of the internet. In a corporate environment where resources (people) are more limited in the time they can spend enforcing structure, sections of the wiki need to be organised in a consistent and logical manner.
Companies can greatly benefit from the wiki concepts. Corporate Wiki’s can become vast stores of knowledge, all interlinked from article to article, allowing a user reading the policy regarding the Disaster Recovery policy immediate links to related pages on back-up procedures or fire regulations, etc. Were these documents each stored in a static Word document, it would increase complexity.
When looking for advice on introducing a wiki into the business world, I trawled the web looking for some kind of “best practice” which would help me to define a structure and hierarchy which would encourage use and growth in a scalable and maintainable way. The best resource I discovered in this capacity was WikiPatterns, an excellent resource of Patterns and Anti-Patterns, how you can get the best use out of them, or solve their issues as they arise.
I am currently working on a project to implement the Confluence wiki from Atlassian. This is a Java based, fully supported enterprise level wiki. In my own webspace, I plan to use MediaWiki, the open source wiki behind Wikipedia.
May 16, 2008
Getting Agile
Recently I’ve been looking at escaping the standard “Waterfall” approach to projects and the development lifecycle. There are many reasons behind this shift, not just the “everyone works in an agile manner” thought, here is a small list;
- Client involvement and “buy in”.
- Easier incorporation of ideas and changes.
- Ability to change direction to meet the changing demands of the client.
- Reduction of risk.
I have had issue in the past of seeing the benefits of agile practices, mainly from reading and listening to preachers and evangelists giving sermons on agility from a highly theoretical, high level manner. What I found lacking was an easy to understand, entry level discussion on what works, and what doesn’t.
Whilst at the qCon conference, I picked up a couple of books for free in print that InfoQ make available on their website. One of these publications gave me that low level basic understanding and view of agile that I needed.
Scrum and XP from the Trenches
This book walks through the concepts of the Agile development methodologies from the perspective of a developer, the author Henrik Kniberg, has implemented many projects using the agile concepts, and through all the struggle and teething problems, has written his experience and approach down in an easy to understand way. It is important to note that this isn’t a theoretical “how you should work” it’s his own experience of how they did work.
I have found it an invaluable resource and have encorporated many of it’s teachings into my current way of working.
May 15, 2008
Featured on InfoQ
I noticed yesterday that the blogs I wrote for the qCon conference in March have been featured in the qCon round up on the InfoQ site.
That would probably explain the jump in spam
May 13, 2008
Site Update
I’ve added a page showing pictures from my Flickr account. Mainly as a quick proof of concept of integrating Flickr with WordPress.
