boogdesign links

I've had another article published on developerWorks, a short one this time, which looks at utilizing the new Microformats API in the upcoming Firefox 3.0 from within an extension. With it being a purposely short article I had to gloss over some of the background steps, so if you have any questions ask in the related forum topic and I'll try and point you in the right direction.

I've had another article published on developerWorks, this time a tutorial so you'll have to register to view it. It moves on from my previous article with some actual code examples of a lot of the stuff I talked about before. Check it out and let me know what you think!

I'm now moderating a forum on IBM developerWorks:

A forum, moderated by Rob Crowther, to discuss building web pages and sites that are a part of the Semantic Web. We'll cover the main front-end technologies such as RDF, RDFa, Microformats, GRDDL and OWL. This is a community for us all to learn together about how to build the next generation of the Web.

If you have any questions about Semantic Web technologies, or just want to share your ideas, please come along and make a post.

This might be big news for the Semantic Web, or it might not mean much at all. In one way, this doesn't change very much - Yahoo! is very much niche as far as search engines are concerned (in the UK at least), MSN/Live has overtaken them in terms of referrals on the websites I work with (probably because of all the new installs of Windows which have that set as the default search provider, rather than because their search is better), but both are dwarfed by Google. In another way, it might be enough benefit to make people think it's worthwhile to start adding more semantic markup, which in turn might lead into a virtuous circle which quickly ramps up the amount of semantic web content available to a critical mass.

I've been published by someone other than myself! Read my introductory article on applying Semantic Web technologies to your website on IBM's Developerworks site. Although it's mostly my own words, I had a lot of help from the guys at Backstop Media, who were great. This was an interesting experience for me, from frantic writing into the early hours of the morning to being interviewed through my mobile while standing in a fire escape stairwell. I was kind of nervous about the whole thing, but got great support all the way through.

If anyone's followed the link from the article back to here, then welcome! Please feel free to let me know what you think in the comments to this post (they're moderated, but I check a couple of times a day). In the meantime the potential influx of visitors is motivation for me to complete all those half finished posts I've got lying around from the last five or six months and try and look like less of a slacker

Web as ubiquitous computing platform got a boost today as Google announced a version of Gears for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices. Google Gears is a browser extension which lets web applications work offline, which is a crucial requirement if you're planning on doing any serious application for a mobile device where the connection is likely to drop in and out relatively often (compared to your desktop PC). It's a shame that they've not started with Symbian, the most widely deployed smartphone OS outside of the US, but hopefully they'll get to it shortly.

And while on the subject of Symbian based OSes, Microsoft also made an announcement in the mobile device space today - they have agreed with Nokia to write a version of Silverlight for Series 60 (which is Symbian based) phones. I admit I hadn't really taken Microsoft's 'cross platform' claims for Silverlight that seriously up until now, because they weren't even as 'cross platform' as Flash, which is hardly the gold standard, but a few more announcements along these lines and they might convince me.

Following up on the increased storage (now over 4Gb) and the improved support for mobile phones, this week Google rolled out IMAP support for Gmail. I access all my other mail accounts through IMAP, so I don't need to be convinced of the benefits - mostly (for me) a consistent view of your entire inbox (including sent items) across all the mail clients on all the different PCs I use to read my email (currently six, and now my mobile phone). If you're not so sure, try reading "Why IMAP is better than POP" or "POP vs IMAP for Inboxes."

Also related to my little signage project in the last post, one problem I encountered was the IE would insist on displaying a vertical scrollbar even though it wasn't required - and since I knew the exact pixel dimensions of the display I knew I didn't need one. It turns out there are many solutions to this on the internet, it's a common complaint when IE is rendering in standards compliant mode, and the solution is easy enough, just put:

html {
overflow: auto;
}

in your CSS file.

Today I've been working on electronic signage, to display meeting details on small screen outside of meeting rooms. The details themselves come from the booking system sold by my employers and the data is sucked out from the back end database by a fairly simple ASP page. The sign is really a Windows CE device embedded in a box with 640x480px display, which is configured to launch PocketIE in kiosk mode, pointing at my ASP web page when it starts up.

Nothing too complicated. However, to confirm with the client that I've developed what they actually want I need to send them screenshots. There's no facility for screenshots on the device itself, but it displays almost identically on desktop IE - from which I can easily produce screenshots. The problem is I wanted the dimensions of the displayed page in desktop IE to exactly match the dimensions of the device screen, but desktop IE has a whole load of window chrome (borders, toolbars etc.) which don't show on the device. I could have messed around trying to get the correct size manually, but I thought there had to be a way I could achieve with code.

The solution was a little harder to find than I expected, most browser resizing solutions concentrate on changing the entire window rather than the visible part, but I found a good solution at the above link. I also turned the code into a bookmarklet so I could add it to my favourites in IE by hardcoding some of the values, it should be easy enough to change if you need a different resolution.

An interesting article from David Airey, and I'm always a sucker for this sort of thing I'm sure I've made far more than just seven mistakes, but I'll stick to his ones:

• Mistake #1 - not using a self-hosted blog - never been a problem for me, since half the point of it has always been to mess around with the blogging software.
• Mistake #2 - expecting people to visit - well I've never really expected people to visit this little blog, but the wider point here is that you've got to drive traffic to your blog by interacting with other bloggers as well as the readers of your blog - good advice.
• Mistake #3 - not writing as if I’m talking - I think what he meant to say here was 'not writing as if I'm conversing', the point being that your blog posts should invite people to respond rather than attempt to intimidate them with your superior knowledge. At this juncture I think I ought to point out, if ever you read anything on this blog where it sounds like I'm trying to initimidate you with my knowledge, rest assured I'm almost certainly bluffing
• Mistake #4 - changing the location of my blog - I think this isn't an issue so long as you've avoided mistake #1 and are able to deal with sitemaps and either mod_alias (redirect specific URLs with RedirectPermanent directives in your .htaccess, eg. from /blog/ to /) or mod_rewrite (use a regular expression to redirect with a bit more intelligence).
• Mistake #5 - neglecting my article headlines - David's been reading the same blog writing blogs I have. This is still a trap I fall into - I have to fight my tendencies towards whimsical and abstract headlines. Witness the difference in views of Rob discovers his Javascript inadequacies, chapter 442 (88 views at time of writing) and Unobtrusive Javascript, Opera, <body onload= and window.onload (608 views) - both are short posts describing a javascript 'gotcha', but one has an abstract title while the other describes a specific problem.
• Mistake # 6 - not linking to others as I’d like them to link to me - I would like to think I've always been a good netizen in this respect, but probably I'm guilty of the odd slip up. 'Do unto others' is always a good bit of advice in my opinion.
• Mistake #7 - underestimating the time commitment - this is a funny one for me, because I think I'm fully aware of the time commitment required, which is one of the reasons why this blog went three weeks without an update this month - other things to do! (And more on those other things in later posts, I hope!)

Neat trick (so long as whatever you're using to view this supports Unicode, and your font has full support for all the possible characters) - a little utility which translates each character of the input text, using a symbol lookup table, to a character somewhere in the Unicode character set which looks like that letter upside down.