Techie :: Techno ::: February 2007 Archives

In another one of the sidenote style posts ..... We've currently got about 4 positions open!! That's mad! It wasn't that long ago that we had 4 staff! Anyway, we're looking for the following:

• Sales Staff
• Technical Support
• Php programming

If you feel that you are suitable pop your CV over to management@blacknight.ie in PDF or RTF format.

Client-side Javascript is really useful sometimes, but this one is rather silly: It *thinks* the Oscars start in just over an hour, whereas they don't actually start for another 8 hours, due to the time difference! Oh well :)

As part of my ongoing efforts to make sites on this server run faster and cause me fewer headaches I've implemented Apache log rotation using Cronolog. Apache2 does support log rotation, but Cronolog gives you more options, which is why I chose it. On Ubuntu all you need to do is: apt-get install cronolog To see which version you have type: cronolog -V The version I have is 1.6.2, which was released 5 years ago! I guess that means "it just works". Unfortunately the documentation on the site isn't as extensive as I would have liked, but adding a daily log rotation in Apache2 can be done by editing the log entry in the vhost config to read as follows: CustomLog "|/usr/sbin/cronolog /pathtologs/logs/%Y/%m/%d/access.log" combined This will create a subdirectory for each year, month and day. As the site I was concerned about, IrishBlogs.info, produces rather large log files I was more concerned about getting them down to a managable size. I am not worried about processing them at this juncture. Hopefully this will help :)

Seemingly the people behind the new Lily O' Brien's site were paying attention to my post and the thread over on the webmaster forum. It's a pity that their staff can't be as mature and graceful as Ross, but there's very little we can do about that .... In any case the site now "works" in lynx and the w3c validator is no longer blocked. I have to say "works" as the use of ALT tags etc., is woeful and totally lacking in any semantic basis which would probably cause confusion for a visually impaired user and gives zero benefit in terms of SEO. (Try browsing the site using lynx to see what I mean). Why anyone in their right mind would want to block the w3c validator from accessing their site is beyond me. It makes me wonder what they had to hide. I suspect it was the bad coding, since none of the pages on the site were validating before the posts here and on the forum. With regard to SEO it will be interesting to see what happens. The original site ranked well and was obviously well indexed, as the image below illustrates: As all the inbound links to specific pages etc., are all dead you can expect to see Lily's SERPS being impacted negatively. Whether or not the site will eventually recover remains to be seen, but in its current state it distinctly lacks semantic textual content. Only time will tell.

I've just moved this site over to a different server for a number of reasons - one of them being that I want see how well APC works and it wouldn't work on the previous machine for some silly reason. In any case if anyone spots any weird errors please please please let me know.

I got back from ULlast night and went straight to bed! Skycon was great fun, but I was absolutely exhausted - Skynet really know how to organise a party! (A more sober post is on the company blog - if you'll excuse the intentional pun!)

If anyone wants the slides from my talk yesterday afternoon here they are: Open Office format PDF format

I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft server technology, but I was really impressed with the demo site that Rob threw up earlier today. So now we offer Asp.net AJAX extensions. Are you impressed? :)

Suse Linux is "on the road" with a date in Dublin organised for 27th March:

From Xen server virtualization to 3-D desktop graphics to tight application security, it's all in there. Don't miss this opportunity to meet experts, see live demos and learn why SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 is the best-engineered, Linux platform for your mission-critical applications.

Full information on the Dublin date and registration via their site.

I've mentioned issues with websites on more than occasion in the past. In some instances the issues have been mildly irritating, whereas in others they have been horrendous. When an ecommerce website basically tells me / my browser to "get lost" because I'm not using Javascript I get rather annoyed. However, for every website that tells users (and their browsers) to go elsewhere there's another that is sitting there welcoming them all in as potential sales. In the case of Irish handmade chocolates this is really obvious. A quick search on Google for "irish handmade chocolates" shows the top three or four companies in the sector: So the 3 main competitors are:

1. Butler's
2. Lily O'Brien's
3. Lir

I happen to like chocolate, so the results don't really surprise me :) Anyway, you could expect the search results to oscillate for certain key phrases. In this particular sampling, however, there is one wildcard - Lily O'Brien's. They're the wildcard for two reasons:

1. They just got a complete redesign which changed ALL the URLs
2. Their site is completely inaccessible to many browsers (and potential clients/customers)

I should be able to access an ecommerce website using ANY browser I choose. I don't expect it to work perfectly in ANY browser, though I would expect it to be functional in the most commonly used ones. I don't think that asking that is too much :) Since I like web standards and the like let's try a little test on all three sites and see what happens: Butler's W3C Validator Test: The HTML on this site is anything but valid, however once you force the w3c validator to deal with it you get a massive 92 errors! The silly thing is that most of the errors could be fixed very easily. They're silly things like missing mimetype declarations for Javascript etc., Lynx Test: The site is usable. Better use of ALT tags would make it a hell of a lot easier to get around, but it does display. Lily O Brien's W3C Validator Test: Failed. Now this is the bit that really got me. Not only did the site fail the test, but it's actually using server-side UserAgent detection AND is basically telling a large number of browsers to "get lost". What's laughable is that even the "get lost we don't like your browser page" doesn't even validate!! How on earth could they put together an error page that doesn't even work properly? No DocType declaration and incorrect HTML markup. Talk about adding insult to injury! Funnily enough the site currently has a good Google PageRank - I'd expect that won't last, as the new site is going to be really hard to traverse with a spider. Lynx: It won't let me view the site! Lir W3C test: Gives 67 errors. As usual most of them are very simple to fix Lynx: Navigable. Not as much content as on the Butler's site, but it's still usable The problem that sites such as Lily's face is that they are basically trying to force people into using what the developers / designers think people should be using. What if I wanted to access those sites using a PDA or my mobile phone? What if I want to use a new funky browser with a UserAgent string that their code doesn't recognise? What if I was using a screen reader? While JAWS may support Javascript I've already seen issues with UIs on several sites, so a site that doesn't have any text (or very little of it) is going to put people off. What about older people with weak eyesite? My grandfather, for example, is over 90 years old. His eyes aren't good. He has to use onscreen magnification to view a lot of sites. If they're using more images than anything else there isn't much for him to see. What if I have money in my pocket and I need to buy chocolates for my girlfriend? Are you going to tell me to go elsewhere simply because you didn't code the site properly? It will be interesting to see how the three sites compare in a few months time when Google has done another dance. Unless Lilly's make some significant changes to their current website layout I would predict that they will be severely penalised by Google et al and that their online sales will suffer as a result

Once you have a reasonably sized network you will get abuse complaints. It doesn't matter what's causing the complaints (well it does... ) but you need to be able to react quickly and deal with the issues. I've mentioned my own experiences dealing with abuse desks in the past..... Now for the flipside. Would someone please please please tell people to send clear abuse reports? Please? How hard can it be? I was reviewing a few abuse tickets this morning and had to ask someone else to explain what the hell they were talking about! For example this one is a classic case of bad English:

We are contacting you on behalf of XXX that is receiving objectionable traffic from your network. The type of traffic identified is tcp port 25.

Technically it's correct, but why couldn't they just say:

We are receiving spam / UCE / UBE from your network

That would have been a hell of a lot easier to understand (I've omitted the really clumsy introductory paragraph of their email). They've also included a load of rubbish about network abuse in general - we have our own AS number - thanks! Gah!

BarCamp Dublin is set to take place in the Digital Hub on Saturday 21st April 2007. I was at the last two Irish barcamps in Cork and Waterford, so I'll be attending this one as well. As it's in Dublin I expect there should be a good turnout (not that there wasn't at the previous events...) At this point the schedule is stilll a bit "up in the air", but I expect it will develop closer to the date.