Category Archives: Web

Links: Unconventional Art, Private Browsing, Scott Pilgrim

Posted on August 15, 2010 by Kelson

Some recent linkblogging. (Thank you, StumbleUpon)

Art

Privacy

Scott Pilgrim

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Please Check This Site on Your Phone!

Posted on February 11, 2009 by Kelson

A quick request, if I may: If you have a web-capable cell phone, would you please try to view this blog in it and let me know how it appears? I’m testing some plugins that should optimize the page for desktop, low-end mobile, and high-end mobile devices.

Please look at the main page and at least one post, then leave a comment below (still on the phone if you can) with the following:

  • What phone are you using? (RAZR, iPhone, etc. Specific model if you know it)
  • Can you load the site at all? (If not, what error do you get?)
  • Does it look like..
    1. The desktop version of the site (photo banner across top, full sidebar, complete posts on front page)
    2. A bare-bones page (plain background, mostly text, headlines only on main page, “Powered by WordPress. WordPress Mobile Edition” listed at the bottom of the page)
    3. A sleeker-looking list (grayish background, each post headline in a white rectangle, calendar image next to each headline, headlines on main page that expand to excerpts, dark banner across top, “Powered by WordPress with WPtouch” listed in footer)
  • Are you using the built-in web browser, or something you installed (Opera Mini, for example)?
  • Did anything not work?

If you can’t post a comment, please try one of the following:

  • Bring up the site on your computer to leave the comment.
  • Send me a Twitter direct message to @KelsonV.
  • Email me at kelson - [at] - pobox - [dot] - com.

I’m mainly trying to make sure that the detection code is working right, since I’ve got 3 different plugins (WPTouch, WordPress Mobile Edition and WP Super Cache) working together to manage it.

Thanks in advance!

Posted in Site Updates, Web | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Suggestions Wanted: Alternative Browser Alliance Relaunch

Posted on September 24, 2008 by Kelson

You may have seen my website, the Alternative Browser Alliance. I put it together in 2005, when flame wars between Opera users and Firefox users were at their height, to show that we shared a common goal: opening the web. The most popular page on the site is a list of web browsers, which is linked as a resource from a number of sites and also gets a steady stream of traffic from people searching for alternative browsers.

Of course, things have changed a lot since 2005, so I’m planning an overhaul of the whole site. Continue reading →

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Web Contest: 11 Years Later

Posted on September 15, 2007 by Kelson

While checking some dead links in the Internet Archive, I decided to see what they had of the website for the Literary Guild at UCI. This was a creative writing club we were both involved in back in college. There’s an abbreviated history of the club still online.

UCI Bookstore WWW page design contestI looked at the earliest archived copy I could find, and noticed down in the corner a badge for a long-forgotten website contest. Every quarter, the UCI Bookstore holds a literary contest, sometimes poetry, sometimes short stories. In spring 1996, they decided to make it a website contest. I had just built a website for the club, and submitted it. Our site was one of the three winners [archive.org].*

Just for kicks, I decided to see which of the sites were still around.

  • Literary Guild at UCI – gone. The club disbanded after the 2000 school year, and the defunct website was removed 2 years later. I still keep an archive of one segment, the collaborative writing projects, but it used to have 10 times as much writing, meeting minutes, club info and news, etc.
  • The Orchid Weblopedia – gone. It appears to have moved around a bit for several years, but the top search result for the title brings up its last web designer, and a note saying that “this page no longer exists.”
  • Ishmael’s Companion – the study guide for the book, Ishmael is still around, but it’s now a tiny part of author Daniel Quinn’s site.

1 out of 3. And even that one’s at a different location.

And so the link rot continues…

* I was hoping to link to an independent announcement, but the UCI Bookstore website only lists the most recent winners (Spring 2007), and while the Anteater Weekly regularly announced the winners, their archives only go back to 1997. I did find the announcement in the May 30, 1996 Zotmail Archive, but it doesn’t return linkable results, so you’ll have to search for it.

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The Perfect 404

Posted on September 13, 2007 by Kelson

Digg has a link to a story on creative 404 error pages. Amazingly enough, I managed to look at the page at the exact moment that it had 404 diggs.

How perfect is that?

404 diggs on the Collection of Awesome 404 Pages

Full screenshot below: Continue reading →

Posted in Web | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Unsyncable

Posted on September 4, 2007 by Kelson

I use Firefox, Opera, and Safari on a regular basis on three computers at home (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and two at work (Windows and Linux). That’s 11 sets of bookmarks that I’d like to pare down to 2.

del.icio.us helps somewhat, especially since I discovered I can add it as a search in both Firefox and Opera, but web apps have a certain amount of delay that doesn’t work for the most frequently-accessed sites. And I don’t want to add yet another web app, I want to sync the bookmarks in each browser.

Most of the solutions I’ve found (.Mac, Google Browser Sync, Opera 9.5, various Firefox extensions) are geared toward syncing two or more copies of the same browser on different computers. What I want is to bookmark a site in Firefox on one computer, and have it show up in Safari on another.

Any suggestions?

Posted in Web | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Vanishing Realm

Posted on July 7, 2007 by Kelson

Every Friday, a script verifies all the links on this website. I usually check the results that evening, or sometimes during the day at work, and see which dead links I can fix.

Strangely enough, this week 3 links on “What the heck is a Hyperborea?” have dropped off the face of the net. I checked the rest of the links manually, and 2 more turned up broken sites with internal errors!

The first was easy. It’s an excerpt from the book, Arctic Dreams: Imagination And Desire In A Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez. I just pulled up the Archive.org copy, picked a sentence to search for… and found the same excerpt at another URL. (A classic college website issue: moving faculty pages from a specific server to a more general site.)

The other two that actually reported errors are both role-playing games. The MUD Darkwind has moved to its own domain. Epiphany: The Legends of Hyperborea is a little trickier. It’s missing from its publisher’s website, but there are references to it online. I figured I could link to the sourcebook at Amazon, or maybe to a review, but the most informative page I could find was on archive.org.

Now to the sites that lied and reported “200 OK” instead of an error code. One was a page describing Clark Ashton Smith’s book, Hyperborea. The site had a search box on the home page, making it easy to find the new location. (It would have been nice if they’d actually removed the old script instead of letting it break. A 404 or even a 500 would have helped me catch this earlier.)

That leaves a Conan reference site, which is shut down, the domain name listed for sale. I went looking and found a site with maps of the world in which Conan takes place, showing Hyperborea near Cimmeria.

It’s just odd that three links would vanish from the same page at more or less the same time.

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Safari on Windows

Posted on June 11, 2007 by Kelson

Safari LogoWow. I have to admit I was not expecting this at all, but Apple has just announced they’re releasing the Safari web browser for Windows.

Increased consumer choice, of course, is a good thing. The most immediate benefit, though, is that Windows-based web developers (the majority) who haven’t been willing to buy a Mac to test their sites in Safari will be able to do full testing on all four major rendering engines: Trident (IE), Gecko (Mozilla/Firefox/etc.), Webkit (Safari) and Presto (Opera).

Also, there’s some really cool stuff available in recent versions of WebKit that will be great to have available for a wider audience.

Interesting thought: this may be the first browser released since Opera expanded to Linux in ~2000 that is available in the same version on Windows and Mac, but not Linux. Even when Internet Explorer was available for the Mac, it used a different engine than the Windows version did.

I wonder what impact this will have on the development of Swift. Its main claim to fame was porting WebKit to Windows, and it’s been months since their last release.

I also wonder what the status is on re-merging the KHTML and WebKit forks. It’s gotten to the point that Konquerer is only an approximation of Safari, making testing on Linux a little harder than it used to be.

(via Asa Dotzler)

No doubt there’s a 500-comment Slashdot discussion already.

Update: Slashdot’s all over it, and Opera Watch has a thread going as well.

Update 2: I’ve posted my thoughts on the implications for Opera. There’s an update at CSS3.info, where they have previews of upcoming CSS features available in Safari 3.

Update 3: I’ve updated the Alternative Browser Alliance to reflect Safari’s new status. This also solves a nagging doubt I’ve had as to whether the default browser on Mac OS should really be considered “alternative.” On Windows, it definitely is.

Update 4: The Webkit team and Web Standards Project have weighed in. The Windows version of WebKit should be available later today, which will be nice for following progress on issues as it moves from beta toward final version. It turns out there’s a regression and at least the Windows version no longer renders the Acid2 test correctly.

Update 5: The author of Swift says that Swift isn’t going away [edit: the blog has since vanished], and points out that “Swift renders more like a Windows Application, both in the GUI and in WebKit. Safari, looks just like OS X, similar to iTunes 6 and below.” Ever since Apple started porting apps to Windows, I’ve found something odd: A common complaint about third-party Mac software is that it doesn’t look and feel native (one of the big reasons we have Camino as well as Firefox), yet when Apple ports their own apps to Windows, it makes them look exactly the same as they do on Mac OS instead of making them work like native apps. I mentioned this to Katie yesterday and she suggested it might be a case of turnabout being fair play.

Posted in Apple, Web, Web Browsers | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Power of Suggestion

Posted on February 12, 2007 by Kelson

Surfin’ Safari posted an interesting remark that highlights the power of suggestion.

There’s a tip floating around to speed up the Safari web browser by changing a hidden setting, “page load delay.” There are testimonials by people who are really impressed with how much faster Safari is after making this change. Only one problem: The setting doesn’t exist anymore in current versions of Safari (1.3 or later), so changing it has no effect.

The author of the shareware tool in question responded, saying that he honestly had no idea that the setting had been removed, and offering a refund to anyone who wanted their money back. And there are a couple of other optimizations it can make.

There are some things that the human mind just isn’t good at measuring objectively, and perception of time depends very much on circumstance. “Time flies when you’re having fun” and “A watched pot never boils” have been known for ages.

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Unlikely Partnership

Posted on January 31, 2007 by Kelson

Here’s a surprise: web standardista extraordinaire Molly Holzschlag is now working with Microsoft to promote web standards within the organization.

Improving interoperability, especially at high-profile services like many of Microsoft’s, is critical to the future of the web. I can only hope that the emphasis on standards will feed into the design goals for Internet Explorer 8—and that IE8 will be released before Windows XP drops from mainstream to extended support in 2009.

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