JazzyMoon

Morning, the first rays of light come through the window…

My boss comes in and says:
Client !!!
Do accessibility, ROI and traffic,
Landing page, Adwords , ethic,
Adsense, Campaign, Usability,
Human resources, Deadlines, Accessibility.

Without a hesitation I go then and see the designer! I say:
Apache, PHP, MySQL,
C#, .NET, MS SQL!!

The designers reply:
So DIVs, CSS, Photoshop, Indesign,
Colour chart, gradient, Logo, Branding.

Ok then I say:
XML, Web 2, XSL, SEO,
Microsoft Project, CMS, let’s go!

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Wikia Inc., the company behind Wikipedia, has launched ‘Wikia Search’ in its public alpha on the 7th of January. It is a new search engine, and its principle is meant to be a revolution, as it is the first open-source Web search engine.

Wikia Search uses ‘Grub’, an open source distributed search crawler. It means:

• Anybody can participate to improve the code of the crawler.
• Users can download a Grubclient and crawl the Internet. The result is then indexed by the Wikia search servers.
• Users can submit and review websites.

The results of a search with Wikia Search will be inaccurate still for some time, as Grub needs to be installed on users’ computer and crawl an estimated one hundred million websites worldwide.

Wikipedia is now the 9th most visited website according to Alexa, and is almost as accurate as Britannica. The same way, Wikia search, using the open source community, could become a very serious competitor for Google.

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I found an article by David Airey, a designer who had his website hacked last December. Mr. Airey had his Gmail account hijacked, and the cracker transferred the domain name www.davidairey.co.uk without his consent.

The cracker asked then a ransom of 650$ to recover it.

The technique used to hack the Gmail account is known as the Gmail E-mail Hijack Technique, but has been fixed by Google since then.

The Gmail account get Hijacked when a user goes to an evil website. A filter is setup in the Gmail account of the victim, which forwards all the emails to the email account of the hacker.

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There are many articles concerning the subject, but I would like to have the approach of a developer.

It is always a riddle to try to make the website compliant with all the browsers. But what are the constraints at the moment?

The ratio between the main browsers is roughly the following:

IE6
IE7
Firefox


45%
35%
15%

Source: www.thecounter.com

These three browsers count for around 95%, the rest being Opera, Safari and IE5.

IE7 is a better IE6, and IE7 would hardly fail on a layout where IE6 succeeds. Internet Explorer 6 has a poor compliance with web standards, but as it is broadly used, developers and designers will have to cope with it for still some time.

The good news is that Microsoft is putting a lot of efforts making Internet Explorer compatible with standards. Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test as explained in this post of the IE blog.

My approach is to develop under Firefox, using very useful add-ons like Firebug and Web Developer, and then to fix all the glitches under IE6 using a second style sheet called with conditional comments.

It is possible to obtain that way a layout compatible with 95% of the browsers.

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This next video is about image retargeting. A little software is now available at http://www.thegedanken.com/retarget to test it.

This algorithm has been invented by two Israeli researchers and allows intelligent resizing of images. This technology, also called Seam carving or liquid resize, should be available soon as a plug-in for Photoshop, and maybe one day installed by default on browsers.

After trying it on a few images of www.eyecitysolutions.co.uk, my opinion is that this technology has some limitations:

• It is not possible to resize the image less than 70% of its original size. The image gets then too distorted.
• The image must not have straight lines or regular shapes like circles. Most of them become bowed and crooked.
• It doesn’t work when there are writings on the image, as the alignment of the characters is lost when retargeting.
• The protection mask, that allows protecting some areas lacks of precision. Often the areas around the protected mask are damaged when retargeting.

Excepted from these drawbacks of the current version of the algorithm, I think this technology has a great future and will be regularly embedded in softwares.

Resources:

• Flash Online seam carving implementation: http://rsizr.com
• Wikipedia article on Seam carving http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_Carving
• The website of Ariel Shamir, one of the authors of Seam carving: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik
• The software used to test the image retargeting: http://www.thegedanken.com/retarget

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The name of the domain is now fixed: www.JazzyMoon.com
I started to customise the template. The base is Spotlight 1.3, a template of the WordPress template subdomain.

I wanted to add a second ‘sidebar’ in the footer. I followed the instructions of a topic of www.blogohblog.com. For the rest, I played with the CSS and some images.

I will continue to customise this website, focusing on the design and the usability.

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I am working on the title of the website. I wouldn’t have thought starting blogging before having a permanent address. Anyway… I have been thinking of several possibilities, and posting may help me to find the best one.

A website address must follow the following rules:

• Easy to remember.
• Easy for pronunciation.
• The domain must not be already taken, and it is better if the .com, .net and .org domains are available.
• It must sound nice, especially for those who are supposed to use the website.
• It must have an identity.

I found an interesting post from www.seomoz.org. Other rules would apply in my case:

• Easy to spell.
• Keep it as short as possible.
• Finally the AJAX Domain checker from www.ajaxwhois.com is really useful in this case.

Considering this, I had several examples:

• ManiacTree. Can be confused by Maniac3 or ManiacThree. Sounds a bit stressful.
• ChromaticMoon. Hard to say and to spell
• JazzyMelon. Sounds good, easy to remember, but may sound a bit silly.
• NanoBlue. The .com domain is already taken

Writing that, I realise I am attached to do the association of two words, and also some of them are tongue twisters. To be continued…

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Here we go for the first post of this blog. I have been looking around for some solutions like the one proposed by Google for instance, but was more interested in more flexible solutions like WordPress, Drupal or Mambo. The interface of WordPress is quit satisfying, and allows in-depth customisation through themes, plugins and hand-coding (solution I would prefer to avoid actually ).

I started to develop from scratches an ArtBlog for some friends, www.ArtBlogCommunity.org, on the purpose of promoting their creations, but felt like reinventing the wheel. The advantage was to develop in the Microsoft Technologies though, as opposed to the free technologies provided by the PHP Group.

I will be talking about different issues here, personal and professional, and well, in two languages. Hours of plain joy for the reader . I intend to sort the posts according to their languages and their topic though, making the things a bit easier.

Hope you will enjoy. Welcome to this Weblog!

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