March 20th, 2009
So IE8 is out, released with barely a whisper at 4PM GMT yesterday. I had already tested many of my sites with release candidate 1, so I knew I didn’t have much to worry about. The infamous compatibility mode forces the rendering engine to work in IE7 mode, but non standard mode for standards compliant websites is the preferred mode, and it is the mode I’m using. So far everything looks fine.
New features include stealth browsing, better address bars and search bars, and improved tabbed browsing. Accelerators and web slices are Microsoft’s answer to the current widget and mashup mania. Conspicuous in it’s absense is a plugin/addon feature. Removing plugins seems crazy to me – it is the feature that makes firefox so cool.
Performance seems to be similar to that of IE7, and the browser still seems a bit bloated. Reports are that the browser does significantly worse in the Acid3 test than its competitors, but I haven’t had the opportunity to verify this yet.
Tags: Internet, Web Design
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March 11th, 2009
In 1997 or so, I made my first webpage. It was hosted on geocities, and used plain html with not a doctype or css style in sight. It took me about an hour to figure out the html syntax and put it together, and another hour to iron out the quirks. The page certainly wouldn’t win any design awards, but it was typical of what was out there at the time, and certainly nothing to be ashamed of.
Fast-forward to 2009. I’m currently deciding which open source CMS platforms to invest in, which PHP framework to choose, what new technologies Spiralli needs to embrace for the medium term. It is starting to become overwhelming. We need to constantly innovate to stay on the bleeding edge, but that means having a laptop perched on my knee until bedtime most nights.
Last year, for a course I was teaching, I outlined in a powerpoint slide the typical technologies and software one would need to have in their arsenal as a web developer generalist. I ended up leaving stuff out, so it would all fit on a page.
In my opinion, Spiralli has a good balance at the moment, with a design person and a development person. I’ve only met a few talented individuals who excel at design and development, in fact talent in one often seems to preclude an ability in the other. I get by with graphic design, but I’m not a designer.
We are starting to see more projects, where an aspect of the implementation needs to be outsourced, just because we can’t justify the large time investment to learn a new technology for a small value-add on one website. Outsourcing is always a worry – on one hand it allows us to provide a wider range of services, but on the other hand, quality is always a concern.
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March 5th, 2009
I’ve been blogging a bit about the Zend framework lately. Bottom line – I like it, but I ran into a huge problem this week. I needed to run a periodic maintainance task, which would normally be a piece of cake to set up as a cron job.
The trouble with the Zend framework is that it uses mod rewrite and a dispatcher, so that everything is internally dispatched from index.php using seo friendly urls like mysite.com/controller/action/parameter. PHP from the command line just can’t handle this – it expects to be passed a physical path to a php file. There are some modules in the works for Zend to facilitate this, but nothing is generally available now. I was up the creek without a paddle….
Until I found
this. The author built a bootstrapper with a difference: “This file will glue Zend_Console_Getopt together with Zend_Controller_Request_Simple to get arguments from the command line into the request object.”.
I tried it, with a certain amount of trepidation, but with a little tweaking it worked! I’m now merrily scheduling tasks from the command line which have access to Zend’s MVC architecture and class/function library.
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