5 years, 5000 bookmarks

Actually, it's only 4 years and 3 months since I started using Powermarks to manage my bookmarks. (Before that I used the browser's useless built-in bookmarking feature.) Today I've added my 5000th bookmark. 5 years just sounded better. That averages to about 4 a day, or just under 30 a week.

So what have I been bookmarking? I thought I'd do a trip down memory lane. Here's a snapshot of 4.25 years of internet time, and a reflection of what I've found interesting at the time. Note that the following indicates when I bookmarked something, not when it was actually published.

Bookmarklets updated

I’ve updated the popular bookmarklets page, where I compile bookmarklets from various sources that I find useful. I also added it to the main site navigation.

Multiple IE versions on one PC -- now possible!

Big news in web-design world this week (disregard this email if that doesn't apply to you):

Someone has cracked the years-old problem of how to have multiple versions of Internet Explorer running under Windows, without resorting to virtual machines.

Here's the original article, with the background and explanation, and here's the most useful URL -- all packaged up for download.

Of course, this meme has already travelled all over the web. You can read more at
http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2003/11/06/ie_x_3/
http://a.wholelottanothing.org/archives.blah/007561 (wondering why on earth MS has kept this a secret so long)
etc.

Why is this important? For me, mainly CSS debugging. It should also be useful when developing complex DHTML.

Eureka.

Good article about using MT

Good article about using MT as a mini-CMS.

Japan travelogue

While our 10-day holiday in Japan ended over 2 weeks ago, I’ve been pleasantly reliving it since then putting together a travelogue of sorts from the over 1000 photos we took. It’s a bit too easy to take photos — the digital camera holds about 350, and when it fills up, you use an ATM-like machine to put them all onto CD, clear them off the camera, and start again.

I should really start trying to explain why we wanted to go to Japan, but that’s difficult to put into words. I’ve been something of a Japanophile for over 10 years, a result of manga, film, books, music, and I even feel a kinship with some of the social norms that differ from the West’s. That said, despite how friendly and helpful the people were, I thought that getting deeper than the superficial tourism level would take years of living there.

Probably the greatest direct influence was the films of Studio Ghibli and the recent opening of the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka.

The travelogue’s here (table of contents):

Besides the diary-style day-by-day pages (that may only interest relatives) there are also some subject-specific pages:

• Imagery: Japanese posters, signage, TV, and other designs
• Design that’s different or clever
• Food

I wish I could summarise an incomparable 10 days better than this, but perhaps the travelogue does it adequately.

Thanks also for everyone who offered us advice while we were planning the trip. You know who you are!

Six years (and another anniversary)

I just registered a couple of domain names through the wonderful gandi.net. (If all goes according to plan, this site will become just fjordaan.net soon.)

Filling in the domain expiry date in my calendar, I noticed that 27 March is also my London anniversary. I’ve lived in London exactly 6 years today. I nearly missed the anniversary. I have another hour left to reflect on it.

At the last anniversary, I lazily said I was too busy to reflect. That’s not really the truth. I mull over my circumstances constantly, but now as then, I don’t give myself the time to write down my thoughts. But in the last year, I bought my flat, stayed at the same job, and finally registered a personal domain name.

Ready!!! Memory empty

I walk past this billboard on my way to work every day. The meaningless buzzwords and equally meaningless photographs arranged around that pseudo-religious centerpiece always struck me as almost funny if it wasn’t so depressing. It seemed a relic of an era already past, and I often wondered how it lasted so long on that spot. Last week, I smiled to notice that the electronic display that usually scrolled “Supply chain management” and yet more buzzwords, appeared to be fizzling out.

Arukou, arukou

It was the last of my new year’s resolutions I expected to obey. But last week we bought two tickets to Tokyo, for the 17th of April, returning the 28th. It’s the culmination of 10 years of japanophilia via films, books, comics and music, and part of me wanted it to stay in the fictional realm. (Kelly had no such hang-ups.) The opening of the Ghibli Museum (or see here or here) in 2001 was probably the final push.

Anyone reading this have any information or tips for Tokyo? Any indispensable websites?

Blogging in the 17th Century

This meme deserves to be spread: Samuel Pepys’s blog demonstrates much that’s good about the internet, and the blog form. Where relevant, entries are cross-linked and people and places are linked to background information (including online maps). But more significantly, comments and trackbacks allows a wealth of related information, provided by visitors, to gradually accumulate around the text. A truly worthwhile project.

Is this thing on?

Months ago, when my ISP upgraded their servers and Berkeley DB with it, I found myself locked out of my blog. I only needed to update the MT database files but lacking root access, couldn’t do it myself. Today I discover it’s working again. Either one of my earlier abortive attempts worked, or, more likely, the ISP took pity on my plight. So that’s one New Year’s resolution taken care of; we’ll see how far I get with the others...

1. Upgrade MT
2. Improve site
3. Visit Tokyo
4. Write

Exploring music: Allmusic.com

I’ve been looking for a good online music encyclopaedia for ages. An equivalent of IMDB.com, basically. Last weekend I finally found it in allmusic.com: I’ve been unable to stump it. I haven't found any band with a published album too obscure to be included. Not only is it it complete, and the capsule biogs are well-written, but it is cross-indexed to within an inch of its life. Every single record is crammed with metadata; a band might be classified as

• Genres Rock
• Styles American Underground, College Rock, Experimental Rock, Noise-Rock, Alternative Pop/Rock
• Tones Irreverent, Sleazy, Humorous, Outrageous, Freewheeling, Gleeful, Boisterous, Brash, Provocative, Rowdy, Aggressive, Silly, Druggy

Discovering music: Sonomu, Epitonic

I’ve recently discovered sonomu.net (“SOund NOise MUsic”) which is a thoroughly cross-referenced repository of non-mainstream music (similar editorial policy to The Wire magazine, for example) — organised by artists, albums and lables, with reviews and .m3u streams of complete tracks (no downloads unfortunately), all in a wonderfully simple, fast design. Crossreferencing music you know with music you don’t is always a good way to discover new music. You can also listen to a random selection of tracks from the site as a radio stream.

You need to register to use it, requiring only email address and a non-valuable password (they email it back to you in plain text).

It’s a good companion to epitonic.com, still my favourite site for discovering music. Like sonomu, epitonic also showcases mostly little-known bands (which is probably how these sites can afford to be so generous), meticulously organised over dozens of genres, and cross-referenced to within an inch of their lives. Very usefully, the cross-referencing also includes better-known bands that aren’t in the epitonic catalogue, but you are more likely to recognise.

In functionality epitonic leaves sonomu (and most other music sites) far behind. All tracks are complete, and are downloadable as well as streamable (MP3 and M3U respectively). The “stream this page” feature, when browsing genres, is fantastic. It also has an excellent “black box / playlist” facility, allowing you to save stuff you like and create playlists from it, which you can email to friends, or just set up a day’s worth of listening.

Not sure yet how much of an overlap there is between the two sites’ catalogues.

RichTextBox: In-browser word processor

I know it’s been quiet around these parts the last couple of months. Flat-buying hassles was part of the reason, but also, an increasing amount of moonlighting work. One project went live this week — the redesign of RichTextBox.com.

My jaw dropped when I saw this utility the first time. RichTextBox is, essentially, MS Word running in a browser, downloading in seconds. Kind of put my own suggestions for textarea enhancements into perspective, and offers one workable solution to getting correctly styled content into a CMS. I wish I’d known about RTB for the last custom-CMS site I worked on. It'd be great to integrate with a blogger; as Moveable Type is a CGI app, and RTB is ASP.NET based, I wonder if this would this be possible?

Still working on several projects after hours, so posting will probably continue to be sporadic for a while.

Homeowners

Today we completed the purchase of the flat I wrote nearly two months ago that we were being kicked out of.

It’s been a nerve-wracking two months, as we had to arrange a mortgage before 25 July, when the flat was due to be auctioned. Last Monday it still seemed hopeless.

The sale’s story is a fascinating one, of our own struggle and the iniquities of the London property market.

Character entity chart updated

IE3/PC and NN3.04/PC added to the entity support table (which tells you whether it’s safe to use — to get a — in your favourite browser, for those of us who care about such things.)

Don’t trust Verisign

Read this, this and this. Then, if you agree, blog it: Verisign. Oh, and if you’re looking for a trustworthy domain registrar, the MetaFilter thread is an excellent place to start.

Uprooted

Wednesday. Our landlords inform us they’re selling our property and we have two months to find a new place. We’ve lived here 2 and a half years. It’s the best place we’ve ever had.

Coincidentally, the previous day someone contacted me asking me what our flat was like — they’re thinking of buying a property in our housing estate and found, through a web search, my contact details on this site. I painted a very positive picture. The next day I heard we’re losing it. Thankfully, the flat they’re considering isn’t ours. But I’m envious — I’d love to be able to buy here.

Saturday. We found a place. It’s 2 blocks from here, and very nice. We took it. It’s sinking in, though, that it’s not as nice as this one. Not only that, but in the last 2½ years rents have increased 25% at least. So we’re 100 quid worse off each month. I’m trying to ward off creeping depression.

Not looking forward to the big move in 3 weeks.

Yat-Kha. And Reality Film

When these Tuvans play live in your neighbourhood, go.

A small step for web typography

A Textpad macro that converts quotation marks and dashes with one keypress. Towards a foolproof route from Word to HTML.

Updates: Entities and bookmarklets

IE 5.0 PC and Opera 6 PC added to the entity support chart (thanks Nate and Branko), and lots of improvements to the bookmarklets page.

Wanted: A foolproof route from word processor to HTML

As I admitted at the end of my entity support test article, knowing which special characters display correctly is a hollow victory.

Sure, now we can easily use the correct typographical marks when working in our favourite HTML editor, but only a small fraction of text on the web is generated like that. The great majority originates in word processors wielded by journalists or editors, and is transformed into HTML either by the word processor itself, or via a CMS, or by an HTML “programmer”.

Even if the writer was versed in the correct use of special characters, the deck is stacked against the typography surviving the transfer to HTML. The most popular word processor in the world generates HTML so bloated that it’s practically worthless as a route to web publishing, and doesn’t convert special characters to the correct numeric entities. Copying and pasting formatted text from Word into a WYSIWYG web editor like Dreamweaver doesn’t convert characters correctly either. And few HTML coders have the time or the knowledge to convert these characters by hand.

Jared Spool in London

A very entertaining lecture (“Beyond Common Sense”) Monday night by New York’s foremost usability expert.

For me, the most important point he makes is that today’s design process does not have a feedback loop built in. We build, and then move on to the next job (“throw it over the fence”), never listening to the users or learning from the mistakes we made. Or for that matter, learning from what works.

Browser support for extended characters

HTML forced many typographical limitations onto designers. Some, like exact font specification, are unavoidable. Others, like extended characters, are not, but are so inconvenient few people bother using them. As a result, many features of fine typography like curly quotation marks, dashes and ellipses are all but extinct on screen and many designers are no longer even aware of their existence, or resort to semantically meaningless GIFs for special characters. These things matter.

If clumsy editing tools weren’t enough of a problem, browser manufacturers compounded it through their incomplete support for character entity references. The former problem is modestly addressed by my Dreamweaver and Textpad modifications.

As for the browser support, aardvark created the invaluable Character Entity Chart (required reading before any of this will make any sense), and advises that “to be sure a particular browser supports the entities (both named and numeric), simply open your browser to this page and view the charts”. Unfortunately, without a reference you cannot be entirely sure whether a character is displaying correctly, and not all of us have the means or time to test them. For that purpose I’ve started the numeric entity browser support table [200kb]. Update: Anyone wishing to contribute reports use this Excel file: table.xls.

Here are some conclusions, observations and questions I’ve drawn from it so far:

I’ve updated the Textpad clip

I’ve updated the Textpad clip library to include many more useful numeric entities. More details here, or download it now.

Five years

I’ve been living in London for five years today. I’ve had five homes and four jobs in that time. I’d look back and reflect, but I’m too busy. That may be a good thing or a bad thing.

XHTML modifications for Dreamweaver

I’ve gone and implemented all Dreamweaver updates for XHTML and Unicode character entities. Anyone wishing to do the same and want to save themselves some work can download all changed files here. You need Dreamweaver 4. Also included is a clip library with numeric character entities for use with Textpad. Update 10/4/02: More detailed instructions, and some additional files that have been modified, detailed below. The files in the ZIP are now also organised in the correct directory structure.

Mac on Win98

No, I'm not running a Mac emulator. That's a VNC window looking at a G4 sitting in another room, via the company network. The G4 is running the 300kb VNC server, and I'm viewing it, and controlling it, using the 170kb VNCviewer application. It's as fast as if I were sitting at the Mac. Cross-platform website testing without leaving my seat. (Now, if only we had VirtualPC on that G4...)

Avoid italics

On the CHI-WEB list the other day, someone asked for arguments against using italics on web applications. A colleague was claiming that italics have been proved more legible than normal text.

Online cross-platform testing

So cross-platform testing is the bane of all webdesigners’ lives. I was just musing while reading this indispensable article, which advises, regarding browser support for character entities:

“To be sure a particular browser supports the entities (both named and numeric), simply open your browser to this pages and view the charts. If the character you want doesn’t appear in the target browser, it doesn’t work (simple, huh?).”

Pretend-it’s-magic time: Wouldn’t it be great if someone was to set up a website that’ll provide snapshots of a given URL on any browser on any platform?

Picture this: Using an online form, you enter your URL. Then you specify platform (PC, Mac, Unix, WebTV, PDA, etc.), browser, browser version and desired window size. Submit, and after a short wait, the site serves you a PNG snapshot.

More crayons—and a lesson in HTML

People may be wondering what happened to the 216-colour “web-safe” palette. Besides increasing irrelevance in the face of improving technology, some have also pointed out that it is less than infallible.

So let's assume that the lowest common denominator is no longer 8-bit colour (256 colours), but 16-bit (still more than half of all users). We still need to ensure that colours display consistently across all 16-bit and 24-bit monitors. Enter the 4096-colour “web-smart” palette:

…a 16-by-16-by-16 cube of 4096 colors. The web-smart palette uses any combination of 00, 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, 99, aa, bb, cc, dd, and ff, and provides a more complete gamut that should display consistently on monitors that support thousands (16-bit color) and millions (24-bit color) of colors. Most of the colors dither to the nearest browser-safe color on 256-color monitors.

The main purpose of this site is to provide a resource for web designers and developers to test this expanded palette. The web-smart palette pages show different demonstrations of the palette. If you adjust the bit depth of your monitor, you can evaluate how the colors display at different resolutions.

The site does a great job of providing the means to preview and select colours from the palette.