More common pleas for survival
Workshop Summits
I have been in a two day training conference similar to the CSS summit I attended a few months back. Its a cool trend and seems to go pretty well, except for the one presenter yesterday that had issues with her connectivity. It seems to be a new trend to do these video conference type using DIMDIM and web cam and a linked in chat via a sidebar, using HTML 5 terms already, and I think its thousands less than the larger conferences per person. I mean we go to our 20th floor training facility, have three screens with the presenter on it, have our own laptops to communicate and see the slides better, as well as download for a follow up. SO we spend a few hundred on this presentation rather than the 200k we spent on SES. It was awesome to be in NY for a week but I get almost the same from sitting on 20.
Its funny I have this guy I worked with years ago, he lies about his credentials, he labels himself a guru of Social Media and had some seminar locally not too long ago, I have no idea how it was received, but why was he doing a face to face in person event when this trend seems to work well.
Anyway, the interaction for this is immediate and the value is great, I am not sure what we paid for this event, but individual was $399 as a group maybe double, but not the flight, or drive back, hotel, food and all that. We had about 15 people so far that hit the two yesterday and about the same with a few new people today.
Anyway I will hit up with the topics covered and place them now that WP is scheduling again. Yesterday we covered CSS 3, HTML 5 and we are going through Microformats currently. Interesting stuff.
HM
Wordpress 2.9
So one of the features I have been loving in Wordpress lately is the Schedule, its been around forever, but I have only recently used it from what I understand it never worked. I guess I was running WP 2.8 and the scheduler worked fine, but this new build that I just updated to does NOT work at all. I have scheduled 3 entries the last few days and ALL have missed launch. I thought at first it was me I was doing something wrong and have cautiously went through adding things and nothing has worked. I end up deleting the original message and re launching around the time I want the entry to launch…really sucks. Hopefully WP on their new build will fix this, until then know that these entries are all manual.
**ironically I had to manually push this article since the scheduling would not work for this AGAIN!!!
HM
Wordpress 2.9
So one of the features I have been loving in Wordpress lately is the Schedule, its been around forever, but I have only recently used it from what I understand it never worked. I guess I was running WP 2.8 and the scheduler worked fine, but this new build that I just updated to does NOT work at all. I have scheduled 3 entries the last few days and ALL have missed launch. I thought at first it was me I was doing something wrong and have cautiously went through adding things and nothing has worked. I end up deleting the original message and re launching around the time I want the entry to launch…really sucks. Hopefully WP on their new build will fix this, until then know that these entries are all manual.
HM
IE 9
I have been doing some research on CSS 3 and how we can use it here at work, and planning on rewriting my site in it; I actually bought new space and have to move things. They are supposed to be able to transfer my blog easily, we will see. I may be condensing, I have two sites really, my hjmoore420 and hjmdesigns. I may just be doing hjmdesigns and having both point to the same place on the new server. They are basically the same site with two different looks, I wanted a resume site and a professional site, but they are kind of one and the same at this point. Anyway, I was doing research on CSS 3 and had to comment on IE 9.
Should we as developer applaud the release, whenever that is, years after all the other browsers already support the new features, at least most of the new features, in CSS 3?? I mean Microsoft should be leading this as they think they own the internet, and as numbers I have reported on this show, they are losing their possession. IE market share is slipping online, since they still have rattling around products like IE 5.5. IE 8 ios a decent browser as it meets CSS 2 guidelines, thanks for catching up; but shouldn’t they be pushing to have compliance with CSS 3?? They will, their blog, shows they are starting to pass some of the tests all the other current browsers currently meet, and considering W3C is about to make law some aspects of CSS 3 in a month they need to get IE 9 out. They can just copy what Mac does, safari, Microsoft is good at that.
HM
Short Week
CSS 3 is the most current design standards as set by the W3c.The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. They govern rules to develop by and create guidelines for browsers that most (all but IE) adhere to for the most part.
Fortunately/ unfortunately for us Opera is the most Compliant browser to any of this, Safari a close second, from what I could see. Opera runs around 2% of the internet and on EG less than 1%. Safari hits 4% of our Visitors and is around 7% of the internet. With only 8% of the internet seeing CSS3 at its fullest should we even consider moving forward on our sites?? Right now IE sees over 70% of our market share but it is slipping overall around 64%; this is obviously the biggest player in the browser war, but a few years ago IE was well into the high 80s in percentage if not the low 90s; with the changes that are coming from W3C it would not be wise to ignore what is coming and start to implement some elements of CSS 3 to our current sites and when building the sites that are coming in the next year build CSS 3 compliant sites. The changes I will document are accessible to the widest browser support, I have personally tested on all browsers at my disposal: Opera, Safari, FF (PC and Mac) and all IEs down to 6 and currently these changes will be viewable to almost 30% of our visitors and with IEs simple ignoring of these styles we can get a similar if not identical behavior from IE making the extra coding negligible.
As far as the W3C is concerned a chunk of the new CSS standards are about to be finalized and should be by the end of January. Open discussion on the first module of CSS 3 should be finished by January 31st however; the overall compliancy of the new standards has been underway by every major browser but 1. IE has minimal support thus far for CSS 3, however rumor is IE 9 will follow CSS 3 guidelines, in fact from the IE Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx) they are testing on Acid Test and CSS 3 standards and meeting some of the tests which is a step forward to where they are now. What I am going to focus on now is the aspects that we can benefit now that will not be entirely different than what we have done, re writing some of the code for JAC and soon the other sites we re write to be compliant with CSS 3 in respect to Rounded corners, Nth Child and a few of the new Pseudo classes that CSS 3 brings. I have two pages of our site re written in CSS 3showing what will be possible and how we will build with CSS in the near future.
CSS 3 Article
I have been busy with Christmas coming up, Friday we had a bowling party at work, I did terrible, and Monday and actually today I am sick as a dog. SO its been extra hard to post here. I am doing research for CSS 3 for a presentation I am doing here so I am passing along an article on the subject from Smashing from a few weeks back. Enjoy, and I will try to get back to regular posting a few times a week as the new year approaches.
HM
CSS 3 nth-child
So looking a little closer at the code I put up yesterday
tr:nth-child(odd) {
background-color:#C6D2C4;
}
is all you need to do some zebra striping on a table (tr) on a page. What we do in the past is a PHP deal that set a var the looks for odd by %, I understand PHP enough to be dangerous, keep life interesting at work. SO after that you add new class which appends all TR’s and then call the color you want it to be. No PHP here, no extra checking, one line of code…tr:nth-child(odd) {background-color:#C6D2C4;} which is starting to put CSS into a true programming language.
I mean I value what I do and its a good honest living but I am not really a coder (flame away) with CSS 3 you verge on that. Not to say I don’t have to read all the PHP or in the past ASP thrown my way to do my job, I only write true PHP minimally and its always a struggle. So with CSS 3 and J-Query UI, I feel, moves into a new age of higher end programming and the end result is going to be better faster code for everyone.
HM
CSS 3 Tests
So I have been asked to take a look at two new areas of UI the CSS 3 and the HTML 5. I have already took a look at some CSS 3 and I am plowing through teh Pseudo classes, I am about half way through so i thought I was clarify some thoughts here today as I continue through.
First and foremost, there are a ton for the new classes. The old Pseudo classes are:
a:link {color:#FF0000} /* unvisited link */
a:visited {color:#00FF00} /* visited link */
a:hover {color:#FF00FF} /* mouse over link */
a:active {color:#0000FF} /* selected link */
And thats it. You can do a lot with these, but to really push things on here you need to add PHP or Jquery; more code more weight. So in an effort to make CSS 3 more powerful and still keeping it simple the powers that be have added few more scenarios to the pseudo class making it more specific and ultimately more powerful for your designs:
1. :nth-child(N)
matches elements on the basis of their positions within a parent element’s list of child elements
(everything but IE)
2. :nth-last-child(N)
matches elements on the basis of their positions within a parent element’s list of child elements
(everything but IE)
3. :nth-of-type(N)
matches elements on the basis of their positions within a parent element’s list of child elements of the same type (could not get to work)
4. :nth-last-of-type(N)
matches elements on the basis of their positions within a parent element’s list of child elements of the same type
5. :last-child
matches an element that’s the last child element of its parent element
6. :first-of-type (everything but IE)
matches the first child element of the specified element type
7. :last-of-type (everything but IE)
matches the last child element of the specified element type
8. : only-child (everything but IE)
matches an element if it’s the only child element of its parent
9. : only-of-type (everything but IE)
matches an element that’s the only child element of its type
10. : root
matches the element that’s the root element of the document
11. :empty
matches elements that have no children
12. :target
matches an element that’s the target of a fragment identifier in the document’s URI
13. :enabled
matches user interface elements that are enabled
14. :disabled
matches user interface elements that are disabled
15. :checked Pseudo-class
matches elements like checkboxes or radio buttons that are checked
16. :not(S)
matches elements that aren’t matched by the specified selector
So yeah 12 more, now I have been working through and getting some simple examples, the page I am going through on this is very dry, no examples, I set up some simple ones that will work UNLESS you are looking at this in IE…if you are SHAME ON YOU!!! My whole job is to appease people like you since you don’t know any better, its like caring for baby birds, well retarded baby birds, well retarded baby birds that don’t know a thing about browsers. So if you are in any IE, except maybe IE 9 beta, if there is such a thing at this time, you will not be able to see the CSS 3 stuff, so i could create a screen shot and upload it and have an image, but that would indicate I am catering to the IE crowd and I am not.
SO here are some simple examples of new CSS 3. There are two pages,
I will go into more detail about these tomorrow, just hitting the top of the ice berg, but you can take a look at each page by viewing source to see the simple code I used to do this. I am about to redevelop my sites as I am moving hosts so I think I am using a lot of CSS 3 and will report on that as I develop.
HM
Custom 404 pages
So I had done some custom 404 pages for work and some for my personal use. You can see some great examples of custom 404s through Smashing magazine which was of course my inspiration. So I am showing off a couple here that I designed and built out for different sites. The point of this is, have some fun with your 404 pages.
You can click on the link above for my JAC design. Refresh the page there are two of them, you may have to refresh a few times but trust me there are two of them.
This is my site and I did this one last year right after the playoffs. I may have to redo it, or just keep holding the cup for my boys. For those that don’t know the player pictured it #40, not #404.
two I did that were never used
These two are pics of designed 404 pages never used, the ones we used were designed by another designer so i still have these as work I did to show my skillz.
This was a tough one
The reflection was tough for this one.
None of these are for resale and should not be used for anything other than to see the design ability I have. If any use of the images are found out I will do what I can to press charges, this is Copyrighted material either by myself, or my employer. Any use of their likeness without express written permission is expressly prohibited.
HM
Google Analytics
I am a UI developer and part of that is actually seeing what people are doing when they come through your site. A User Experience depends on the design the interface the programming and bringing it all together is me, so when you go to a site you get what you need and move on and hopefully come back. At work we use several expensive programs to aid in this; to help me and others to define search terms, navigation paths and entrance/ exit points to guide our design and follow our visitors through our site. This can sound complicated and difficult to understand or very intrusive, but it’s neither. It is either captured by a cookie or triggering code already on the page that will report what page you came from, where you went after and how long you were on the site, if you stayed at all. A free version of this software that I endorse and use on my side projects is Google Analytics. I check my sites profiles everyday and was really drilling down this morning to see the new hits to my site, where they are coming from and trying to figure out why they are hitting my site. I want to go over some of this today to help any interested.
Setting up
First you need to get an account with Google and sign up for Google Analytics (GA). A code will be generated for your site and this code needs to be on each page you want to check to see statistics. What I do to keep the page neat is set up a separate file and use include statements on each page throughout the site. That way you can throw the same call in on each page and forget it. Once the code is in place, and a meta tag that GA will tell you how to add to your index page to prove you can edit the site and you are not tracking someone else Jank. It will take about a day for everything to fall into place for GA and when it does your information will be a day behind. That is minor advantage to things like Hit box and Omniture, they are real time, but honestly its not a big deal.
Reading Your GA
When you first come to your dashboard, this is the overview of your site. It will take a month and really more for this to be at all interesting. This monitors things, by default, traffic, bounce rate, content overview, visitor’s overview etc. You can customize yours, as I do mine, so the elements you want to see are immediate when you come to this page. I focus on things like referring sites and Keywords but also top landing and exit pages. This is where I drilled down to today. As I said all of this is customizable, a drag and drop very nice feature, but you can also get very granule on what you are looking at and can focus on what you are interested in. I was working yesterday with a client’s site and the new feature “Custom Reporting” but that’s another post.
Getting Small
So what I drilled baby drilled for today was landing page hits since I started writing again. I took the date range for just this month, GA sets its sites on 1 full month so it takes numbers from last month and blends them with this month, and looked primarily at my Blog page and can see some up tix a sort of high bounce rate and some low time on the page, but I haven’t started my media blitz just yet, I will work on that this weekend and review next week.
Conclusion
If you are looking for a great free tool that will give you the numbers I reported on the other day, granule view of your site, a glimpse of your traffic presence and can focus where you should be investing money and time of your site Google Analytics is the key to that. Its free, easy to read and understand, and the knock against it in regards to the big boys is it is not real time, but since a trend takes a month or two to really see, or longer, this is more than effective for any size site.
Thanks
HM
