CSS Naked Day ’08
Like everyone else on the planet. I found out that it was CSS Naked day by accident. I would love to participate in it, but Wordpess doesn’t let you. One thing that bothers me about it, is that it falls on different days of the year (kinda like easter or thanksgiving). I really wish they would pick a date and stick with it. To me, the perfect day would be April 1. Think about, everyone will think that it’s some huge internet April Fool’s Joke.
Here is how I participated 3 years ago:
Cool font list
Since the whole 2.0 thing, I’m really getting into fonts. This is just a personal list for myself of what my font decoration should be:
“Palatino Linotype”, “Book Antiqua”, Palatino, Georgia, “Times New Roman”, Times, serif
FamFamFam Silk Icons converted to gifs
UPDATE:
For those BluePrint fans out there, I’ve converted the SilkSprite plugin into gif as well. You can download it from my github repo.
Sometime in your career, you’ve used the famfamfam silk icon set for a project. If not, shoot yourself right now. This icon set should be the defacto in icons for websites. They’re incredibly drawn and FREE! Problem is though that they only come in PNG format and IE6.X has a problem displaying them natively. The only way around this is to convert them to GIFs. So I took it upon myself to convert them to GIFs using Photoshop’s Batch processing and made them available to download.
Selenium IDE: I’m in love (sorry Linda).
For quite sometime now I’ve been trying to find something out there that would let me record my actions on a web page and then save them as a script. The idea was so that I while I was programming and debugging, I didn’t to remember or perform the recreation steps. Another reason I wanted something like this was so that I could easily just take the script and attach it to the bug. Now I don’t have to write out the recreation steps.
I know there are a lot of programs out there that can do stuff like this, but I never found one that I personally liked. Either the programs were too complex, expensive, platform specific or down right unusable. I actually was hoping that someday someone would write something for FF. My prayers have been answered.
Selenium IDE is about as simple as you can get and meets every requirement I could dream of. It’s a FF extension so it will works on both Windows and Mac; even Linux!, It’s a 2 second install, extremely easy to use and best of all FREE!
Here is a quick walk through:
To open Selenium IDE (SIDE) just choose TOOLS -> SELENIUM IDE. The interface is very simple and clean. The Base URL lets you choose which site to run the script on. This is great because you can create a script on your test site (www.example.test) and still run the script on your live site (www.example.com).
The second you open SIDE it’s ready to record your action. As you click through you site and fill in form fields, your steps show up in the center window under the TABLE tab.
By changing to the SOURCE tab you can view the source code that makes up the task and modify it if you want.
You also have the option of changing the source to different programming languages. As you can see they give you the option of writing tasks in PHP, C#, JAVA and other languages. Though I haven’t done it, it wouldn’t be too much to write some code that would pull username and password from a database to pre-populate a login form. This way you could test out different roles and users.
This just shows you a basic task whose source has been converted over to C# by choose C# from the format menu.
Once you’ve recorded your tasks, you can save the task as a file. This is great. Now you can email the task to your buddy and he can play back the task and see exactly what problems you discovered in your web application. Excellent stuff indeed.
Although the purpose of SIDE is for QAing applications, I can see people using it for other things as well. Imagine recording a task for your family member that shows them how to use a particular website. Maybe even to record repetitive tasks that you have to do on a company intranet site. Who knows?
The only thing that this product is missing is a scheduler. It would be nice to be able to schedule a task to run at a certain time or increment. This could be very useful to some people.
All and all this product is great. I can say anything bad about it whatsoever. It’s very easy to use and will probably take you a minutes of playing with to get the hang of it. Have fun.
CSS Naked day!
Kinda sucks that I can’t participate in CSS Naked day since this blog is hosted by wordpress and I have don’t have full control over the layout. But in the spirit of things, I present to you: a naked ferret.
Firefox dominating IE? I think not.
Since we started to use Google Analytics last month, I was itching to seeing what the percentage of FireFox vs IE visitors we would have to sheriff.org. Well with a good months worth of tracking on over 1.6 million page views and 212,000 unique visitors, the results are in.
IE: 89%
Firefox: 6%
All other weird browsers take up the rest. Surprisingly Safari is like only 2% if that. Opera’s user base is laughable. So what does this mean? It means that IE still has a strong hold on the browser market with the visitors to sheriff.org. While Firefox is gaining ground, it no where near dominating IE by any means.
Below is the total breakdown:
Internet Explorer| 191175
Firefox| 13669
Safari| 4153
Mozilla Compatible Agent| 2046
Netscape| 1210
Mozilla| 257
Opera| 196
T-Mobile Dash Mozilla| 64
HTC-8500| 47
SAMSUNG-SGH-I607| 43
HTC-8100| 41
Konqueror| 39
Camino| 24
gzip| 14
SquidClamAV_Redirector 1.8.2,gzip| 2
Palm750| 1
Palm680| 1
Any good offline validators?
Since I’m reworking our main website at work in XHTML Strict, I need to validate every single page on the site to make sure I havn’t missed anything. With over 6500 generated pages, it get to be a bit much using the W3c validator, so I’m wondering what other people do out there to validate their web sites.
What I need is a program that will work on my local machine so I can point it to http://127.0.0.1:8500 (I’m using the developer version of CFMX7). Then it will spider every page on the site and give me a report on what it finds.
Obviously I would like a free tool if one exists, but I don’t mind paying for a good one since I will be using this for my peronal use as well.
2 Column layout template
This is just for future websites I design. the following is an XHTML Strict valid layout for 2 column pages. Since you can only upload certain files with WordPress, I’ve named it 2columns.doc, however it’s just a txt file renamed.
UPDATE:
Not more then two minutes after posting this, I found out that it doesn’t work in IE6 (I didn’t have it available to test at the time). I have a better solution that works in all browsers thanks to this post. I’ve updated the file to include this new method.
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