James Titcumb

One thing I ensure I do on all sites is to develop for two audiences at once. The first audience is of course the end user of the site. This user has CSS enabled, and can view all the prettyness of the site in all its original intended glory. But I also develop the site for text-based browsers, search engines and those with CSS disabled. The advantage of this is that the page is semantically correct. You have <h1> tags around the site title, <h2> around the page title and so on. Menus are in <ul> unordered lists, and so on. Semantically correct pages are instantly more SEO-effective. Working at Netbasic has shown me how important that is ! In addition, for the small population that use text-based browsers, it enables them to view the site without mess.

If you have a nice logo to display, and you don’t want to display a big bulky <h1> tag on your page, there’s a really easy way of doing that:

<div class="site-title">
<h1>Your Site Name</h1>
</div>

This markup is great for search engines. Search engines will see the <h1> tag and notice that “Your Site Name” is the page’s main title. Little things like this help search engines determine what your site actually contains, as opposed to the hugely ineffective method of repeating a load of words several thousand times in tiny text…

The way to make that neat semantic code look nice and pretty is with CSS, in order to hide that “Your Site Name” text but display your nice company logo instead…

div.site-title
{
background-image: url('/images/your-company-logo.png');
}
div.site-title h1
{
display: none;
}

As you can probably tell, what this CSS does is ask the browser to display your company’s logo as the background image to this div, and hide the <h1> text.

There’s another issue though – how do we make that lovely logo clickable to go to the home page? That’s easy too, and semantically.

<div class="site-title">
<h1>Your Site Name</h1>
<a href="/home/page/url"><span>Click here to go to the home page</span></a>
</div>

We modify the CSS as well to hide the text itself (in the <span>) but make the anchor (the <a>) tag into a block, which turns it into a link that covers the entire logo.

div.site-title
{
background-image: url('/images/your-company-logo.png');
}
div.site-title h1
{
display: none;
}
div.site-title a
{
display: block;
width: 300px;
height: 60px;
}
div.site-title a span
{
display: none;
}

We’ve used a similar trick here to hide the text that should only appear when CSS is turned off. As mentioned, we explicitly set the dimensions of the anchor tag to fill the dimensions of the logo image.

That’s all there is to it, and search engines will love that as opposed to just using something like this for your logo:

<a href="/home/page/path"><img src="/images/company-logo.png" title="Company logo" /></a>

The search engine or text-based user looking at your site will be able to see clearly what the page title is, and it will load really quickly as unless you’re applying the CSS styles, there will be no images to load, which makes it an all-round winner really!

I’m not saying this is the best way of doing it, but I’ve found it to be quite clever and I use it. If someone’s got some better ideas out there, why not add a comment with your idea

Now that the fuss over Bing’s launch is already over (that didn’t last long, did it?), what is the future for it? According to this article’s source, Bing had a 11.1% share of the US Search market. Microsoft apparently haven’t hit above 10% since 2007, so that could be seen as quite a positive thing. But Google seems pretty confident this is just a blip on the radar and they are unconcerned, and that could potentially be true.

I’m no expert by any means, but it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Whats more, if Microsoft really love the Bing name, will they start replacing all the Windows Live products after replacing Live Search? Will we start using Bing Messenger, Bing Hotmail and so on? Will they do a last minute re-brand of Windows 7 to be Windows Bing? That would be quite funny…

It looks like we’ve taken another step towards never leaving our houses. It’s nothing new I know, but Luke reminded me yesterday of it’s existance – Microsoft’s rather impressive stab at mapping software à la Google Maps.

Instead of Google’s angle of just taking pictures of everything, Microsoft are going down the less intrusive route of just making 3D models of all the buildings. When I last saw this last, it was much less impressive, but looking at it today, you could almost say it’s better than Google. Although having said that, Google Earth has this same 3D view, but in a standalone app.

My opinion though, is that they both have their merits – Google Street View is pretty cool, and so is this 3D view… I suppose it depends what you want it for.

Regardless, with competition from these, and probably other mapping software, combined with online shopping, online chat, video gaming, home offices and a whole host of other software, it’s looking more and more likeley that I’ll never have to get off my bum ever again.

As we’re off skiing tomorrow (wahey!), I was setting up Hannah’s laptop with Eclipse PDT, and after installing Subclipse, I decided to have a go at setting up Mylyn to use my Trac install with the Mylyn Trac connector. It all went well until I tried adding the Trac repository, where it decided that it was invalid. A quick Google revealed the general concensus that Trac 0.11 (the most recent Trac version) doesn’t work with the Mylyn plug-in.

Thankfully, it turns out that this isn’t the case. It was a simple case of running:

easy_install http://trac-hacks.org/svn/xmlrpcplugin/trunk/

Then restarting apache:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now go into your Trac admin page, and enable XMLRPCSystem, XMLRPCWeb and all plug-ins with “.ticket” in the module name.

Now in Mylyn when adding your Task repository, specify the XML-RPC (rev 1950) access type along with the rest of your settings, and it’s as easy peasy as that.

There – I told you I’d blog something soon!

I’ve been having a look at Adobe AIR this evening, just to get an idea of what it’s all about. The first impression I get from reading the website is that it’s a pseudo-browser-come-Flash player. Which isn’t really that new, or exciting. Reading their Browser vs. Desktop app comparison, I’m not sure they’re really selling it well to people like me. Let me start with the way I see technology moving forward at the moment. There’s a slowly growing movement towards Netbooks and cloud computing, and I see that as a really dynamic way of moving forward. The need for powerful clients are hugely diminished, and the power is left at the hands of other people who can afford to buy huge datacentres to power widely used apps like Gmail and Facebook, as well as office tools like Google Documents. There’s movements towards putting everything on the web, to the extent of some people experimenting – and even making a living out of – webtops, such as eyeOS and other similar products. Personally, I think having an “OS” on the web is going a little too far, but there is huge potential for moving to only using web apps.

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