I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently in small business startups, especially those started by young people. A lot of these entrepreneurs, when launching their businesses, are jumping on the social networking bandwagon and using a Facebook or MySpace page instead of a traditional website. It could be because it’s a natural extension from the tools they’re used to in their personal lives or because it’s self-service and can be live in minutes, but I’m here to say they’re doing it wrong. Here’s why.
We’re used to using browser sniffing to work around incompatibilities, to serve different stylesheets or scripts to different User-Agents with different capabilities. Of course, that approach has fallen by the wayside in recent times, with best practice now dictating that we test for capabilities rather than browser/OS combinations in our rich UIs.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I thought I’d jot down a couple of ways Apache and mod_rewrite can save your life. Not literally of course, unless your website’s been linked to your life-support system by a crazed psychopath – but it should make your readers’ lives easier. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing here?
Acronyms are everywhere, especially on the Web where technical terms ((X)HTML, CSS, PHP) rub shoulders with shorthand figures of speech (IMHO). In fact, the profusion of acronyms has given rise to a self-referencing acronym of its own – TLA.
I was recently called upon to troubleshoot the mail script powering a website’s contact form, which for some reason unbeknownst to anyone was failing silently. It should’ve been an easy fix, but the more I dug into it, the more confused I became, and resorted to dumping variables to see if I could figure out what exactly was going wrong. The server was setup properly – I whipped up a quick test script, and it had no problems sending. Nothing was obviously wrong with the script itself… or so I thought.
During the course of my career, I’ve had to deal with some quite bizarre things jumping out at me from the source of pages. One developer I know, from a well-respected firm (to spare your blushes I won’t link to it, Kev) is in the habit of using <div id="mchammer">
“because it’s a wrapper”) but I think such oddities, which don’t break any SGML or XML parser, have pretty much broken me. I was briefly stymied this morning by the following querystring (identifying information stripped out):
Like many IT professionals, I’m still heavily involved in deploying and supporting Windows XP. While most of the compatibility and performance problems with Vista have been addressed in SP1, there is still a clear case for a lot of businesses to run XP for a variety of reasons, mainly revolving around compatibility with third-party applications.
I’d like to share one caveat I’ve recently discovered while setting up an editing workstation on XP to run Avid Xpress Pro.
The system had already been set up with a Vista Ultimate in line with the company’s migration policy, however it had to dual-boot into XP Pro 32-bit in order to run Avid, which relies on kernel-mode drivers that remain incompatible with Vista. It is my normal practice to slipstream all available service packs onto the install disc to cut down on install time, however during the process of the install I discovered that there is no way to install the Realtek HD Audio drivers after SP3 has been installed. So the procedure can best be summed up as:
Install XP SP2
Install all hardware drivers
Patch to SP3 using a separate disc
Install updates post-SP3.
Apparently Microsoft is aware of the issue, but given their retirement of XP to OEM channels on 30th June, I very much doubt that they will devote much effort to resolving it.
With any luck I should have news of Magellan Sitemap here shortly. Meanwhile I’ll finally be fixing the layout and putting together the final (rev. umpteen) graphics. Some content would probably help too…
