afongen

While wandering through Ruminator Books yesterday, I came across a book that looks like it was written just for me: Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France. Maybe for my birthday…

Nowhere Girl, an online comic.

If you live in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area, here’s a neat idea: Twin Cities Free Market, “a listing service for Twin Cities residents who want to get or give free reusable goods for the home, garage and garden. It is part of an effort to reduce the amount of reusable goods being thrown away.”

Earlier this week I was talking with a bunch of webmasters and mentioned that the main Minnesota State Colleges and Universities web site was still getting 10-15% Netscape 4 traffic.

Yesterday I took another look at the stats. To my surprise and delight, Netscape 4 is now hovering around 2% of the traffic. It seems that I was correct in my longstanding suspicion that most of that traffic was internal: our office switched to Netscape 7 and IE 6 a few months back, right around when the stats dropped. Yes, I could have easily verified my suspicion, but it was never important enough to bother.

Because, you see, I’m not sure how much I care, or what effect this drop in Netscape 4 traffic will have. My approach to dealing with Netscape 4 and other older, less-capable user agents has never been to ignore them completely. I just don’t bend over backward for them, spending ungodly amounts of time ensuring that everything looks perfect. As long as everyone can still access the content and the pages don’t look or act awful, then I’m happy. Nevertheless, 10-15% is nothing to sneeze at, so on the sites where I have influence, and certainly in my web applications, I spend a little time making sure that pages look more or less similar even for older browsers. Just not an undue amount of time,

My approach is similar to how I think about JavaScript. When I do accessibility training, I always emphasize that yes, you can use JavaScript and still have an accessible page. In fact, much as images can help some people understand or navigate a page, sometimes JavaScript can enhance a page’s accessibility. But that’s the key: treat it as an enhancement to core coontent and functionality rather than a basic requirement. Similarly, when putting together pages, I design with web standards so any user agent can access the content, then enhance and do cool things for modern browsers that can handle it. That is, I lean less toward graceful degradation as progressive enhancement.

Still, I must admit, 2% makes me feel a helluva lot more comfortable than 15%.

There’s nothing quite like starting the weekend several hundred dollars poorer. On her way into St. Paul today, our car’s brakes failed on Kiara. Not completely, but enough that they needed to be replaced right away. Thank goodness everyone was safe and that today was payday.

The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities web site is getting a much needed redesign this summer, and for the first time the implementation is being done by the internal web team instead of a design firm. This means that for the first time, little things like accessibility and web standards will be paid some attention. Yes!

In preparation for this, I’ve been going through a copy of the “Strategic Communications Plan” furnished by our Public Affairs department, who are responsible for the site. Some of it is actually quite interesting, but it felt really, really weird to be reading both that and the latest Dr. Dobbs Journal on the bus this morning.

No, scratch that. Dr. Dobbs had nothing to do with it. It’s just plain weird to be reading something called a “Strategic Communications Plan.”

Strange that keeping track of dates would be such a pernicious programming problem. But it sure seems to be.

A few months ago on Perl.com: The Many Dates and Times of Perl. More recently, on OnJava.com: Making Sense of Java’s Dates.

I forgot, when i first came across it (via Rafe Colburn, I think), to point to this wonderful piece tracing the history of the Bush administration’s self-contradictory statements on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Seeing it published in today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune reminded me to send you that direction.

Along the same lines, the piece they did on The Daily Show a few weeks ago: Bush vs Bush. Masterfully done.

PHP offers choices in syntax for control structures. You can do this:

if (expr) {
    statement;
}

or this:

if (expr):
    statement;
endif;

I am none too fond of the latter. Especially when the programmer whose code I have to edit doesn’t consistently indent a damn thing. At least with curly braces I can use a decent text editor to indicate matching braces. Compound this lack of proper indentation with code blocks that are way too big to keep track of so it’s hard to tell to which if an endif belongs and you’ve got yourself a mess.

Or rather, I do.

Grrr…

Nukes: the Open Source Java CMS.

For a while the folks at JBoss were running PostNuke. Beyond the expected questioning of why the web site for a Java application server was running on PHP, they found that some unfortunate design decisions meant that PostNuke didn’t scale.

Ultimately, it didn’t work with PHP, so we decided to pull the plug on the PHP web site and put all we had learned about system design for scalability in four years of J2EE in JBoss (including EJB) to the test. Could we port the Nukes engine to J2EE? We did just that.

Nukes was born.

If we had a chance in hell of using JBoss at work, I’d actually be excited about this. Instead we’re almost certain to go with another application server, for better or worse, and I think we’ll be stuck with its CMS. So instead I just read the article with interest.