Tony’s Web Design <blog / >

I suscribe to a lot of RSS feeds. On any given day I might have 100 updates. However I can’t and don’t read all of these. The ones who I often don’t read usually get removed within a week or two. The biggest problems I notice are:

• Too long. If your blog posts usually extend beyond two pages in my RSS reader, I won’t bother to read them and will just scroll past them unless you have a good mix of images and text. I don’t have the time to read too much text and as for posts consisting entirely of 30-50 images, I get bored.
• Too short. The opposite is also through. If your post is a one line comment, it should probably be on twitter or another similar site.
• Teasers. This is the most annoying problem I come accross. If your RSS feed is just a heading and a description of a post, I won’t click through to read it. I’ll actually delete your feed from my RSS reader. If you won’t put the whole post in the feed, have at least 1/3 of the content in the feed.
• Too many posts. If you post 9-10 articles a day, I will delete your feed from my reader. In my opinion 1-2 is a good amount per day. Some people do like posts that many times a day but for me, once my feeds go above 100 a day, I can’t read them all and start feeling like blogs with loads of posts are spamming my feed reader.
• Don’t post all your social network info to your blog as soon as you post it. If you must put your twitter post, flickr photos or other content on your blog, do it as a weekly summary, not an on the spot post.

Smashing Magazine article on project management tools.

The post linked to there is very interesting. It does however leave out my personal favourite, the free PHP and MySQL Mantis Bug Tracker which I have installed on my testing server which I use becasue

• It’s free
• It uses programming languages I’m familiar in
• and it took about 1 minute total to install.

The next version of Wordpress, 2.7 is close to its release date. The biggest feature is the automatic update for wordpress which will save a lot of hassle.

I’ve noticed a few threads on every Linux forum where people complained about Linux hardware compatibility so I thought I’d write this.

I had a Linux boot on my computer and my laptop. I uninstalled it on my laptop as it only has a 60GB hard drive and I bought the sims 2 with a good few expansions, completly filling the remaining free space on my windows partition. My computer’s hard drive failed on me last Thursday.

Every computer I have ever installed Linux (Dell Dimension 8300, Inspiron 8600, Precision M60 and some 2001 HP computer) on has just worked with no driver issues. I have 5 discs with drivers that need to be installed for Windows to use things like my printer, graphics card, speakers, network card etc. These all worked perfectly after Linux was installed (which only took 20 minutes average compared to XP’s 1-2 hours).

The only thing I couldn’t get to work was a Netgear WPN111, wireless network dongle that is hit and miss on Windows aswell.

What is everyone else’s experiences with Linux and compatibilty. The distro I use is PCLinuxOS.

Very similar to my last post.

I’m using inputs for this example because 90% of the time I’m using attribute selectors is with inputs.

$("input").each(function() {
		$(this).addClass($(this).attr("type"));
});

The code is pretty simple. It loops through each input element and gives it a class corresponding to its type allowing you to use input.submit in all browsers for input[type=submit] without hard-coding the class to each element.

While working on a project of mine earlier today, I ran into a problem of how to highlight the current link. For complicated reasons I couldn’t do it on the server so I had to use javascript. This code is very simple but it does require jQuery.

$("a").each(function() {
		if(this.href == window.location.href.split("#")[0]) {
			$(this).addClass("current");
		}
});

The current class applied a different background to the link but you could do something else such as delete the link.

I was making a few changes on the site (like the new logo) yesterday then when I checked my stats (which are set up to ignore me), I noticed the stats reported a 1,110.42% increase in my hits for the 17th October. I’ve checked and it’s not google, yahoo or msn so does anyon have any idea what can cause my hit counter to go so weird?

From mattcutts.com
If someone links to a page on your site that doesn’t exist, most webservers give a pretty sucky experience: visitors usually land on a pretty useless page, and search engines might not give you full credit for those 404 errors.

Now Google’s webmaster portal lets you see who is linking to your 404 pages. Once you register your site, click on Diagnostics, then Web crawl, and select “Not found”.

As the post says (not in the bit I quoted) these links are already there but they aren’t any use to users if they just give a 404. That post suggests mailing the admin of the site with the incorrect link to get it fixed but you could take action yourself by creating a page at that address with a link (or redirect) to the actual page if enough users click that link or enough sites link incorrectly.

I have tried various frameworks for different languages from time to time and have found a lot of them  However, most of them have not been worth the bother in my opinion. I like jquery for its simplicity but other frameworks I have tried such as Rails or cakePHP have placed too much complexity into the design. e.g. Your folders must be laid out in this specific order, you must overide this class, and this one and this one and this one and this one. At which point I get fed up and move on. jQuery on the other hand has one thing to learn $(). The rest is optional depending on what you want to do. I know you can probably overide the default directory names but that is still an extra step to using frameworks like Rails or cakePHP.

After hearing a lot or good things about jQuery for the past while, I finally decided to try it out. It is really convenient as you can use CSS selectors to replace all the javascript tricks for getting elements or using loads of ids.

It has a lot of effects built in and you can use it’s $(”") function to select elements which is a lot less to type than document.getElementById(”").