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July 15, 2008 - Comments Off on WordPress 2.6 now available

WordPress 2.6 now available

Version 2.6 "Tyner," named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Read about all the updates at the WordPress blog and download 2.6 here.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

July 11, 2008 - Comments Off on theMechanism’s browser support

theMechanism’s browser support

theMechanism follows Yahoo!'s Graded Browser Support and agrees with the GBS approach:

In the first 10 years of professional web development, back in the early '90s, browser support was binary: Do you—or don't you—support a given browser? When the answer was "No," user access to the site was often actively prevented. In the years following IE5's release in 1998, professional web designers and developers have become accustomed to asking at the outset of any new undertaking, "Do I have to support Netscape 4.x browsers for this project?"

By contrast, in modern web development we must support all browsers. Choosing to exclude a segment of users is inappropriate, and, with a "Graded Browser Support" strategy, unnecessary.

The two principal concepts of GBS are a broader and more reasonable definition of "support" and the notion of "grades" of support.

Read more

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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July 9, 2008 - 6 comments

Some Useful Firefox 3 Hacks

I finally joined the "Upgraded to Firefox 3" club today and so far, I'm pretty happy with it. However, I was happier after I came across 12 Quick Hacks for Firefox 3 written by Preston Gralla for Computerworld. The article provides some hacks and features to make FF3 a bit more usable and FF2-like for those of you who are resisting some of the changes. I immediately implemented #3: Having Gmail Handle mailto: Links and #6: Shrink the Back Button, and I'm looking forward to utilizing the Get Web Details (#5) feature for developing.

Christy Gurga is junior designer and programmer at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: christygurga in The Programming Mechanism

July 9, 2008 - Comments Off on Firebug extensions

Firebug extensions

As Jan Odvarko notes, "I was surprised how many Firebug extensions … exist out there." Check out his list of 12 extensions at http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug/list-of-firebug-extensions/. All extensions include a brief summary of what they do, a screen capture and a link to the download page.

Two that I use are YSlow and Odvarko's own Firecookie.. YSlow analyzes Web pages and determines why they're slow based on Yahoo's rules for high performance web sites. Firecookie makes it possible to view and manage cookies within the familiar Firebug UI.

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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July 3, 2008 - 2 comments

CSS variables in WebKit

via Webmonkey:

Variables in cascading stylesheets are now available in the nightly WebKit build.

CSS without variables:
//Sets the background of the page and tables to the hex code for the color grey
body {
   background-color: #eceae1;
}
table {
   background-color: #eceae1;
}

With CSS variables:
//Defines "DefaultBGColor" to light gray
@variables {
   DefaultBGColor: #eceae1;
}
//Sets the background and any table on the page to the default background color
body {
   background-color: var(DefaultBGColor);
}
table {
   background-color: var(DefaultBGColor);
}

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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June 30, 2008 - Comments Off on GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers

GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers

Not sure, because it's in the "from the strong-accusations-so-consider-the-source dept.," but I hate GoDaddy regardless, so…

An anonymous reader writes "A GoDaddy Vice President has been caught bidding against customers in their own domain name auctions. The employee Adam Dicker isn't just any GoDaddy employee; he's head of the GoDaddy subsidiary that controls the auctions. Dicker won some of the domains he bid for, and pushed up the bid price on auctions he didn't win. The conflict of interest is unethical, but could this practice also be illegal? Said a representative for a competitor, 'Even if controlled, that practice has bad news written all over it.' This comes hot on the heels of news that despite earlier promises to ICANN to end their 60-Day ban on transfers, GoDaddy quietly circumvented it by forcing customers to agree to the ban anyway. ICANN doesn't appear to be investigating or asking follow-up questions about this. What can be done to force ICANN to police the registrars for which it is responsible?"

From Slashdot

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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June 27, 2008 - Comments Off on Victor Tsaran: “An Introduction to Screen Readers”

Victor Tsaran: “An Introduction to Screen Readers”

One of our loyal monthly attendees of the New York Web Standards Meetup sent us a link to a video by Victor Tsaran, an accessibility engineer at Yahoo! who focuses on developing best practices for the creation of websites that work well with screen readers. In this video, he provides an important introduction to some of the things that work well in the world of screen readers and others that do not. Web designers and programmers who are curious about how people use software like JAWS would benefit from watching this 25 minute video of Victor navigating his desktop and explaining the process. It’s encouraging to see that Yahoo! has a proactive stance on accessibility.

Thanks again to Joe Devon for sending this around to our list:

Published by: davefletcher in The Programming Mechanism
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June 26, 2008 - Comments Off on Standards Suck: ARIA in HTML5

Standards Suck: ARIA in HTML5

During XTech2008, Anne van Kesteren and Marcos Caceres sat down to chat about the current state of the "ARIA in HTML5" debate. Anne gives an overview of ARIA and the controversy over naming of ARIA attributes and makes some suggestions as to how the community can move forward.

Part One:

Part Two:

Source: YouTube: Part One | Part Two

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism
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