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June 24, 2008 - Comments Off on NY Web Standards Meetup—Introduction to WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite)

NY Web Standards Meetup—Introduction to WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite)

The New York Web Standards Meetup Group will be meeting this Thursday (26 June 2008) at theMechanism at 7:00 pm.

Adam Detrick (thestreet.com) will present "IE Root," a technique using conditional comments to target IE without making extra calls to the server or using CSS hacks.

Jeffrey Barke (theMechanism) will discuss what the WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite) is and how to use it.

26 June 2008 . 7:00 pm
theMechanism
440 9th Avenue 8th Floor
New York, NY 10001 [map]

RSVP now!

Please contact us if you’d like to present at the September or October meetup.

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 21, 2008 - Comments Off on OneWebDay

OneWebDay

OneWebDay, a global celebration of the Web, is looking for 100 ambassadors for the 100 days leading up to this year's event (22 September 2008). OneWebDay ambassadors take a day to talk to their community (it can be as simple as a blog post!) about their values and how those values tie to OneWebDay's 2008 theme of participatory democracy.

To view the schedule, visit http://www.onewebday.org/base/index.php/OWD_Ambassadors_2008. To become an ambassador, contact volunteer@onewebday.org.

For more information, visit the formal invitation to be an ambassador and the OneWebDay slideshow.

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 Non-Profits, The Programming Mechanism
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June 20, 2008 - Comments Off on ISXubuntu—Linux distro optimized for security and privacy while online

ISXubuntu—Linux distro optimized for security and privacy while online

While at the ISOC-NY monthly meeting last night, I learned about a cool project of theirs: ISXubuntu. ISXubuntu will be a Linux live CD, based on Ubuntu Linux, which has been optimized for security and privacy while online. The global Internet Society has provided a grant to cover development costs and so that CDs may be distributed free of charge.

ISXubuntu will feature anonymous Web browsing using Tor, ad blocking with Privoxy, encrypted email with Enigmail, encrypted instant messaging with OTR and the ability to store a personal home directory and other configuration settings on an encrypted USB flash drive.

Volunteers are needed for this project, so if you're interested, get involved: http://isoc-ny.org/isxubuntu

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 18, 2008 - Comments Off on ISOC-NY monthly meeting

ISOC-NY monthly meeting

ISOC-NY's next monthly meeting will be held at tomorrow, 19 June 2008, at NYU.

Date: Thursday, 19 Jun 2008
Time: 7:30 pm–9:30 pm
Location: Room 317, 251 Mercer Street NYC (SW corner of West 4th)
Note: Use the entrance on the west side since construction blocks the Mercer Street entrance. Must bring photo ID.

Provisional Agenda

  • Meet new members
  • By-laws reform
  • Planning future meetings and events
  • ISXubuntu Linux project progress report
  • OneWebDay—planning progress report http://onewebday.org
  • Access advocacy program

All meetings are open to the public, wheelchair accessible and free.

If you plan to attend a meeting, please RSVP to president@isoc-ny.org or via Meetup.com.

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 17, 2008 - 6 comments

Firefox 3 Download Day 2008

Download Day 2008 Help the Firefox community set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours by downloading Firefox 3 on Download Day (some time in June).

You can pledge and get buttons and banners at the Download Day Headquarters.

Update 2008-06-12: The date of the download day has been set: Tuesday, 17 June 2008. While you wait, check out Deb Richardson's Field Guide to Firefox 3 to get an overview of all the new features and improvements.

Update 2008-06-17: Today is the day, but Firefox 3 won't be available until 10 am PDT.

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 11, 2008 - Comments Off on Custom cursors and pseudo-class descendant selectors in IE 6

Custom cursors and pseudo-class descendant selectors in IE 6

Cursors

It's been awhile since I had to implement a custom cursor, but I figured it wouldn't be a problem—just set the cursor property to url(path/to/cursor.cur), right? Of course it's never that simple…

The full scoop can be found here, but in summary we need three rules:

cursor: url(cursor.cur), url(cursor/cursor.cur), default;

cursor: url(cursor.cur); works in Safari, but we need to add default to make it work in Firefox. url(cursor/cursor.cur) is for IE, since the base URI is the source element, not the style sheet.

A nice table/demo of CSS2 and CSS3 cursors can be found at http://www.worldtimzone.com/mozilla/testcase/css3cursors.html

Pseudo-class descendant selectors in IE 6

I just discovered that it is possible to use pseudo-class descendant selectors in IE 6 and put together a demo/tutorial.

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 6, 2008 - 2 comments

Dzone Snippets and Webmonkey.com

After benefiting from the site multiple times, I decided to start contributing to DZone Snippets, a source for useful source code snippets. There's not much there yet, but you can follow my snippets at http://snippets.dzone.com/user/jeffreybarke.

Also Webmonkey.com is having a re-launch party next Wednesday, 11 June, from 6 pm through 8 pm at Sweet & Vicious in Manhattan. There will be music, beverages and good cheer, and theMechanism will be attending.

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

June 3, 2008 - Comments Off on Robots.txt and the Sitemaps protocol

Robots.txt and the Sitemaps protocol

At Google I/O, I discovered you can add a line to your robots.txt file so that search bots can autodiscover your sitemaps built to the Sitemaps protocol. The format:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

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 3, 2008 - 12 comments

When will IE 6 die?

As a recent Mac and Safari convert (I only use Firefox for development now), I just read with enthusiasm that Safari currently has a 6.25% market share. While welcome news, unfortunately it reiterates how important it remains to make sure our sites work in Internet Explorer.

After hearing about Safari's growth, I became curious about IE7's penetration. How close is IE6 to death?

Unfortunately, not close enough. According to http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0 (the same site that reports Safari has 6.25% market share), IE has 73.75% market share. The site does not differentiate between IE 6 and 7. thecounter.com reports that between 1 Feb 2008 and 31 May 2008, IE7 was used 40% of the time and IE6 still has a 37% market share!

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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