Duke Street Alley

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Something I fervently wish existed is a standard “unsubscribe” method for mailing lists - both discussion and broadcast. Something that an email client could hook into, in order to display a great big “unsubscribe” button in the interface.

I’ve been cleaning up a few mailboxes during the early part of the new year, and looking at email tactics for our own marketing efforts. It’s becoming clear that the plethora of unsub methods is not a good thing. Some systems just want you to click on a link. Others want you to click on a link, then fill in an email address and hit submit. Some want one of the above, and then they send you an email which you reply to, or further still, click on another link in to fully opt-out. Some have a range of tickboxes about remaining on their alert list rather than their newsletter list, and so on, and so forth.

An awful lot of people resort to hitting the “report spam” button instead of making their way through the maze, and that doesn’t help anyone. The trouble is that with at least one major newsletter out there, I tried for months to unsubscribe - and eventually had to mark the thing as spam to stop it appearing.

I assume there are technical issues with introducing an unsubscribe standard - so what are they? Is there a way to get around them?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve just finished a redesign of The Wizard of Duke Street. There might be some tweaks to go, but the core of it’s done. Your comments and criticisms will be welcomed.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

We’ve some server down time in work, so I’m clearing off tabs I’ve had open for a while, meaning to record them someplace.

I have Design Melt Down on my sidebar, but I’d like to draw your attention to it now as well - it’s a site that looks for trends in web design. There’s some fascinating stuff there; I’m particularly enamoured of the Ornate Backgrounds.

Serious Eats is a well-designed, well-written food blog, focussed on New York. Quite apart from its content, I really like the design and layout - the multi-column, content-filled footer fascinates me, and makes me want to rip apart several of my sites and redesign them. In fact, I might just do that…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So I posted stats for The Wizard of Duke Street and In Ranelagh for August at the beginning of September, and people seemed to like it. So here’re stats for September, and a note to myself to post more, because otherwise I’ll vanish into an auto-analytical black hole.

The Wizard of Duke Street: In the month of September, there were 15,859 visitors (up around 850 from last month), who looked at 19,945 pages. 95.88% of that was from search engines.

The top ten search terms were “torchwood season 2″ (2,883 visits), “torchwood series 2″ (1,075), “doctor who series 4″ (772), “doctor who season 4″ (496), “freema agyeman” (371), “world of starcraft” (273), “lotro music″ (261), “japanese monsters” (221), “dr who series 4″ (205) and “time and chips” (180). That’s almost the same as last month, save for the order, and a slight increase on the Doctor Who-related terms. There was a peak in the traffic around the 22nd for such terms, with most of it originating in North America, which trailed off over the next week. I’m guessing Series 3 finished showing on some US channel around then.

The referring sites are a touch over 2% of overall traffic this month. Notable ones come from imdb.com, where a discussion about Torchwood linked to my very short article on the Torchwood Magazine, and The Ancient Gaming Noob.

Inranelagh.com: In Ranelagh got 1,337 visitors in September, viewing 2,530 pages. Just over 75% of that was from search engines, 11.33% from referrals, and 13.65% from direct traffic.

The search terms are an odd assortment again, divided between the main site and the blog. “ranelagh” comes in first again (132 visits), followed by: “ranelagh dublin” (56), “superquinn ranelagh” (28), “mcsorleys ranelagh” (18), “css z-index ie” (15), “nevada plane wrecks” (15), “ranelagh ireland” (15), “dublin ranelagh” (12), “css ie z-index” (10), and “css z-index internet explorer” (9). I guess IE’s z-index stuff is bugging a lot of people.

Notable referred traffic (32 visitors) came in from virtualireland.ru, where something was presumably asked about Ranelagh.

Overall, there’s little enough change in traffic or interest, which is nice and steady, but probably indicates I should look to expand into a few other areas - steady is good, growth would be better. I’m noting a definite difference between the interest shown in articles by searchers, and the interest shown in articles by people who provide links. One article on Now Is A Long Time too, about disabling nofollow in Moveable Type, has more links to it than any other page on the site, and yet it gets very little actual traffic. Some of the difference there, I suppose, is between reference material and a quick solution.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been threatening to build this new site for a while: How To Survive Winter.

With thanks to bluedevi for the initial idea, and kamaitachi for provoking me to finish it!

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I have two identical monitors on my workstation in work. One of them is connected to the video card by DVI, the other by VGA. The differences are quite astounding.

DVI seems to have sharper, clearer colours. In’ve no idea if this is inherent to the connection, or if it’s something on the video card, but it’s making life interesting around now. One one of my two screens, I can distinguish black from a dark navy - that’s VGA. On DVI, they look almost identical, but orange and grey colours that are almost invisible on the VGA monitor stand out bright and clear. There’re a range of shades of light grey that look white on VGA, too. Given we use all these colours in our new designs, making things usable for everyone is going to be tough.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m finding it terribly irritating that the sum total of CSS 3 features we can use is: zero.

There are several dozen aspects proposed and very nearly settled for CSS 3 which I could use on a day to day basis, which would make my life a lot easier. As it stands, however, it’s going to be years before I can use any of them.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m pleased to point you all at Nina’s site, Rocking Grass, now returned to action with a new design. I may be posting a bit there as well in the future, when food-related topics strike me.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

This is ALA’s annual survey. It’s good and useful. If you work in web design or development, go ahead and fill it in.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Since I was beating my head off this problem all weekend, I figured I’d post the solution for the benefit of anyone else who’s looking for it.

The Problem: Moveable Type (which I’m using for The Wizard of Duke Street) changes links so that they have the attribute ‘rel=”nofollow”‘. This is annoying, as when I post a link, or allow through a comment which has a link to the commenter’s site, I intend that link to be seen by search engines as a mark in favour of that site. Nofollow prevents that from happening - while the search engine spider sees the link, it won’t credit it in terms of the algorithm that calculates how popular a page is.

Solution Part 1: Disable the “nofollow” plugin in Moveable Type’s plugin page. This will allow links in the body of your post to function properly, and depending on how MT is configured on your server, may also work for links to commenters’ sites. If it doesn’t do the latter, though, leaving in a redirect function rather than a direct link, you’ll have to move on to part 2.

Solution Part 2: There’s an almost undocumented attribute which you can apply to the MTCommentAuthorLink tag, which you can do under Templates -> Archives -> Individual Entry Archive. Your tag should look something like:

<MTCommentAuthorLink no_redirect=”1″>

Rebuild your individual entry archives, and you’re done! Links should now have no nofollow “functionality” attached, and should go straight to the target sites, with no clumsy redirect.
Credits: I eventually found mention of the no_redirect attribute on Eat Drink Sleep Movable Type

Links: You can find more about how to disable nofollow on various blogging platforms on Andy Beard - Niche Marketing.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been working on various web projects of my own for some time now - some people will know them from the MMW filter on livejournal - but a few are starting to come up working with other people now. The first of these to get going will be my working with Graylion Enterprises as the marketing partner. Graylion’s site is graylion.net, and you can get to the (not safe for work) adult sections and blog from there. Graylion sell boots, leather goods, and adult toys for the goth and fetish market, and I’m greatly looking forward to working with them. Of course, if there’s anything you’d like to suggest (or like to buy), let me know.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

This is a complete sidetrack from all current projects, and I won’t have time to look at it for weeks, if not months, but…

Does anyone know of a service from which I could fetch weather predictions for an arbitrary area (specified by country and city, preferably) for the following day or week in XML or any other kind of web service? In particular, I’d be looking for predicted temperatures and precipitation types.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Before I go off to rentacoder.com or somesuch, I figured I’d ask here - anyone want to take on a small PHP programming job for me? It’ll basically be a set of database manipulation scripts - add items, remove items, list all items in category A, B or C or attached to user X, Y or Z. It’s simple enough stuff, but I haven’t the time to cudgel my brain into coding it from scratch. it doesn’t have to be pretty; I can take care of that end. The SQL to create the relevant tables would also be needed.
I’m looking to pay, mind - cash, if you prefer, although I can’t afford to shell out big money, or links, website consultation, or whatever barter takes your fancy.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There are three positions currently going here in Sports Interaction - mostly in the casino area.

Marketing Executive

Junior Marketing Executive

Web Usability Specialist

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Yesterday, after lunch, winding down through a long series of formatting problems on the current project, I found some odd gaps in table cells. For some reason, places where we had nicely formatted tabular data with images in some of the cells, there was a gap of two pixels at the bottom of the cell. I flexed my (by now, reasonably well developed) CSS muscles, and went to work. Some hours later, I was still staring at it. I cut it down to a bare bones test case. It still happened. I ripped out every single bit of CSS individually, margin, margin-bottom, padding, padding-bottom, and it still happened. And eventually, trying ridiculous things, I found it.

It was the gods-bedamned doctype. 6 hours work. One line of code.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m poking at a project concept here. It might grow into a massive, world-ruling empire, or it might disappear when I find it too complex. However, it needs a database. Without giving away any specifics, it deals with boxes and objects. There is a single main box, which has some method of distinguishing it from other main boxes - probably an ID number, that being nice and simple. It has a number of compartments within it, which may vary. Some of these compartments can hold more than object, others can only hold one. Some compartments have limits as to what types of objects they can contain. Some objects are containers themselves, and can hold other objects, generally more than one. Some objects are too large to fit in particular containers.

Optional extras for simplicity: Containers cannot hold containers, so the deepest you can go is main-compartment-container-object.  The size limit will only be applied to whether a given object can fit in a given container, not how many other objects are in there.
Can someone who is a little more knowledgable than me in the ways of database design show me how to set up the tables for this?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Working with cross-browser CSS is like being released, blind-folded, into a large maze with mobile walls. While you make your way through it, you are occasionally beaten with sticks. Sometimes, the beating stops. You can’t always identify why.

I enjoy working with CSS. I must be a masochist…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Javascript in Internet Explorer makes me an angry, angry webmaster.
Two days ago, one of the developers passed me some AJAX stuff. “It’s all working,” he said, “it just doesn’t look that great.” It’s a search box, which, after the third character or so, goes off and gets the various possibilities, presents them in a neat two-column div that looks like a dropdown (think Google Suggest). The major problem was that the “columns” weren’t lining up nicely, and it took me about ten minutes to sort that out. And then I noticed that in Internet Explorer, for some odd reason, the first line of the div was blank.
I’ve spent most of two working days since then trying to work out why. I am now past the stage where I growl and threaten the folk who wrote the javascript engine for IE with grievious bodily harm. I’m also past the stage of muttering obscenities under my breath, which made one rather new co-worker, not yet used to me, back away hurriedly. I am approaching the zen stage where I try wholly unrelated things in the code, removing spaces, experimenting with the position of semi-colons and closing brackets, and so on.
So far, I have determined that the innerHTML thingmajgit does not play nice with the appendChild function - but only when you’re not looking closely. If you insert alerts to look more closely, it’s all sweetness and light, although it gets a bit un-cooperative when you try to do stuff with the div it has so politely produced. The moment the alerts are gone, it’s back to pushing poor innerHTML into dark corners and sitting on it.
As best I can describe it in more technical terms, here’s what’s happening:
resultArea is a div, initially styled not to appear. arrCurrentResultSet is an array of schtuff coming back from a database query.

resultArea.appendChild(document.createElement(”ol”)) ;

…creates an ordered list.

var theList = resultArea.childNodes[0] ;
theList.name= “liveSearchList” ;
theList.className = “liveSearchList” ;

… assigns it a nice handy variable, a name, and even a class.

for (var i=0; i<this.arrCurrentResultSet.length; i++) {

var tempItem = document.createElement(”li”) ;

tempItem.innerHTML = “<div class=’itemline’><div class=’eventItem’>” + this.arrCurrentResultSet[i].eventname + “</div><div class=’runnerItem’>” + this.arrCurrentResultSet[i].runner + “</div></div>” ;

tempItem.className = “liveSearchListUnHighlight” ;

theList.appendChild(tempItem) ;

}

resultArea.style.visibility = “visible” ;

… does the work of creating an li, populating it, appending it to the list, and finally making the div visible. Except, in IE only, there’s no text visible in the first li.
If, after the theList.appendChild(tempItem) line, I do an alert for tempItem.InnerHTML, it appears in the alert, AND in the displayed div - except that the second (runnerItem) div is missing in all the li elements. And once there’s some more or less unrelated JS run to highlight different li elements after you press the arrow keys, it goes back to the way it normally is - both divs showing, except in the first one, which is now blank again.
If anyone can explain any of this, offer a workaround, or send money, please do so. The money will buy me beer, which will make me feel better, even if it does nothing to the code.
EDIT: Wordpress’ spectacular inability to deal with <pre> tags is not helping…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s been some movement on the discussion boards at In Ranelagh. This is rather gratifying, since I’ve done nothing whatsoever to promote them. I’d like to keep the momentum going, though, so if you’ve anything to contribute (there’s a thread singing the praises of Hobarts there at the moment) please do drop by, register, and leave a few words.

And I’ll get down to a long session of deleting spam profiles from it as soon as I can. Anyone know any good tricks to keep phpBB boards spam-free?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

If you ask me, this is definitely headed for being a number one hit. It’s not often I hear such a mainstream sounding song with lyrics I can completely agree with.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

After a couple of weeks of fairly intensive work, we soft-launched Sports Interaction’s Spanish version yesterday. There’s now a link saying “Español” in the top right corner, and if you feel like betting on the World Cup (or indeed, any other event) in Spanish, go for it. I’m pleased to see this one live.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

… whoever worked out the code for embedding sound on webpages. If I ever meet them, I have every intention of slapping them.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

• Move shelves downstairs
• Move stuff downstairs to put on shelves
• Dispose of leftover stuff upstairs, deemed unworthy of shelving
• Move old desk into shed
• Fetch strawberries looted from freecycle list
• Plant strawberries
• Redesign dukestreet.org in more civilised colours.
• Mow lawn, plant some more rocket, weed herb bed
• Schedule Starbound Economics discussion
• Write like mad for Kingfisher’s Way, as pesky players now thinking too clearly
• List more businesses on inranelagh.com, and pester people unmercifully for links

I think that should be enough to be getting along with…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

20 Best Practices for Web Development - these look like sensible, non-gimmicky ideas. Web design is swinging upward in my interests again, as ye’ve no doubt noticed.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m beginning to get a little irritated with the blocking of javascript, embdedded video, and so on on LJ. There are a lot of cool toys out there at the moment, from flickr photo badges to del.icio.us tag clouds, that I’d like to attach to my personal blog, but due to the fact that an awful lot of them need JS to run, I can only use them on dukestreet.org.

Anyone done the site embedding thing I hear you can do? How well does it work out?