WebFaction is great

[Shameless plug alert!]

After becoming completely fed up with GoDaddy and its complete lack of options for “power users” (if you can call my web dabblings that), I sent them some angry feedback (I wish I’d saved it, it was quite good), cancelled my hosting, and decided to look for alternates.

Having recently started dabbling in Django, a key factor in my search was that the hosting should support running Django applications (something which GoDaddy failed at, incidentally). It didn’t take long for me to stumble across WebFaction. Their plans, while slightly more expensive than GoDaddy’s (in the order of ~$2 more per month), appeared to offer far more than I was getting with my old hosting.

And so I elected to sign up and give them a shot! And so far it’s not a decision that I regret in the slightest! Some reasons I like WebFaction:

• Their control panel is actually usable, does exactly what you’d expect of it, and offers a great level of control. Setting up new domains and “applications” (the name WebFaction gives to individual server daemons) is completely intuitive, I could jump straight in and set up everything that I needed.
• The data and bandwidth allowances are well and truly enough for the couple low-volume websites that I run. Performance is fine (aside from the odd hiccup, pages are generally very fast to load).
• It might as well be a VPS for the freedoms they give you; you can create as many shell accounts as you want, and install/run what you like on them from your home directory. You’re only limited by memory. The configurability that having shell access affords, is of course invaluable.
• One-click installers for applications and databases had my Django instance up and running in around 10 minutes. That’s pretty much unprecedented, it took significantly longer for me on my own development machine to manually configure Python/Apache/etc.

All in all, if you’re a power user, and you’re prepared to pay the extra $1-2 over budget hosting, you won’t regret it!

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 | Posted in Intarwebs | 8 Comments »

Why I hate sIFR

(And why I think it should lay down and die, just as much as I think IE6 should).

Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (or sIFR), for those wondering, is a popular method for replacing plain text in a website, with custom fonts that a user may not have installed. It is typically employed in headings, or on buttons, where a custom font can add interest or “pizazz” to an otherwise mundane page.

It works by employing some complicated JavaScript (roughly 10kB of it, when compressed) to dynamically replace text at load time, with a custom Flash movie that contains the desired text, rendered in the custom font. This is ideal for pages where heading text might be regularly changing (such as on a blog), as it does not require the blogger to generate a new heading image for every new post. Indeed, the general concept behind sIFR is a good and useful one.

The problem I have with it lies in its execution. Here’s why I think it is a scourge on the earth, and should be cleansed at first opportunity:

• It uses Flash. This is a bad idea for so many reasons.
  • First (and most obvious), it requires the user to actually have Flash installed to see the better fonts. If they don’t have Flash installed, they don’t see the page to its full potential.
  • Some power users will choose to selectively enable Flash in websites, to avoid advertisements and the like, and these users will not see your headings. Ad blockers may block your headings by default.
  • Flash does not play well in the typical browser environment. It often appears on top of all other page elements, potentially concealing (for example), flyout menus, in-page JavaScript overlays, etc.
• Being an embedded Flash movie, it’s a completely different entity to the rest of your page. While the creators of sIFR have cleverly included the ability to select text within the Flash movie, as soon as you try to continue your selection further down the page, you find your selection frustratingly stuck inside the heading. If you begin your selection outside the heading and select over the heading, then you can copy and paste with some success, but it feels clunky and unusable.
• Did I mention it was Flash?
• There is often a noticeable “flash”, or flicker on page load, or reload, or moving to a new page. This is directly a result of using JavaScript replacement, and loading in the Flash player.
• If you’re placing a link against the text, you lose browser features such as being able to right-click the link (instead you get the Flash right-click menu), or middle-click to open in a new tab.

There are two good alternatives I’ve found, which both have their merits, and which both don’t go near Flash with a ten-foot pole! Yay! Note that both of these use the same concept of JavaScript replacement at load time, so that the page is still accessible to screen readers, and people that don’t use a graphical browser.

• Facelift (FLIR) is essentially the same as sIFR, but instead of replacing text with a Flash movie, it is replaced with a dynamically-generated image. Genius! (Not really, it just looks like it alongside the retardation that is sIFR). The only caveat is that you need to have the ability to run PHP scripts on your webserver, and have GD2 installed. It will even cache the images for you, so you’re not generating a new image on every page view. The only drawback I’ve seen, is that there can be a visible delay in image replacement, while the browser grabs the image files from the servers. However, after first load, these images will be cached, both on the server, and in the user’s browser.
• Cufón requires neither Flash nor a PHP backend. All that’s required of the developer is to prerender an SVG font file from the font of their choosing. Headings are then rendered on the fly in-browser by JavaScript (usually to a <canvas> tag) – no backend required. This is both extremely fast, and equally as effective as the other two options.

If you have the ability to run a PHP backend, I’d suggest using Facelift (I’m a fan of the elegance of using images, which is essentially what would be used if you were to manually craft the headings yourself), otherwise Cufón is pretty great too. Whatever you do, don’t touch sIFR or Flash with a ten-foot pole!

Thursday, August 6th, 2009 | Posted in Intarwebs | No Comments »

Death to IE6

I’m happy to see that ditching support for IE6 is finally gaining ground. Most prominently, Facebook, Digg (and soon, YouTube) are all officially leaving IE6 behind – and hopefully other large companies and websites to follow.

IE6 has been around since 2001, and the online landscape has changed much since then – from new standards (transparent PNGs, CSS 2, etc), to a complete shift in the paradigm of what a website is (the pages we view are far more interactive than the mostly static ones of a few years ago, and complex JavaScript is extremely prevalent). Some would argue that IE6′s standards support was never very top-notch, and certainly by today’s standards, a designer must bend over backwards, and then some, just to get their website to display correctly in a severely outdated browser. As a perfect example, I never tested tom.net.nz in IE6 when designing the current theme, and while it displays fine in virtually every other browser since IE7, IE6 fails spectacularly at rendering certain elements of the design.

So who exactly is holding us back? According to a Digg survey, only 7% of people using the browser actually like it. The rest? Well, a staggering 76% use it because they are forced to – due to sadistic workplace IT policies, or not having administrator access to their PC. Only 17% aren’t upgrading because they don’t feel the need to upgrade (hopefully as more big-name websites drop support, they will begin feeling such a need!) It seems the solution lies with those in charge of IT facilities in workplaces around the world – surely the people who would know best the importance of using an up-to-date browser!

Here’s hoping that IE6′s market share drops into the nothings by year’s end. I personally feel no desire to wrangle my designs to support it.

Helpful hint: if you’re still using IE6, click this link.

Friday, July 17th, 2009 | Posted in Intarwebs | No Comments »

RIAA’s Hostile Takeover of the Internet

The recording industry is no longer targeting pirates – they are actually trying to hijack the very fabric of the Internet.

The apparent strategy:

1. Outlaw file sharing
2. Outlaw personal encryption and anonymization services
3. Set up a global, privately-run Internet surveillance program to spy on everybody all the time without a warrant — run by ISPs and paid for by the taxpayers
4. And finally, get the authority to block anyone from the Internet entirely, without the involvement of police, courts or any verifiable trail of evidence

We can not let this happen.

“It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.” – Bruce Schneier

This article sums up my thoughts quite nicely.

Thursday, April 30th, 2009 | Posted in Intarwebs | No Comments »

The Pirate Bay Trial, Redux

Apparently the judge in the trial had ties to pro-copyright groups. They’re calling for a retrial. Interesting!

Friday, April 24th, 2009 | Posted in Intarwebs | No Comments »