tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28953435233944806142026-05-31T22:20:46.091+12:00My thoughts about technology.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger90125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-82673754646832642972016-04-09T14:13:00.001+12:002016-04-09T14:13:50.190+12:00

I am now blogging over at richard.hulse.nz. See you there.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-62042876789275632152016-02-06T08:18:00.004+13:002016-02-06T08:22:58.375+13:00

A few times a year I release browser and OS stats for www.radionz.co.nz and The Wireless. In this February 2016 release we can see that the the Chrome browser is still increasing its market share, and the shift from desktop to mobile continues. It is no longer good enough to provide a mobile compatible site, or even a mobile friendly one - we need to be making sites where the mobile

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-89515820122752382902015-08-02T13:38:00.000+12:002015-08-03T08:47:51.242+12:00

This is the July 2015 release of browser and OS stats for www.radionz.co.nz and The Wireless. The Chrome browser is still increasing its market share, and the shift from desktop to mobile continues. Browsers Browser 07/2015 02/2015 09/2014 03/2014 11/2013 06/2012 11/2011 11/2010 11/2009

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-34809024160304857122015-06-17T16:23:00.002+12:002017-05-02T17:33:44.618+12:00

This post has moved to here. window.location = "http://richard.hulse.nz/2015/06/17/what-cms-should-i-choose/";

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-78902857163362872442015-06-17T11:09:00.003+12:002017-05-02T17:36:09.675+12:00

This post has moved to here. window.location = "http://richard.hulse.nz/2015/06/16/should-we-underline-links-on-headlines/";

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This post has moved to here. window.location = "https://richard.hulse.nz/2015/05/23/stop-wasting-my-time-please-fix-your-podcast/";

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-25528924048956630222015-05-04T19:17:00.003+12:002017-06-06T12:29:56.857+12:00

This post has moved to here. window.location = "https://richard.hulse.nz/2015/05/04/marking-up-durations-for-screen-readers/";

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-75286355359325560332015-03-29T15:11:00.001+13:002015-03-29T15:11:22.087+13:00

We've all seen websites that reflect the internal structure and politics of an organisation. It is a particularly common pattern among Government agencies. From their home pages you can see all the departments and what they do. The divisions with the most space on the home page can be assumed to be the ones with the most powerful and influential managers. Is this the best way to build a

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-42156080509224743942015-02-18T20:52:00.005+13:002015-02-18T20:56:23.665+13:00

This is the February 2015 release of browser and OS stats for www.radionz.co.nz and The Wireless. Overall, the Chrome browser is increasing its market share, and the shift from desktop to mobile continues. Windows has dropped to under 50%. Browsers Browser 02/2015 09/2014 03/2014 11/2013 06/2012 11/2011 11/

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-63225117385881768172015-02-14T15:51:00.002+13:002015-02-14T15:58:43.287+13:00

I am fixated with page load times. Why? There are three main reasons: Mobile User experience SEO  Mobile Mobile is the fastest growing market segment for web traffic. Radio NZ has 40% of its traffic from non-desktop browsers. Desktop is 60%, Mobile at 28% and Tablet at 11.8%. In the case of devices used over a mobile network, the connection speed is going to be a lot slower than

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-53427766437323292262015-02-04T21:57:00.000+13:002015-02-05T09:55:07.645+13:00

Normally I write here only on tech issues. Last year I found a lump and I thought I'd share my experience in the hope that it helps other men. The story does have a happy ending, and I have a challenge for you to complete. Late last year I started feeling sore on the right side of the scrotum, and so I checked for lumps using a technique called Testicular Self Examination, or TSE. This is

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-56814743268875285782014-11-19T20:00:00.002+13:002014-11-19T20:00:53.487+13:00

Unix has many tools that you can stitch together to do useful things. For example, if you want to watch your site headers in near real-time you can use watch and curl. You might want to do that if you need to build information headers (like X-Cache-Info) and you want to quickly try out different ideas. In my case I use it during a patch window to monitor when our site's proxy server has

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-74729707738978265812014-10-23T09:55:00.000+13:002015-02-05T10:13:16.703+13:00

If you are getting the following error in your Rails app: unexpected token at 'alihack<%eval request("alihack.com")%> ...it can be blocked in your nginx config. The following snippet can be placed inside the server block and returns a  '400 Bad Request' with a text message in the body. A big assumption here is that your app is not using json - it blocks all JSON PUT requests

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-72351038261123186322014-09-21T09:22:00.004+12:002014-09-21T09:22:54.109+12:00

This is the September 2014 release of browser and OS stats for www.radionz.co.nz and The Wireless. Overall, the Chrome browser is increasing its market share, and the shift from desktop to mobile continues. Windows has dropped to under 50%. Browsers Browser 09/2014 03/2014 11/201306/201211/201111/201011/200911/2008 Chrome 30.8 25.23 23.7 14.6 13.8 8.75

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-62794446963988763692014-09-17T21:25:00.000+12:002014-09-17T21:42:59.841+12:00

This short post shows how news events impact website traffic on radionz.co.nz, and how we handle it technically. On 18 August Guyon Espiner interviewed the Prime Minister about the claims in the book Dirty Politics. Within 10 minutes of the interview airing and being posted on the site traffic jumped to nearly twice normal levels, and stayed up for 12 hours. The interview was the

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-15098834274355224592014-08-02T10:01:00.003+12:002014-08-02T10:01:55.150+12:00

I have evaluated dozens of content management systems over the last 20 years, as well have having built several myself. The answer to the question, do we have the right CMS, is almost always going to be no. It is no because your business will always be changing, and there will be a gap between what you want to do, and what your CMS will let you do. Given this gap, the question that

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-15745881157160572572014-06-02T10:56:00.000+12:002014-06-07T08:46:27.336+12:00

I have just published a Google doc of eight years of Operating System, Browser and Mobile data for www.radionz.co.nz. I have also included a couple of graphs such as this one showing the decline of desktop use (click to see a larger version). There are other interesting trends - the decline of IE, the decline of the Windows desktop OS, and the rise of Chrome (all as a percentage of the

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-84595964055082096592014-05-18T09:19:00.003+12:002014-05-18T09:19:38.813+12:00

I've found it handy during the development of responsive CSS to know what stylesheet or media query is active. The following is an example of how to dynamically add labels to a page. @media screen and (max-width:600px) { .site-time p::after { content:" (0-600px)"; } } @media (min-width: 601px) and (max-width: 800px) { .site-time p::after { content:" (601-800px)"; } }

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-22624704705562665602014-03-23T19:36:00.001+13:002014-03-23T19:36:40.856+13:00

Here is another lot of browser and OS stats for www.radionz.co.nz and The Wireless. Size of Content Library The audio library now contains 27,000 hours of material, all of it searchable from www.radionz.co.nz/audio. That is 179,000 items, most of which are downloadable and embeddable. We also just partnered with DigitalNZ who now have a copy of most of our

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-5790733970173990522013-11-23T09:32:00.000+13:002013-11-23T09:38:45.784+13:00

Here it is once again - my roundup of browser and OS stats for www.radionz.co.nz. This time I'm including stats from The Wireless. Size of Content Library The audio library now contains 25,000 hours of material, all of it searchable from www.radionz.co.nz/audio. That is 167,000 items, most of which are downloadable and embeddable. Browsers Browser 11/2013 06/201211/201111

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-43419664101772113932013-06-08T10:33:00.001+12:002013-06-08T10:34:55.159+12:00

At Radio NZ we engage outside contractors to help us build the web applications we use. The most public of these apps is our website, and internally there is a large database system that is used company-wide. One of the challenges of writing code is that over time the codebase tends to become rundown. This can be made worse if many people are working on that code. Differences in coding

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-32381509896841025512013-05-26T12:19:00.003+12:002013-05-27T13:06:32.544+12:00

After three years of work, the new Radio New Zealand website is about to go now live. As well as a new design, we built a new content management system to handle our publishing requirements. Starting from the inside out, this is what our technology stack looks like. The Hardware We have eight HP servers, all with 8-core hyper-threading CPUs, and a minimum of 12 gigs of RAM. Four

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-71383881314161113412013-02-10T09:05:00.000+13:002013-02-10T09:08:08.577+13:00

As anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last few years will know, there has been an explosion of the use of mobile computing devices over the last few years. At Radio New Zealand we've seen the percentage of mobiles devices accessing our website increase dramatically in the last 12 months. One year ago the percentage of our traffic from mobile devices (including tablets) was 13%.

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-60886485362367714292013-02-01T21:37:00.004+13:002013-02-01T21:38:04.407+13:00

I worked with Paul Holmes in the 1980s while he was the host of the 9am to midday talkback slot on 2ZB in Wellington. I was a studio operator at the time - we played the commercials, took in feeds of news and other events and balanced the audio levels of the show. I also got to worked with Paul on the odd outside broadcast, and helped put together the audio package that was part of his (first)

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2895343523394480614.post-41528031039544552782013-01-08T19:25:00.003+13:002013-01-08T20:38:52.149+13:00

Normally I write about tech issues here, but this last weekend my wife and I were tourists, for a get-away without the kids. A tourist's view of a location is important - in this on-line age word of mouth is probably the most important influencer of opinion about where to holiday - especially with review sites likes Trip Advisor. With this in mind, this is my review of our weekend

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0