Citrus Skies

Valid 'Live Earth' Badge Code

If you haven’t heard of Live Earth, its the latest group of concerts, in the lineage of Live8 and the original Live Aid, raising money for various charity works. This time the main target of the concerts is ‘Climate Change’. Brief introduction over, the Live Earth organisers are asking people to show their support by displaying a Live Earth Badge on their websites or MySpace/Bebo/etc. page. However, for anyone who has taken the time to ensure their website is Web Standards compliant, the code provided for Live Earth Badge (a Flash object) will break that compliance, introducing several validation errors.

I’ve attempted to resolve these errors and have included the new code below, which validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. So far, I’ve checked that it works in Firefox 2.0, IE 6 & 7 and Opera 9.

Update: Now also confirmed working in Safari and Firefox on Mac OS X.





  alt : Live Earth

Here’s the code in action:

alt : Live Earth

If you’ve got any corrections or improvements on this code, post them in the comments and I’ll update the article.

Textile Link Titles (Handy for Textpattern Users)

A chance discovery, which saves me a little time with each article I post, is how to set the link title attribute when using textile to mark up my posts.

In textile, links are formatted as

"Link Text":http://www.some.random.link.org

which generate XHTML links such as:

Link Text.

Most of the time this is sufficient and its very easy to quickly add links into your posts.

However, sometimes you need a little more. If the text you’re using for your link doesn’t actually state where the link will take the visitor to, then its a good idea to add a descriptive ‘title’ attribute for your link. The only problem is that neither of the textile documentation pages (on Threshold State and Textism) tells you how to do this.

As it turns out, the answer is quite simple:

"Link Text(Descriptive Title)":http://www.some.random.link.org

Which generates XHTML as follows:

Link Text

Armed with this knowledge, I no longer have to resort to writing out the full XHTML code for a link just because I want to set the title attribute. I’m hoping that if this is useful for me, it might be useful for someone else too.

Dreamhost leaks 3,500 FTP passwords

Not all that long ago, I was praising Dreamhost for their efforts in ‘going green’, but now comes the news that somehow they’ve leaked 3,500 FTP passwords opening the hosting accounts of many users to a spam attack, with unwanted links being added to the end of many web pages.

These days, complete security is impossible, as there’s always someone willing to spend hours/days/weeks trying to crack a system, either for profit, for a cause or just for kicks. Eventually someone determined enough and resourceful enough will find a way in and you should have a plan of how to deal with this should it happen (hint: make regular backups!).

However, what annoys me most about this incident is that according to reports, Dreamhost first tried to blame individual users for their choice of PHP applications or blog systems, before finally admitting to the fault themselves. In the mean time, many users remained unaware that their accounts had been compromised. Unfortunately, this an attitude I’ve observed with other web hosts over time and not just Dreamhost – the knee-jerk reaction always seems to be to blame the user rather than question the system. I’m sure sometimes they’re right, but so often they’re not.

Apple Shakes the Tree

I just loved this description:

“What could be more scary than an organisation capable of working in total secrecy, with a track record of creating highly desirable products, headed by a man who’s beaten cancer and an SEC investigation and comes equipped with a Reality Distortion Field that would make Darth Vader jealous.”

The Register on how the mobile phone biz lost the plot and why Apple might shake things up with the iPhone’s killer app… “making calls”.

DreamHost Goes Green

I’ve recently been investigating “green” web hosting as I have some upcoming projects for which a more eco-friendly approach is appropriate. From “Carbon Offset Schemes” and “Renewable Energy Credits” right through to fully “Solar-Powered Data Centers” there’s quite a range of green hosting options out there, each with their own definition of just what “green” means.

One thing I didn’t expect however, was that right under my nose, Citrus Skies’ own web host, DreamHost, would turn over a new leaf (sorry!) and go green with its new “Carbon Neutral” policy. Whether its a sincere move (and I believe that it is) or just a quick, though expensive, PR move, its good to see such a large web host making a commitment to be more environmentally friendly.

For more information see DreamHost’s Green Policy and their ‘We’re Green’ Blog Entry