That being said, imagine my surprise when I see the Top 10 list of cities that people would like An Event Apart to visit in 2010, and right there at number 10 is Memphis. For those that may not know, An Event Apart is a conference put on by the good folks over at A List Apart. While I have never been I have followed along at home and once our economy gets itself in order this conference is high on my “want list,” along with SXSWi.

So since they only do 4 of these a year and Memphis is 10, I may be out of luck. But at least we made the list.

todd

<object width="480" height="295">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wmkkVhBxLsc&hl=en&fs=1"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wmkkVhBxLsc&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed>
</object>

Now is where my problem comes up. We are making an effort to produce pages that are all W3c compliant and we are using XHTML 1.0 Transitional and the embed tag doesn’t validate. According to the HTML 4.01 elements page, there is no embed tag. But the specs for HTML 5 have the embed element. So once HTML 5 gets here life will be easier.

In the meantime there is a way to validate using the HTML 4.01 tags.

<object width="480" height="295" 
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
data="http://www.youtube.com/v/wmkkVhBxLsc&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1>
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wmkkVhBxLsc&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
</object>

Take the type attribute from the embed tag and move it to the object tag. Then take the src attribute from the embed tag and move it to the object tag but change the name of the attribute to data. Also make sure all the ampersands (&) are encoded (&) even in the URL.

Once HTML5 comes along this code will still be valid since the object tag is staying around.

todd

The problem came up when someone tried to display a jQuery image rotator to cycle through some images. To make sure it degraded nicely when javascript was turned off we chose to just display a static image. The problem was that the plugin used, s3Slider, had a height set on the div it displays in. While not entirely bad while javascript is turned on, it creates a rather larger white box when javascript is turned off.

Simple workaround in this case…

We set a display:none; on the <div id=”s3Slider”> in one of the stylesheets used so that by default the div would NOT be shown thus eliminating our large white area. So for the folks with Javascript turned off we are done.

For the folks with javascript turned on we just use javascript to change the display style. The s3Slider code is initialized using:

$(document).ready(function() {
   $('#s3slider').s3Slider({
      timeOut: 4000
   });
});

We changed it using jQuery chaining:

$(document).ready(function() {
   $('#s3slider').css({display:"block"}).s3Slider({
      timeOut: 7000
   });
});

You can ignore the change in the timeOut as that doesn’t affect this. Notice the addition of the css({display:”block”}) which causes the block to display, but only for those users with Javascript.

todd

My primary project that is going on right now is migrating the 51K or so pages on our main web server into our new templates. So my group and I are having to go through each directory and first decide if the content there is relevant. We have no real clean up process, so many of the pages and directories are being deleted. We are about 35% of the way through the directories (not necessarily that far on the page count). And we are not using a content management system (CMS) so we are moving them all manually.

Screenshot of view source from pandora.com

That now brings me to my View Source Fail. Most folks on campus are excited about moving their pages into the new templates as they are a tremendous step up from where we were. That being said I have seen a few pages that have been moved without me knowing about it. This is necessarily a bad thing, unless of course it is done wrong. Then it causes all parties involved a little extra work.

Some folks have taken the view source method to see what the code for the new pages look like. Then they remove what they don’t need and throw up the page. This works fine until there is an update to the template. Since there is a repository that pulls in all the necessary files, things start to break because most of these “view source pages” don’t point to the repository.

So the point of this rant is not to bash the view source functionality, I have used it many times to help me out. I have also used it to see what others have done to help them out. But be aware that what you see isn’t always what you get. With so many people using server side scripting languages (PHP, Perl, ASP, Python, just to name a few), things can be done behind the scenes that manipulate what is shown when you just “View Source.” This is also true when server side includes (SSI) are enabled. With most scripting languages the file extension is no longer html or htm, so the flag should go up that something could be going on at the server level. With SSI enabled, the extension is still html or htm, so it is harder to know.

“Web work” isn’t as easy as view source makes it out to be. This is a good thing, because there are enough poorly done pages in the web world.

todd

Then, the next day my hard drive said it was about to go out. So I started to think, I can do this as well, and now seems like a good time to start. The aforementioned folks are both considering a lighter and easy to manage laptop. I’m thinking why not be able to just find an open computer with an internet connection and be able to be productive. This concept would work great at conferences, some teachers, or people that travel around a bit. I also realize this isn’t for everyone, just yet.  In the web world, most of the stuff I do and interact with is on a different server already, so I have that going for me.

So much is already there. Bookmarks, pictures, music, docs, email (both work and personal).  The only thing that I didn’t automatically know of is storage space. I have since found Dropbox and Humyo. I decided against Dropbox since it requires a local installation, where as Humyo doesn’t. I’m not against local installations, because there are things that I don’t know of a replacement for yet (Gimp jumps to my mind for me), but it would be nice to rely on local installs as little as possible.

So how has it been for a few days? I am currently working on a Linux box and it’s been fine. So far I haven’t needed any of the 16 GB of stuff (all work related) that I had to copy, makes me wonder… So the next time you send me a Word doc or Excel doc, you’ll never know, but it was probably edited on Google Docs.

todd

We currently don’t have a virtual tour, and I would love to get one going. So, I decided to give the Flip a try. I’m an oddball in the web industry and use Windows, so I planned on using Windows Movie Maker (WMM) to do all the video editing since it comes with the operating system (Vista if you are wondering). I found some music from Musopen that is free as well. Going royalty-free and price-free greatly limits the choice of music, but I found something that fits my purposes. I also had 3 voiceovers to produce as well. So off to Movie Maker I go.

I import the movie files, then go to narrate a section of the video, which was very easy.  Then I go to import the music. Rut Roh! The music imports, but it pushes the narration I had done to the end of the 4 minute song.  Not good. A quick Google search reveals my dilemma in which WMM just allows one audio track. This keeps WMM simple to use, but limits the functionality in this case.

My workaround isn’t pretty, but if you are on a tight budget this may help. Go get Audacity and install it. Once this is installed I imported my music track. Now begins the not so pretty part. I had to go to WMM and write down the times I wanted the voice overs to start. Then inside of Audacity I had to add the right amount of silence in front of my voice overs. You can see below how everything looks inside of Audacity.

Screen shot from Audacity.

Once everything is in the right spot, I exported the tracks as a single file.  Then I imported that file into WMM to merge with the video I shot. Total cost was the $125 for Flip, all the software was free or included with Windows. The result was a 1:53 minute that looks pretty good (biased opinion) for a proof-of-concept. If we get the go ahead to do a whole series, we will need to combat the jitter, but I shot this as I was walking. Any other suggestions are welcome.

Testing with Flip Ultra from Todd Barber on Vimeo.

Also once I break down and get a Mac I will try the same thing and compare the two processes and will be sure to let you know.

todd

• Total visits: 289,879 visits (53,354 unique) - these numbers include on-campus and indicates about an 8.5% increase in traffic (~22K increase). Most likely due to an increase in the number of students on campus.  We will investigate further when we compare the off-campus numbers by themselves.
• 82% of visits are IE and of those 65% are v7 and 34% are v6 (37% last month, it seems as if some people have upgraded.  We can only hope!)
• 92% of visits are Windows and 7.5% are Macs. There is less than 1% combined of many others including iPhone (.16%), and iPod (.04%).
• Our Nintendo Wii traffic increased from 2 visits to 5.  We also added a visit each from the Playstation 3 and the PSP.

Benchmarking

Google Analytics offers a benchmarking utility that offers some interesting insights.  You can’t put too much credence into the numbers, because it all depends on how many peole are participating in the service.  It does benmark in the same sector and size, for example the following numbers are compared against Colleges & Universities of similar size, so it’s also not like the numbers don’t mean anything. How Google determines similar size is briefly explained to be number of site visits.

So, there are 6 areas of comparison, but I will only look at 2 for right now, visits and pageviews.

As stated we had 289,879 visits in August compared to the benchmark of 259,762. So we beat the benchmark for the month by 11.59%. Every business day we beat the benchmark, but on the weekends we are below the benchmark.

For pageviews, we are below the benchmark by 23.71%, 618,850 compared to 811,157. In this category there is no day that we are above the benchmark.

The full version of my little cubicle is at http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=B18405F3-E9C7-43FD-9225-1DC655A9A4A8

todd

But the propeller head in me thinks, “Surely it can be more than just a marketing tool. How can it be used internally?”  My gut reaction is, it can’t, at least not in it’s current state. And I’ll expound.

Graph from Google Trends

I’ll be comparing a few other micro-blogging sites with Twitter in an effort to come up with one that I think could be used just as Rachel’s sources state, but also provide a valuable internal tool as well. I will be examing Twitter, Plurk, Rejaw, and Indenti.ca.

Twitter wins hands down as far as user base (1,244,982 as of investigation according to TwitDir, but I know that is quite a bit off because according to Twitterholic I was in the 14 million to sign up), but we all know about the growing pains they have been through.  Twitter is simple and due to the API has many desktop applications so that you really never have to go to the website. Also, it will hard to move the user base away from Twitter. The APIs auto-update at certain intervals, but the web site does not.

Plurk (65,448 users according to Plurk Mania) wins hands down in functionality.  The biggest complaint, I believe, is the sideways scrolling. Plurk search and Twitter search indicate that it seems there is more negative than positive.  Other than that it allows you to embed pictures and videos.  It allows for threaded conversations, and has groups. To be widely accepted I think Plurk needs to adopt an “official” API.  They have the unofficial one at Google Groups, and there are some desktop apps that are slowly creeping out.

The other two are small and don’t have many users (to be fair to Rejaw, they just launched June 5, 2008).  To me, Identi.ca is just like Twitter except open source.  Rejaw allows all the embedding that Plurk does, but it does have two things that make it stand out to me.  Its website updates using push technology instead of pull as it seems all the rest do. It also jumped ship on the 140 character limit and raised it to 1000 characters.

So all that being said what needs to happen for massive internal adoption.  The best features from all the above could make a very good communication tool.

• A simple interface that has more options if you want them. For business use, you should be able to embed items directly into the post.
• Better privacy and groups, because not everything is public knowledge.
• More fine grained search, to allow people to only search what they should see.
• An API so that the application can be ported to where the user is and not force the user to come to us.
• Push updating. Makes it closer to IM than what is currently on Twitter.
• Higher character limit. 140 is to low for business use.

I don’t think that is too much to ask for, do you? If you have some new thoughts, let me know. By the way, I am on all of these services (username: ctbarber), but really only interact on Twitter. Why? Because that’s where all the people are.

todd

These are for the month of July 2008.

• Total visits: 267,285 visits (49,833 unique) - these numbers include on-campus
• 83% of visits are IE and of those 63% are v7 and 37% are v6 (update your machines people!!)
• 93% of visits are Windows and 7% are Macs. There is less than 1% combined of many others including Linux(.18%), iPhone (.12%), and iPod (.02%). We even had 2 visits from a Nintendo Wii.

Off-Campus Visits

• Total visits: 142,812 visits (about 53% of our total visits)
• Top five countries
  1. United States 139,776
  2. India 468
  3. China 312
  4. Canada 263
  5. South Korea 193

Not all of our pages are being tracked, but as we roll out our new templates we are including hooks to Google Analytics. Once all our pages are reporting I can start to give more info about our most popular pages.

todd