Pet Pixels

PHPLondon08 was quite a success. I really enjoyed it, met lots of great people.

The talks were generally good (I'll get to mine!). The only downer I thought was that there was really quite a bit of overlap between Ivo's intro and Mike & Scott's one immediately after it, though both were good in their own right (and I liked Ivo's bricks analogy).

Mine went mostly ok, but I got the timing completely wrong, spent far too long on the first half, and I'd not even reached halfway through the second half when I spotted Richard (the room manager) holding up the "1 minute remaining" sign - I'd completely forgotten about time allocated for questions! That said, after being really quite nervous beforehand (which is generally unlike me!), I found it pretty easy once I got going, though taking it too easy is probably what made it take too long. Despite all that, there were plenty of good questions asked (no tumbleweed effect!), and I got some great compliments. Someone even said it had been their best talk of the day, so I must have been doing something right.

The slides are linked below, and I'll also try to record audio of the bits I didn't get to, as otherwise my talk's MP3 will have a rather feeble ending!

A real surprise appeared just before Derick's excellent keynote - a combination of PHP history and best-practice - three guys from PHP Barcelona invited me to speak at their conference in September! I think it's kind of provisional, but it was very flattering to be asked!

I mentioned in the talk, and talked to various people, about writing an email book. One point came up that led me to think that there should be a guide for marketers - there simply isn't any good, accessible information on what's legal and what's not, and practical advice about what they should ask of their email service provider in implementing marketing campaigns.

For those who want them, here are PDFs of my talk(s):

• Part 1: mail(); (6.8Mb PDF)


• Part 2: Life after mail();.pdf (7.6Mb PDF)

FYI, I ground to a halt on slide 13 of 28 in the second one.

I just came across this neat trick for providing custom icons (think favicon.ico, but with a reasonable size, better colour and a proper file format) for web pages for iPhone/iPod touch users. There seemed to be some debate over what exactly the native size is, so I built a test page to test it. The full-size icon image is also displayed on the page, but that's only there to show what the phone is starting with.
After twiddling with this test for a while, I came to the conclusion that there isn't a native size - it's somewhere between 59x59 and 60x60 - though 60x60 is about as close as you can get. This lack of native size is interesting, as it implies that the iPhone UI is using resolution independent rendering, which we know OS X can do.
Bigger sizes do scale more smoothly, but they're a waste of bandwidth and mean that you lose control of the exact appearance - photographic icons will look very nice, but anything involving single pixels lines will probably suffer badly. If you're a pixel geek that doesn't like your images twiddled with and you've painstakingly created your icon in Photoshop, you need to know the native size. If anyone finds a perfect image size (which may well not be square), please leave a comment.

Something of a result yesterday. On the same run as on my previous attempt, I clocked 125km/h (that's 78mph). Skis were Stöckli GS 166cm (i.e. short, not particularly stable) on fairly hard-packed piste. Given a better opportunity, run and equipment, it would be pretty straightforward to do better than that.

Today was an astounding powder day, just lots of bouncing about, really good fun on some nice fat Stöckli Stormrider XXL 178s. Tomorrow we have a guide booked and it's due to be sunny - I can't wait!

The WebKit guys have put together a new Javascript benchmark under the name "SunSpider". It's intended to go further than simple benchmarks like Celtic Kane's and try to emulate real-world tasks. Safari/WebKit has been getting pretty quick on these benchmarks anyway, but this new one really shows its strengths. There are various comments about people's results in the comments for that post, but no compilation for easy comparison, so I've put one together.
Updated: added Webkit Win and Opera 9.5b Win
Updated: Failed to run completely on Opera 9.5b Mac
Updated: Some stats for Opera 9.5b Mac and IE6
Updated March 18th: Added Safari 3.1, FF3b4, IE8

Continue reading "SunSpider Benchmarks: WebKit Rocks"

The Email Standards Project is a worthy effort to try to get email clients to handle HTML email in a consistent way. Many already do pretty well, but there are some big exceptions: Outlook 2007 (with its ancient Word rendering engine), GMail, .Mac, Hotmail and others. Many are opposed to the whole idea of HTML email, but often their resentment is based on the fact that historically email client support has been so bad that they've had very poor experiences. Worse is that some senders (not us!) send HTML-only messages, which is certainly something that will drive a Mutt user potty. Smartmessages supports sending in plain, html and mixed formats (settable by each individual subscriber), and we ensure that our users get a clean, reliable platform for delivering their creations, so we try to work around the deficiencies of things like MS Exchange.

Generally the poor support in big-name clients has led to a need to develop HTML for email for very much the lowest common denominator, which for the most part means no CSS (unless you're prepared to tiptoe through the minefields of using it), no images, no scripts, no forms, no attachments. Too many designers think of email as being just like the web, but it's not - the vast majority of web pages will simply not work as email. These days the only effective way of designing for email is to start out with classic HTML 4.0 with no CSS or images and make your message look good using only type, white space and colour, because this is probably all that 90% (yes, really that much) of your recipients are going to see. You can then sprinkle a few images in for enhancement, but you should have no text in images that is not shown as text. With the advent of Outlook 2007's big step backwards, it's no longer possible to use background images, so you can't have text over images at all. You also can't rely on alt attributes as image fallbacks, as some big clients don't display the alt text if images are being suppressed as an anti-spam measure.

Many designers get very uppity about this kind of thing as it means that their palette of options is severely constrained, however, it should really be regarded as a challenge. It's not too hard to make stuff look good with heavy use of images (see CSS Zen Garden for gorgeous examples), but producing stuff that looks good with no images or CSS (or more to the point to still look good when those parts have been ripped out) takes a great deal of skill, experience and appreciation of the medium.

Any effort to try and raise the bar gets our support, so props to the Email Standards Project and to Freshview for starting it.

You may have noticed that some of our sites have not been responding for the last few days. This is because 123-reg.co.uk had a name server outage. They didn't tell anybody or apologise at all, they just decided that several thousand people could do without their sites for a couple of days. People are generally pretty upset about it - just check out these damning blog entries.

123 have always been pretty useless, but to date I've not found anyone offering a decent professional service that also covered .co.uk domains. 123's big feature is that they are extremely cheap, unfortunately in every sense. This low price means that many of our customers have registered domains on there that we have ended up managing, so we have inherited their choice of registrar and default DNS host.
123 have NEVER responded to my requests for support, and I've reported major problems with their web interface many times - despite their takeover by pipex, their web interface has not changed at all (though the shiny home page has). It's not possible to log in to more than one account (something we need to do often) as their authentication system is totally useless - it's also impossible to log out (yes there is a link, but it doesn't actually do anything)! At least there are Firefox plugins to work around their ineptitude.

When transferring domains to 123, it's not possible to set up the DNS before the transfer has completed (or for them to simply retain existing name server settings - they always reset them to theirs), so it's impossible to transfer a domain to them without downtime and exposure of a nasty parking page on your domain.

Their "managed" hosting service is nothing of the sort. Steer well clear. I blogged about that quite a while ago.

All this adds up to something that is a lot less than professional. So from now on we'll be hosting our domains elsewhere, and suggesting that all our customers do the same.

I'm very happy to see that one of the better registrars I've used has finally got .co.uk accreditation.
They have a pretty and functional web interface, full access to zone files (if you want it), and they've answered every support request within a couple of hours (and with a certain Gallic charm). I've also had good experiences with enom.com, though while they are relatively expensive for uk domains, they have a UK support line that's not premium rate and is actually staffed by people who can do something about your request! The aforementioned blog post mentions Everydns, which looks like something to bear in mind if price is a real issue.

Over the last year I've been involved with the guys at d::gen. d::gen have put together the AMEE (Avoiding Mass Extinction Engine) Carbon Calculator, which has since been chosen by DEFRA as the official carbon calculator for the UK, and provides back end for the ActOnCO2 site as well as providing a public repository of official carbon emissions data.
Today marks the launch of the next big thing in AMEE's short history: Google's Carbon Footprint application, which is available as a gadget on Google's UK iGoogle home page.
The app was developed by Avenue A / Razorfish. My role at d::gen has been to deal with server and application configuration, deployment, hosting and monitoring, database configuration and load testing.
AMEE continues to grow in flexibility, ability, capacity and content, all while remaining a shining example of the 'right way' of running an open-source project.
Anyway, congratulations d::gen and AMEE, and thanks to Google and Razorfish for using us!
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and deal with the prospect of being on the receiving end of a link from a Google home page....

If you read some of the postmaster docs on Hotmail/Windows Live, you might get the impression that Microsoft takes the processing of unwanted email seriously. However, this seems to be untrue. Continue reading "Microsoft wants more spam"