ribbontree website design

If you are reading this, it's the year 2010 (or later).. Happy new year.

When this posting went live at 1262304000 Unix time (or midnight on January 1st 2010), the Unix Epoch celebrated its 40th birthday.

The thing with the Unix Epoch (the number of seconds since 1970) is that each milestone is gone in.. well.. a second. There are so many of them. So maybe its main purpose is not for holding a party every time it gets to a special number like 1000000000 or 1234567890.

That aside, it's always nice to celebrate, so Happy Birthday Unix Epoch. Life begins at 40.

Having used various other methods for embedding RSS into a webpage in the past, I was impressed by FeedForAll's RSS2HTML solution.

It does exactly what it says. It converts RSS "2" HTML.
In fact, thankfully, it does more than that. It converts RSS to text, which can be HTML formatted as required.
I was particularly impressed with how easy it is to configure and how I was able to format the output in unusual ways without having to trawl through too much complex code.

I am disappointed that Google seem to be removing the link bar from the top of its search results pages.

Whilst useful to most users of Google search in that after you have searched for your phrase, you would be just one click away from an images, news or maps search, this feature was vital for anyone whose disability makes web-browsing difficult: the links were available at the top left of every page - One tab and spacebar press away for each of the associated links.
Now a user would have to click the 'back' button on their web browser to get back to Google Home, so they could re-select their search type.

Unusually for Google, the disappearance of this feature seems to be intermittent, which in my opinion is the worst situation of all. As a visitor and a web-designer, I can see both sides of this and I feel frustrated by the layout change from page to page.
For example, when searching earlier, a search for "web design" showed no link bar. Searching for "web design" again, a few minutes later, saw the re-emergence of this feature. The same search shortly afterwards then lost the link bar.

I do wonder if the intermittent performance is a sign of either a bug/fault in Google search or their attempt to trial a new feature. I hope this is the case and if it is a trial, I hope they shelve these plans as soon as possible. Not even a search for "web design screenshot" could make a link to Google images appear, which I expect would slow down a lot of Google's loyal users.

If this feature is lost without a suitable replacement, I would consider it a backward step for Google.

Furthermore, I took a look at their accessible search project. Although a wonderful idea, the large blue box that seems to magnify the first result obscures the new Javascript activated options panel. Also it is not immediately clear if or how the large blue box can be moved onto the subsequent search results. I know this is a Google Labs project, but the haphazard way the Javascript options panel seems to have been introduced is cause for concern.

I like Google for its innovative approach, but when things like this happen, it shows how much we rely on them for *everything* on the internet.

I stumbled across a very brief posting on the Daniweb PHP forum earlier today, entitled Do any members asking questions RTFM. User Dsiemab appears to be implying from this post that not enough people are "reading the friendly manual" before posting their questions (N.B. I think the actual meaning of the initialism is not that polite).

I disagree with this assessment; many people will happily munch through an entire manual until they have assimilated every morsel of knowledge. But this is not for everyone. And nor should it be.

Forums such as Daniweb are supposed to be there to help people. They are a place for people with very specific questions/problems to quickly find advice. Many of these people are novices, who simply lack the experience to read themselves out of trouble.
For these people, turning to the benevolent contributors of these online forums is the only option.

Could you imagine someone turning to their solicitor about an impending court case, only to be told to "Read the **** Government Legislation"?
The PHP online manual, just like a Parliamentary Act, is a piece of documentation that works brilliantly for the experts. It is structured well. It uses technical language. It relies upon the reader's prerequisite knowledge.

Perhaps a better approach than quoting yet another overused web-based initialism would be to say to the forum user, "Here is the manual, this is the page with your answer. Please let me know if you need more assistance."
Maybe HITMTITPWYAPLMKIYNMA is just too many initials to type.

I was intrigued to read about Microsoft's decision to extend support for Internet Explorer 6 until 2014 (BBC News 13/08/2009), but I can't help feeling this has all arisen from Microsoft's own doing (or not doing) when they dominated the internet browser market.

When Internet Explorer 6 was released, back in 2001, it wasn't really a choice for most people, it was the internet browser. Of the minority of users who were aware that they could choose another browser, very few had an incentive for doing so, which in turn allowed Microsoft to take their foot off the gas and wait 5 years for their next big update.
Because so many people discovered the internet during IE6's lifetime, it is no surprise now that an estimated 27% of internet users still rely on this antiquated technology.

Despite the whole debate over Microsoft's lack of innovation at such a crucial time, I don't disagree with their latest decision. IE6 is arguably still bigger than Firefox. It is a golden rule in web-design that you must allow for cross-browser compatibility. It would be foolish not to. And so if (as contributors to the web), we continue to support Firefox, we should make an allowance for IE6 too.

Maybe the internet won't grow as fast, as long as IE6 is still knocking about; but callously isolating such a big share of the market won't right the wrongs of the past. With so many innovative changes since the beginning of the browser wars, the internet is still growing. Let's keep it sustainable.

Good move, Mozilla.
Good move, Microsoft.

Before I start blogging off onto other topics, I thought it would be best to introduce myself and this website..
So here it is..

My name is Simon Mayer and I design websites and web applications. I have various hobbies, but to name a few, I enjoy playing cricket, listening to music and programming software.

It's not necessary to weigh you down with details, but this site is my 'base' for my web-projects. When I do something that I think people will find interesting or exciting, or possibly just an improvement on what they have already, I will place it here.

If you want to discuss this further or would like me to work on a project, send me an email: info@ribbontree.co.uk.