The art byte crew Blog.
Safari 5
June 8, 2010Yesterday Safari 5 has been released to the public. The new reader seems to work great on newspaper pages and similar, as it manages to provide a clean page sans ads, using a legible typesetting. It would be interesting to see the method Safari uses to identify an article.
The overlay displaying the article still has a few bugs to iron out. Unlike the normal display, no scrollbars are displayed if a <nobr> or <pre> tag is used. This means that (depending on length) it is impossible to see all of the content contained in such tags. A good (or well bad …) example of this is the previous post on sql functions.
Current remedies for this: either having a big enough screen, zooming out, or using shift + right arrow key to move letter by letter, or shift + down and left to get to the end (alternatively using the end key on your keyboard). It also seems to disagree with certain forms of formatting. An example of this can be found on wikipedia pages:
So a few tweaks here and there are still neccessary. I wonder how this update will be recieved by consumers and developers. Will pages be optimized for this new reader? Will advertisers be content with being left out? Or are they content with the ad being loaded (you do need to load the page to get to the reader)? Most likely it will either have a huge impact formed (standard for article implemented … etc.) or (most likely) the user and consumerbase of Safari 5 will be so small, that it makes no change whatsoever. I'd be keen to see if we find similar funcitonality in Firefox 4 or Chrome 6.
Update
June 09, 2010The reader view seems to be cached, causing changes to the website to be hidden from the reader view. Clearing the browsing history seems to solve this problem.
MySQL Replace function
May 28, 2010One of the most greatest MySQL uses has to be the easy manipulation of large amounts of data. What better than to systematically find and replace a string? The possible uses for this are endless (ridding database of any particular strings, replacing formatting details with classes …etc.) It is probably one of the most widely used functions (im guessing) - yet it didn't appear in the most tutorials. In the hope of making it more public: here is the replace() function:
update `[table]` set `[field]` = replace(`[field]`,'[old-string]','[new-string]')
It should not be mistaken for the REPLACE data manipulation statement, which tries to INSERT a new row, and replaces existing content, if the index is the same.
Character Entity Reference
March 24, 2010While redesigning this site it was hard for me to find a thorough html character reference. Sure there were lots to choose from, however most were lacking some quite useful characters. Incase you don't know what an html character is, use your usual approach and read the appropriate wikipedia article on it. In short: it is a way to display special characters in html. The syntax is something like
&#[number];
or
&[name];
each time replacing the variable in the square parenthesis with the desired code. An example then would be:
∅→ε
which produces:
∅→ε
You can also use hex notation by adding an x before the number. Anyway. To my great surprise, not even the character list found on wikipedia seems to be complete. As I deemed it useful, I rehosted BIG BAER's character entity reference, without the background color which made it almost impossible for me to make out the entities. Feel free to use it but please give credit to BIG BAER.
So here, without further ado: the rehosted character reference.
Some codes are just downright useful, as they can save webdesigners the trouble of making troublesome graphics and having coders position them, if one can just rely on a html entity such as the phone: ☎ (☎).
on a sidenote... the special characters are extremely useful to correctly display the & sign (&) - as it is deemed neccessary by current webstandards.
Site is online
March 23, 2010After quite a few hours of invested work, I can happily announce the site is now online. I′m assuming quite a lot of ironing and tweaking will be neccessary in the next few weeks, but at least I am no longer staring at a blank canvas in photoshop. The “Blog” and “Contact” pages will follow shortly. I also plan on explaining some of the code used to generate this appearance.
Update
March 24, 2010Blog & Contact pages are now online. The site seems to display properly in all modern browsers, as well as degrade properly in terminal browsers, like Lynx. The pages look identical in Firefox 3.6.2, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9 Preview, Opera 10.51, SRWare Iron 4.0.28 and Safari 4.04 (all tested on Windows 7). Firefox and Iron were also tested on a linux system and found to look perfect. Konqueror for linux seems to have its own mind when it comes to submit buttons, so I will have to look into it at some point. If you notice any unusual page behaviour, please use the contact form to report it (unusual could mean bad styling taste…). Older Internet Explorer versions will fail to understand the :after pseudoclass used to display error messages on the contact form, the main layout seems to be stable however.