Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

May 11 2008 at 11:13am

I upgraded my WordPress and I don’t like it!

The much celebrated WordPress 2.5 upgrade was released about a month and a half ago and I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my installation. I was really looking forward to the new Happy Cog designed admin interface. But guess what? I was disappointed.

The new design is surely nicer looking than the old (although I didn’t really have a problem with the old design). They’ve made quite a few interface changes – some good, some not so good. Read on to see some screenshots and analysis of the new interface.

Goodbye vBulletin! Our switch to drupal forums

Finally, after many months of planning we’ve converted The Webmaster Forums from vBulletin to Drupal! Liam wrote a good explaination of why we made this choice in his article, Goodbye vBulletin, Part 1: Reasons to Switch. In short, we felt that vBulletin was too cluttered, too difficult to work with, and was hurting our search rankings.

We chose Drupal partly because our content site was already built on it so it’s a good opportunity for integration. We also have the programming expertise to make it work just the way we want to. With vBulletin we were often making do and putting in work-arounds to accomplish certain tasks. We also considered Vanilla and punBB – both open source, standards compliant, modular forum platforms.

The move didn’t go entirely smoothly. We decided to do it at Christmas time because we knew traffic would drop andway and if there were going to be problems, this would be the best time to sort them out. The biggest problem turned out to be the module that was generating the Google sitemaps, which brought the sever down a number of times before Liam figured out how to fix it. Unfortunately, our server admins are in the UK and weren’t availble to respond as quickly as we needed them to.

As with any change, we are experiencing a temporary drop in search rankings and visitor traffic. Members will awhile to get used to the new format, and surely some will choose not to come back. It will take some time to build the community back up again but in the end we feel the change will be well worth it.

If you’re not a member already, I hope you’ll stop by the forums and join us. We work hard to keep up a friendly, knowledgeable, spam free community.

(This actually happened just before Christmas but I wasn’t able to post because I’ve been sick for 2 weeks Expect a short flurry of posts as I catch up on things I’ve been thinking about).

Comments are now closed on this post. I was getting a lot of spam on it for some reason. If you would like to discuss this further, please visit the Webmaster Forums discussion on this topic.

Posted in General, Open Source | 4 Comments »

Dec 17 2007 at 2:15pm

More on fonts in operating systems and CSS

Todays’s 24 Ways article, Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix is another take on listing the fonts available in different operating systems and encouraging designers to use a wider range of fonts. This is something I covered with my Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows (not sure what to think about the similarities there!). Obviously Richard Rutter knows a whole lot more about typography than I do so it’s good to have his take on this topic.

I was inspired to come up with my list after looking at the font stacks on Joe Clark’s site. Check out his typography stylesheet for some interesting ideas.

I find myself using the list I from my A Padded Cell article all the time now. Just today I added a few more options as a back-up for a heading that’s already replaced by sIFR. From the way I have it’s easy to pick one font from each column, although I find Rutter’s chart to be a lot cleaner and better as a quick reference (and he’s got Adobe fonts included). I thought a lot about the best way to display that information, especially since I wanted to include information about which fonts are near equivalents of each other, as originated here.

In an upcoming update to A Padded Cell I’m using this font stack:

"Lucida Grande","Lucida Sans Unicode","Eras Medium ITC","Mg Open Moderna",Helvetica,Verdana,sans-serif

It’s working well so far but we need to do some more thorough testing before final release. I’ve also used that list to add some Linux alternatives to the font stack in various stylesheets I’ve come across at work.

If you’re finding my list to be useful I’d love to hear about it!

Posted in Design, Software, Web Standards | No Comments »

Dec 13 2007 at 10:40am

Opera files antitrust complaint against Microsoft

The Web has become essential to our everyday lives. We can’t let one company, Microsoft, control its innovation. This is a fight to protect the Web’s future.

I hope that as developers and Web users you will all show support for this cause. This is not Opera vs. Microsoft, but rather the continued innovation of the Web vs. Microsoft.

The complaint was filed with the European Comission and essentially requests that Microsoft

implement web standards properly
detach IE from the Windows operating system or provide other browsers by default

Posted in Software, Web Standards | No Comments »

Nov 23 2007 at 12:09pm

How did I ever get by without Mac and Linux?

Up until just over a year ago I had really only ever used Windows. I’d encountered Mac in passing but hadn’t actually used it. Why? Pure ambivalence. I didn’t feel the need to try other operating systems. And let’s face it, OSX isn’t exactly easy to acquire for the average PC user. Buy a new computer just to try a diffent OS? Not happening. I had a vague awareness of Linux but I assumed it was just for super-geeks.

Was I ever missing out! I’ve ben using OSX for over a month now at my new job. Although I wouldn’t say I’m enamored with it I do appreciate many differences from Windows. Liam (my husband) encouraged me to swtich to linux at home (when I had my old computer last year) and I haven’t looked back. Just this week I installed Ubuntu on a new laptop at work (and put Windows in virtualization) without much trouble at all. Any problems are always a quick Ubuntu Forums search away. I’ve always been big on customization so Linux is a great choice for me.

As an avid computer user and web professional it’s been a great experience to have a better understanding of how other operating systems work. Can you imagine only ever using Inernet Explorer? Of course not! So why are you satistfied with the default operating system that came with your computer?

I’m finding that OSX + Ubuntu is a great combination for web design. OSX for graphics, multimedia, and Dreamweaver. Ubunutu for file management and development tasks (one of the reasons why I wanted a Linux laptop is because I find the file manager in OSX to be really limiting). Of course, it helps that right now my Mac is hooked up to the nice big monitors That may change…

Come think of it, the lack of diversity in operating systems is really kind of sad. I don’t mean that alternatives aren’t available — they are. But the general computer using masses have very little awareness of them. Can you imagine if everyone drove the same kind of car? Or bought the same kind of DVD player? With almost any product used by regular people you can think of a wealth of alternatives. Consumers have choice. With operating systems, they don’t take advantage of the choices available. But you can’t really blame the average consumer, because the choice really isn’t available. Ever try to purchase a PC with no operating system or even an operating system other than windows? Generally not available (unless you know where to look and even then it’s difficult).

Posted in Open Source, Software | 7 Comments »

Jul 30 2007 at 4:02pm