It’s been, like, forever, since my last post in this series – feels like time to pick it up again and finish the series…
The suggestions in this post are focused on the “behind-the-scenes” elements of your site – to the untrained eye they may not be visible/obvious.
This post definitely sways towards the geek end of the spectrum (just a fair warning if that’s not your thing). However, even if you’re in management, it helps to understand these things for when you’re briefing your tech team.
Just a quick note to say that the Web Standards Group FullCodePress is happening again in May this year. What’s FullCodePress?
Web teams from different countries take each other on to build a complete website for a charity in 24 hours. No excuses, no extensions, no budget overruns.
If you’re in a non-profit and would like to apply to be the lucky charity, check out the details and apply before Friday 17 Apr 2009…
Earlier in the week I made my first open-source code contribution to Google Code: a Python class that makes it easy to access some common functions of Campaign Monitor’s SOAP API.
It’s only a small contribution (and certainly not the most impressive piece of code I’ve ever written), but hopefully it’ll help someone. There’s some usage notes too on the wiki.
And of course the Campaign Monitor crew were kind enough to give it a bit of a plug too. Thanks! :)
A week and a bit ago I had the good fortune to attend the Web Standards Group meetup with guest speakers Richard Ishida and José Manuel Alonso, both from the W3C.
Over the jump are my notes from the session…
Working on Uncensor project has allowed me to dig a little deeper into three interesting technologies: Django, Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3 and Simple DB) and Google App Engine.
Over the jump I talk a little about each and how they can provide benefits to an organisation’s web development efforts.
The folks at Freshview have introduced yet another great feature to Campaign Monitor, their web-based email management system: Automatic inline CSS styles.
While there are tools out there that do this (most of which I found out about through the Campaign Monitor blog), having this functionality embedded within the tool itself makes it even easier.
While this probably only means something to developers, it actually will save clients a lot of money too – developers have to spend a lot of time maintaining and updating newsletter templates to get them working right in various email clients. This “one click” solution will make that whole process a lot easier.
There’s a weird issue with WordPress that means embedding YouTube video using the <object> tag (which is the standards-compliant method) causes HTML output errors.
The solution is quite simple (for anyone that’s comfortable with a little PHP) – it requires a very small update to the wp-includes/formatting.php file. In the wpautop function, there is a line that starts with $allblocks = '(?:table|thead| (it’s line 66 in the file that ships with WordPress 2.3.2).
The fix requires updating the line to begin with $allblocks = '(?:object|table|thead|.
A simple fix, but frustrating if you don’t know where to look. I’m not sure why this hasn’t been fixed in the WordPress code-base, but hopefully this simple patch will help if you’re experiencing this problem.
And don’t forget – you’ll have to apply this patch each time you upgrade WordPress.
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