Archive for the 'General' category

Craziest web page title

These guys are crazy. Totally. :)

How can anyone be angry at Molly?!

I just stumbled at a very interesting post at PPK’s online home. It lead me to Molly’s web site, one quite unusual figure in the whole web standards world. It appears that she took in some of the hatred directed toward Microsoft.

Molly? Molly?!

Molly’s doing an amazing thing. She is doing her best to help all web developers around the world. She spends her own free time to do this. This is not her job– she does it because she wants and she can. Nothing but pure gratitude should be given to her.

I’m even more surprised that included some people from WaSP, although Molly does not name them. WaSP people of all should know that our world would skyrocket forward once IE is better and more standard-compliant. Too many people use it and too many people will use it – it must be changed in order for web dev to progress.

I personally dislike IE as much as possible, but in no way would I ever say that anyone of MS developers is the guilty party for the way IE looks like or works. Let alone anyone from outside of Microsoft.

When you are working in a big company, the decisions are always on the managers. Always. Developers are asked, but in no way they can enforce anything. The fact that we now actually see the glimpse of changes coming in IE7 is a welcome thing. Any improvement is still an improvement.

Go Molly!

So much love

I’m currently away from Belgrade, attending the celebration of slava at my girlfriend’s family. Last night, I went to check my email to see is there anything urgent. And saw that horror was unleashed on the Friday morning (I last checked my email on Thursday evening).

I had 1482 emails, all but few dozens being some kind of virus (probably some new variation) and all with 75k in size. They were coming two or three emails per minute. Until I eventually got time to clear that up (around midnight), it went to 1773. Last month, I have passed the 1GB quota for incoming mail I have at my ISP. The steady rise in spams and viruses finally cought up with me and I was unable to receive mail for few days, until the new accounting period came (the ISP kindly gave me higher quota to overcome the problem).

However, with the speed this is coming now, I have a feeling I will reach 1GB sooner. This wave will hopefully calm down soon, but it’s very unpleasant. Sifting through 1500 emails one could easily miss something important. I’m far from 4 million emails per day that Bill Gates gets hit with, but from the emails I got from ISP owners, I could easily be the most spammed person in Serbia. They litterally told me that new viruses usually result in waves of emails but nothing even close to what is happening to me. :(

The thing is – all these emails look just like regular emails and can be detected as virus infected shit only after they are received. There is no blind option you can set and kill them, as all the efficient system require human intervention. One look at the email I can tell whether this is real mail of spam/virus, but there is nothing that email server can look up or check for.

I got some statistics from the ISP. That month, I have received over 37.000 emails with viruses (those that passed spam-database checks) from little over 25.000 email addresses. How can one defend from that?

I don’t see any reasonable solution to this, except that some very updated virus-scanning software is installed on every possible node that email gets transfered through and which will scan for it.

For what is worth, if you really need to contact me, use the contact form on this web site. That’s the only way I can guarantee that will get through to me. For now.

Community universe

Few days ago, I bumped into Blogocarta, Didier’s fine idea of mapping blogroll into world map. I saw it before, but haven’t read the behind-the-scene story on this about page.

What got me motivated for this post is his final observation:

Is it me or could I have called this thing Blogomerica�? Building this things made me realize that the US are still making things happen in the high technology business. This is not a bad thing of course, but a little more European influence would not hurt.

Is this really true?

Didier is from Holland, there’s a very strong scene in UK, and I follow some people from Sweden, Denmark and Germany. But those are people writing in English. I can only imagine how much people are out there, speaking in their own language. Probably the best known example is Petr Stanicek aka Pixy, who only recently started english speaking web site, altough he’s still publishing developing stuff in czech.

When Joe Maddalone discovered that different IE version can be run side-by-side, it stormed through the english-speaking community. However, it soon appeared that this was already known for at least several months – the “problem” is that it was published on japanese web site.

When I started my site, I started it in english because I knew virtually no one interested in the modern web design, here in Serbia. Now I know few people here, and have seen the works of some others I don’t know – question is are they willing to spend time on maintaining blogs and participating in mailing lists.

On serbian bloggin’ scene, things are getting in shape, with the start of Planet Serbia aggregator. Very nice and clean design, and keeps all of serbian blogs in place, for easy followup.

And the best part is that design is done by woman – Ivana Jurčić aka geekchix – hey Doug, take note. :)

Writing print articles

Few months ago, I started writing articles for the most influential computer magazine in Serbia, PC. I wanted to spread the word about modern web design, CSS-based, semantic markup and similar stuff.

Initial spark was annual Serbian Top50 list, traditionally chosen by PC staff at the end of the year. Of those 50 sites, none was nowhere near validity, semantics. They were (are) all technically outdated. The mag’s site itself was like that (built by me in 2002, I plead guilty) – I added DOCTYPE recently and corrected the mistakes I could.

First article I wrote (for March ‘04 issue) was purely a commentary on that finding, written in the single breath. When it was published, I realized large part of the article was edited to better fit the mag’s style…and soften my bashing a bit. Lesson learned.

Later articles deal with importance of markup validity, semantic markup, CSS etc. Each next article had less and less edited parts. The lesson I learned is that print articles are written over period of several days, even weeks.

The second article I wrote was done in 3 days. I let it be for two days. Then I read it again and realized that it’s poorly written. There was no clear flow of the content. I would talk about one thing, then mention something related, then expand the related part to whole paragraph until the point I completely lost the context. Someone reading that would probably be very confused what exactly I’m talking about.

So enter streamlining process.

Print publications are not blogs. Once it’s printed, there is no going back. You can’t return and correct mistakes or re-phrase sentences. Over the last few months, I developed the process of writing.

In the first phase, I simply collect resources. I write like a maniac, two or three paragraphs in a spree. Some of them are not really related to each other, but all related to the subject. This can last from 2 to 7 days or more (like in the case of CSS basics I’m currently writing).

In the second phase, I organize the parts so they have natural flow. I decide on the main theme and exclude parts not strictly related to it. All usually done in one or two days.

Then comes the hardest part. I read the whole piece and re-phrase parts, divide into chapters (err…sort of), connect them…Then I repeat this after a day or two. Then repeat again, and again…

On each reading I find parts sounding bad or don’t fitting-in with the rest of the article. After that is over, I ask friend(s) to read it, to gain different perspective. I’m lucky in this, as I have friends working for the web but mostly on the server-side. They understand what’s written, even though they have never used CSS-based design or semantic markup. Such feedback is very valuable and always result in subtle changes which I would not bother with, since I eat & breath with CSS, semantics, validation and rest of the crowd.

Only then it’s ready to be sent to the editor.

Writing articles is hard. Very time-consuming. But worthwhile and rewarding.