Brandnoo. A Blog by Ben Hindmarch

Recently the Associated Press has gone after bloggers quoting its articles. Although to most bloggers it may look as if the AP has created this condition just to make life difficult, it was mentioned in the BOL podcast (#746) that this is a rule they’ve had for a long time; it’s just that they’ve now decided to apply it to bloggers.

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I installed this line of code in a crontab the other day. It exports the entire database (schema and data) to text, then emails it to you. Makes backing up easy.

mysqldump -h DB-SERVER -u DB-USERNAME –password=”DB-PASSWORD” DB-NAME | mail -s mysqlExport EMAIL-ADDRESS

To use, replace the fields (in caps) with your database info and run in a crontab.

At work today we launched the new Air New Zealand website, Home Sweet As.

If you’re a Kiwi living in Australia you can highlight your ’sweet spot’ and have it added as a edible dot to a virtual cake in the shape of New Zealand. This follows from our previous campaign last year we just won the Creative Showcase for.

Here’s the video we made promoting the site:

Technically the site enabled me to play about with a few new ideas. Geographic clustering is a completely new area for me. Because of the rise of Google Maps, clustering tends to be done in the browser front-end. This offered no benefit to me as the whole purpose for clustering in this instance was to reduce the data load being downloaded by the client.

I settled on the DBSCAN algorithm, which was simple enough to implement and clustered the data pretty well. It does fall down in that the epsilon value is predetermined in the code, and does need some ‘tinkering’ to get the best results. However, it seems to do the job. At the time of writing this (17th July) the current live version of the site doesn’t use any data clustering. We’re planning on releasing an update to the site later this week.

Also, we LOVE how on the day of launching a new site, Mozilla launches FF3. It’s a Flash site, so we’re not expecting any issues at all, but we would still have preferred not to launch a site on the day a new browser is aggressively launched with a world record for the most downloads firmly in its sights.

The site’s been up for a good 12 hours now and traffic seems to be flowing in quite nicely.

I have to admit to being sucked in by Steve Jobs and his church. It’s easy to succumb to temptation, bowing to him, filing myself somewhere deep within his flock.

It’s because I think owning an item made by Apple of California will make my life richer, fuller, happier. I start to believe that the shine of my iPod is not a refraction of the light, but an angelic halo. The design It’s as if the clouds have parted for a ray of God’s light to embrace me and love me and tell me everything is going just great.

Then my iPod will display a fucking unfixable error over and over just days after the one-year warranty expired, and apparently the only thing to do is to buy a damn new one. Also I keep sitting on the stupid white headphones as I like to keep my iPod in my back pocket. The weight of my left buttock forcing the $50 designer earphones into little white pancakes. Reality sets in. My life is no better. I am no closer to enlightenment. Maybe I need an iPhone?

The initial iPhone wasn’t released in Australia (with exception to the unlocked iPhones that were abundant). This next version is going to be everywhere, including the land downunder. Australia isn’t known for its embrace of the mobile web, Vodafone (my provider) likes to charge extortionate amounts for Internet access and refuses to let me onto a data plan. Telstra whilst not so keen in the Internet, does encourage subscribers to watch television on their mobile, but who the hell wants to watch television on their mobile? It’s like being sat on your neighbour’s lawn watching their TV through the window.

The new iPhone is cheaper in terms of the initial outlay, but with a more expensive contract involved the actual cost is a bit more. It does include GPS, although what’s not clear to me is whether GPS navigation is extra, as it is on Nokia phones. With my N95 I get GPS location for free, but if I want to use it to navigate anywhere I need to pay a recurring fee. Pretty crap really, especially considering the number of times my N95 has suggested I drive the wrong way down a one-way street, and turn into non-existent roads.

If an iPhone is to replace my phone, iPod and a GPS it had better do all those things better than the stand-alone gadgets can do by themselves. Except the chances are that it won’t. And I’ll still sit on the damn earphones.

Yesterday I launched my latest project, Study2U.com. I’ve been involved with that project for about 6 years, launching various incarnations of the site during that time. It seems with each version, search engines either take an immediate like or dislike to the site, and we have to build upon wherever we start out.

The version before last did really well with ‘tail-ends’. Rather than attracting an audience to check out our online MBA degrees, we did rather well on the odd courses we listed then in subjects like ‘knitting’. We decided that we wanted to concentrate on the audience by listing accredited online courses only. That basically wiped out our entire audience.

This new version, possibly the 5th version of the site (I’ve lost count), might work. We’ve gone for a simple design with quality content. We’re going to be adding online courses as we go, so the site should expand at a reasonable pace.

If you are incidentally looking to study an online degree, check out Study2U.com

Michael J. Schmitz posted two comments on my last post, about celebrities and programming languages although his comments included how Paris Hilton should read his blog about climate change so she could save her hotels. His idea for solving global warming entails a fleet of boats spraying frozen saltwater and cold air on glaciers to prevent them from melting further, and perhaps returning them to a pre-global warmed state.

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Yes, it’s one of THOSE lists.

Edit - Ruby on Rails and ASP.NET aren’t languages: I did know that. Apologies - I added these last and didn’t update the post title. ‘Kermit isn’t really a celebrity’ - thank you to those who pointed out that HTML isn’t a language, but I thought the hint in the text indicated that. I’ve had a great response to this post, so thanks again to those who’ve taken the time to comment and pass it on.

Ruby on Rails Paris Hilton Flavour of the moment and very simple. Able to turn her hand to many things, but the results won’t be anything groundbreaking.

ASP.NET Tom Cruise Unpopular with some because of his social views, but completely unavoidable. A juggernaut of the industry and will always get the job done and make buckets of money for his backers.

C Al Pacino He’s been around for a while now but is still the best at doing what he does: possibly the best performer in the industry. Has influenced more future stars than anybody else.

Actionscript Peter Jackson Achieves some really nice visuals and will deliver the ‘wow’ factor like no other. Appears to have had an entire rebuild for his most recent release.

PHP Jennifer Lopez Love her or not, she’s still favoured for her back-end capabilities. Most people are familiar with at least one of her projects.

Coldfusion Michael Jackson Still has some fans left, but most have jumped ship. Was the super star of his day, but those days are long gone. Will probably try to make a comeback at some point, but nobody’s got high hopes.

JavaScript Ashton Kutcher Often plays roles where he appears dumber than he really is. Has a reputation for ‘punking’, can offer a few nasty surprises when he decides to pop up.

Erlang Eddie Murphy Likes to play multiple roles at once, but nobody seems to know what to use him for.

LISP Quentin Tarantino Has done some intelligent work in the past, but hasn’t been put to much good use recently. Probably not destined to kill Bill, but would like to reduce him to Atoms one day.

Java Renee Zellweger Has played roles requiring some bulk, but can just as easily shed that weight for other roles requiring something more lightweight.

*Updated* HTML Kermit the Frog Kermit isn’t really a celebrity. He’s completely flat when he hasn’t got somebody managing him through the back-end. He’s easy to understand and is accessible to all with the right script.

Others Of course I’d have liked to add Python, C++, Pascal and others but have just ran out of imagination. Please use comments to add more.

I’ve been reviewing the document at the w3c about the new elements in HTML 5. I won’t repeat what the document covers, so read it for yourself at http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/. This article is aimed at discussing the new elements and attributes used in the new version. Looking at the additions from the perspective of a marketer rather than an academic I can see several issues I would have.

Just as a side note, I am aware that browsers released in the future will continue to support HTML 4 and other previous versions, so I’m not trying to encourage any kind of panic. I’m simply imagining using HTML 5 (based on the linked article, above) for the things my team and I do every day.

Tracking
There’s a new attribute for the a and area elements called ‘ping’. This is used for tracking, so when a link is clicked the URI is pinged at the same time. This is designed as a simpler alternative than the current method that involves sending the user to a page that tracks the click and redirects to the content page. This also gives the user the ability to switch tracking off. I know that absolutely none of my clients would appreciate this as a feature (why would they opt for profiling a fraction of their audience opposed to all of it?). Another aspect of this would mean that users would be made more aware of website user tracking. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I could imagine plenty of confusion for a lot of users in determining the difference between regular audience trackers and snooping on an individual. How would you explain tracking to your aunt without her feeling as if her privacy was being invaded?

Forms
HTML forms are getting some fresh air. New input types support inserting time-related data, URLs and email addresses. Added to that is the attribute ‘required’ that’s been thrown into the mix. This is a step in the right direction given the number of bad JavaScript form validators in circulation, but the helpfulness of such an addition is limited to how browsers implement the changes.

If I were to create a simple form asking a user for a name, email and serial number I may run into some problems. For the ‘name’ field I would just add the required attribute on a normal text field as a name is going to be text: there’s nothing else to validate. The email field would use the new input type of ‘email’, and also the required attribute to ensure the data was indeed an email address. But what of the ’serialNumber’ field? There is no input type for my serial number, so in order to properly validate the data as being a valid serial number I’d have to use a regular expression within a JavaScript function to check that the field value follows the format I expect. I’d be mixing native browser data validation with supporting JavaScript functionality, which I think is potentially very messy!

I think the addition of the time and date input types are really useful. It means users can select dates from a familiar interface. I think the email and URL field types are an attempt to bring data validation to the browser, and given the complexity and the range of data that often goes into forms I think that this could prove difficult.

The good bits
There are some really nice additions to this version of HTML. Making the embed tag a w3c recommendation will mean easier Flash implementation in the future.

Header and footer as elements will possibly confuse new web developers with both ‘head’ and ‘header’ being used in the same document but for different uses. They will probably be more useful for SEO reasons, as I don’t see why developers would stop using div tags with a ‘header’ or ‘footer’ id attribute.

The nav tag will be great for improving a web page’s accessibility offering, since it enables the developer to indicate where the site navigation sits.

I’m interested in the canvas element, and what that will mean. It is meant to provide a space for rendering media on the fly and spawning on-page games and graphs.

There aren’t many new features that I saw that are geared-up towards AJAX fans, however the ‘event-source’ and ‘output’ elements might prove to be useful.

Back with forms, there is now a ‘form’ attribute to be used within fields that means a single form field can belong to more than one form.

No more frames!
Framesets and frame elements have been shown the door in this version of HTML. The Iframe element still exists, but the w3c found that the standard frame elements were decremental to accessibility so therefore scrapped them. I haven’t seen frames used in quite a while, but I do remember them being an important part of my first few websites in the 90s. I’ve also seen framesets used by SEO companies (the SEO content would go within the ‘noframes’ tag). I think scrapping frames is a good move, but it could really help accessibility.

Problems with HTML emails and CMS content
One thing my agency do quite a lot is build HTML emails for subscribers to our clients’ brands. With the end of the width and height, background, and most importantly the style attributes it’s going to be hard to build HTML emails for applications that have poor HTML parsers. This includes Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! online email readers that all parse HTML email content on the server before it’s displayed in the browser to prevent the content impacting the application interface. I agree that in principle, all style information should be kept out of the HTML template - this is the job of CSS. Although building emails is a big part of my team’s responsibilities and the abandonment of the inline style information is going to either force the email applications to be more compliant or is going to make life a living hell for the guy in my office who builds these emails!

Also I’m writing this in Wordpress: one of many CMS’s available for free or commercial license and one of millions when counting the bespoke CMS solutions created all the time. To allow authors using these CMS’s to control how their information is displayed (such as alignment, colour etc.) the style attribute would have to be used. I cannot see how a CMS could be efficient in managing style information as a separate entity to the content being written given that the style attribute is to be pulled as an HTML standard.

My thoughts
I think the w3c have been careful in analysing popular use of HTML and how they can improve it. Although I think the developments of HTML in this version may be trying to become too involved directly with the user that might create a lot of poorly implemented web pages. I also think that dynamic content created with CMS applications and such have not been considered properly.

I definitely agree with attempts to improve accessibility, and the inclusion of better data descriptors will no doubt help that effort. However, I doubt that the ping attribute will prove popular with developers unless users come to expect to be able to choose whether they’re tracked or not; I question the need for browser-based form data validation; I’m also unsure about the decision to rely more heavily on CSS over inline style information.

This week I’ve been working on the Mr Whitty Sings Christmas site. You can go to the site, watch the live video stream of Mr Whitty and even request a Christmas song for him to play. It’s gone down pretty well so far. Possibly the funniest moment was a re-enactment of Jesus’ birth. Jesus was a doll of one of the Little Britain characters and Joseph was in an Elvis costume.

Happy Christmas
Mr Whitty, the human Christmas jukebox

This is a trick vulnerability I learnt about from a talk I went to by Rasmus Lerdorf called ‘Exploring The Broken Web’. He took delegates on a 30 minute whirlwind tour of security vulnurabilities on the internet, specifically what can be done with XSS combined with a bit of social engineering.

He only briefly skimmed on an area that interested me. He exposed how a developer can check a user’s browser history, by just asking for it.

The trick is to use a small (and very simple) JavaScript code along with some CSS to find out which websites a user has visited from a list you provide.

Rasmus mentioned the script as something of use to phishers (they can find out which banks you bank online with and send you the appropriate phishing emails). I saw a less immoral use for it (although I won’t deny it’s still immoral): purely for marketing statistics. If I had a site selling t-shirts, like www.bensfunkytshirts.com I could use this script to find out if my visitors had also been to threadless, bustedtees and designbyhumans - or any other site.

Here’s the CSS:

<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
#links a {width: 0px; overflow: hidden;}
#links div {margin: 0; padding: 0;}
a {position: absolute;}
a:visited {left: 1px;}
//–>
</style>

Here’s the JavaScript:

<script language=”JavaScript”>
onload =function() {
var links =document.getElementsByTagName(’a');
var visited =new Array();
for(i =0; i<links.length; i++) {
if(links[i].offsetLeft==1) visited.push(links[i].id);
}

//reveal on page the results
for(i =0; i<visited.length; i++) document.write(’You have been to ‘ + visited[i] + ‘<br />’);
}
</script>

Finally, here’s the HTML:

<body>
<div id=”links”>
<div><a id=”Yahoo” href=”http://www.yahoo.com/”>.</a></div>
<div><a id=”Google” href=”http://www.google.com/”>.</a></div>
<div><a id=”BBC-News” href=”http://news.bbc.co.uk/”>.</a></div>
<div><a id=”SlashDot” href=”http://slashdot.org/”>.</a></div>
</div>
</body>

I’ve put an example of the script working up here:
http://www.hostengage.com.au/dev/historyInquisition/

If I were to use a simple piece of Ajax, or to stick the sites I know you’ve visited into a simple hidden form, I could easily learn far more about your browsing habits than you would want me to know.

Update (2008-06-12)
I’ve finally got round to putting together an example of this working.