Monthly Archives: July 2008

Green by design

Friday July 25th 2008

I thought just about every possible space left on the green bandwagon had been grabbed, but not so; Sitepoint has 10 tips on how to be a greener web designer.

Okay, so I know it’s a niche site for web professionals, but seriously, WTF is that all about?

Are there guides out there for other professions, I wonder?

From How to be a greener lumberjack;

Back away from the chainsaw.
Stop cutting down fucking trees.

From How to be a greener narcotics runner;

Consider the use of biofuels for the high powered speed boat you use to outrun customs patrols.
Slower is greener – try using less fuel by sneaking past patrols at more sedate speeds.

From How to be a greener president of the United States;

Stop invading other countries and launching several million tons of ordnance.
Stop giving tax breaks to your buddies on the boards of the oil consortiums.

But I digress.

In the web designer equivalent there are no-brainer gems, such as using an LCD monitor to reduce your carbon footprint. Unfortunately that’d only be greener and truly beneficial to the environment if the production of those LCD’s did not emit nitrogen trifluoride. (Flat Screen TV’s Worse for the Environment)

Hey, I’m all for being more environmentally friendly. If I was Gordon Gecko, Green is Good would be my motto. I have a small, economical car when what I’d really like is a sports car. I take the train to work. I recycle. I consume organic produce. Admittedly I’m counting beer as organic produce here, but the sentiment is there.

However, I think the whole green message is lost in the noise when it’s taken to extremes. Not only that, when I’m being told to green-up on a site I’d only usually go to for articles related to web development, well, it somewhat ironically counts as pollution.

At Last

Tuesday July 22nd 2008

Just having a quick look at the CSS for the new Last FM design to see they’ve made great use of min-width, max-width and an inline css expression to create their pseudo-fluid layout. Those techniques have been in the toolkit for a long time, of course, but it’s only recently that browsers with reliable support have allowed web developers to wield them effectively.

Another excellent point of note is that their submit buttons are proper submit buttons, not some captured usability train wreck in the name of Web 2.0 that fails to work outside of the big three or four browsers. (Yes, Twitter, I’m looking at you.)

It’s good to see a small-ish company like Last FM create clean and usable site with intelligent code, whilst the likes of Yahoo! stumble about making their My Yahoo! pages increasingly unusable on anything other than a PC. Well done to them. 🙂

Linkage: Internationalisation with PHP, Apache & MySQL

Tuesday July 15th 2008

This article posted by Florian Eibeck on setting up php, Apache, and MySQL for dealing with international character sets is a good overview of the groundwork required to support a UTF-8 compliant web app.

As Florian rightly points out, there are non-UTF-8 safe functions lurking in php to upset the apple cart if you’re not aware of them. Although strlen() may not return the right result with double-byte characters, it doesn’t do your content any harm – there are plenty of others that do mangle double-byte content.

From my own experience, once the environment (Apache, MySQL) was set up correctly it’s those unsafe php functions that cause the most grief, both in tracking down the culprits and finding a work around. It is rewarding when it finally comes together, though – there’s something quite cool about seeing all manner of Scandinavian languages sitting on screen alongside Japanese and English in a web app created by your own hand. 🙂

apache, mysql, php, utf-8