Blog
Happy Birthday Jack!
Today is the 7th of September. That means two things. First, it means that this site is now exactly one year old! As it's September, that also means that it is Jack Daniels' birthday as well. The exact date of his birthday is unknown, lost to a courthouse fire, but it is known to be in September. Thus, Jack lovers everywhere are celebrating for the whole month. Check out your local pubs - you might find hip flasks, t shirts, and even free Jack Daniels on offer.
Since starting the site, I've posted 63 articles. Not bad going, though I have posted more sporadically than I would like. Those articles have been read 73752-odd times, which is probably a far higher figure than it should be. There have been 57 comments - less than I would have liked, but I have spent a lot of time experimenting with the comment system here, trying to find better ways to encourage participation. It's my writing style and content that have kept the comments low, though, which I can live with for now.
There's been one redesign in the last year, which I am still tweaking and improving. There's another on the way, too. Now I'm reasonably happy with the operation of the site, it's time to clean up the code and create a nicer front end. I've also got to start documenting the many changes I've made to the vanilla bBlog installation, to allow things like proper URLs and pagination. All in good time though.
It's not been like me to make this kind of more personal post. I tend to write about web design, development and so on, because that's what this site was originally for. The addition of an actual blog section to the site is something I'm weighing up, though, as every so often I find myself wanting to rant, or just share something interesting, and it's about time I gave that a good shot. The question is whether I can keep up the level of interesting content to make a blog worthwhile.
Finally, thanks to you, the reader. Without the encouragement I've received, and without knowing there are people that read this site, I'd probably find it hard to keep motivating myself to write.
So Happy Birthday Jack, and Happy Birthday to this site. Here's to another good year.
Are Cookies Dangerous?
Many inexperienced web users are terrified of cookies, convinced that they are being used to send all their private information (and money) to some sinister group of internet scum. Here is a simple guide to what cookies are and how to make sure you maintain your privacy.
Once a Day Keeps the Visitors Away
Since the first websites came into being, one thing that we have been told time and again is that if we want people to visit our sites regularly, we must update them regularly. We didn't necessarily need to update them daily, just as long as we did do regularly (and ideally as often as possible). And nowhere was this taken more to heart than in blogging circles.
Indeed, it is deemed so important by bloggers to update often that many will find the least substantial of reasons to write, just so they can add an entry for a particular day.
The reasoning behind this school of thought was that a user who liked a site and returned to it, and saw nothing new, may not return again. If a user knew a site was updated weekly, they would return once a week, and if one week there was no update they may then decide to focus their attentions elsewhere.
Recently, the trend has started to slowly shift. More and more people are advocating only writing when you have something to say. The advent of news feeds and syndication has not only made this possible, but mandatory.
Now, the average user can watch all of their favourite sites from afar. They need not go out of their way to visit your front page to see if you have updated recently. Instead, they are quietly notified, with no effort on their part or yours, every time something new is created on one of their favourite sites.
At the same time, there are millions of sites clamouring for the reader's attention. Making sure you are top of the pile, and on as many people's "watched" lists as possible, is as ever a matter of content, content, content.
Today, though, more so than yesterday, this content must be top notch. It no longer matters if you fail to update regularly. Far more important is that when you do update, you have something to say. Better to be a quiet blog in someone's news aggregator, speaking up only when offering something new the user will love, than a loud and obnoxious effort who is constantly demanding attention but regularly disappoints.
Dvorak vs Qwerty
Keyboards traditionally use the Qwerty layout, designed initially for typewriters. Find out why Dvorak is a better alternative.
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, formerly Firebird, formerly Phoenix, hopefully to not change names again, is now up to version 0.8. Touted as a technology preview, it is a very capable, lightweight browser, and currently the only serious competition to the Opera browser in terms of features and security. It is also, luckily, an Open Source project - basically making it free.
Released on February 9th, 2004, Firefox 0.8 includes all the features you would expect from a modern browser, including excellent CSS support, tabbed browsing, find-as-you-type (which allows you to just type keywords when viewing a page and matching ones will be highlighted) and popup blocker as well as being highly configurable. The vast array of extensions available means that the program itself is a small download, but that features can be added at will (and some of them are truly inspired - more info at the bottom of this article).
Firefox is highly customisable, and provides several options for themes, allowing you to control the look of the browser to a degree. However, the focus is on speed. It is very quick to load up and very quick to use on the web. It also has a very simple interface, making it a real pleasure to use. The focus is entirely on the browsing, with little to distract you.
If you are used to Internet Explorer, you may be put off the idea of trying a new browser. Many are used to using IE, and despite its many faults and poor security continue to believe it is better than other browsers. Firefox, despite it's lightweight look and feel, is definitely a heavyweight contender to Internet Explorer.
Recommended Firefox Extensions
Firefox (and Mozilla) have a massive number of downloadable, free, extensions to the browsers, providing all kinds of functionality. If you want to make the most of the browser, I would highly recommend visiting Firefox's extension index and checking out what is available. A few of my personal favourites are listed below:
This toolbar is utterly invaluable. If you do any web design at all, you need this toolbar. It is packed with features, allowing you to do everything from HTML and CSS validation, to disabling images, cookies or javascript, to outlining elements, to resizing the browser window - all at the click of a button. This is worth downloading Firefox for all by itself.
Mouse gestures are truly innovative. They allow you to perform simple, common tasks with just a subtle flick of the hand. They do take a few days to get used to, but once you are familiar with them, you will be unable to live without them. Although the Mouse Gestures extension for Firefox is very capable, I would highly recommend instead installing StrokeIt, which provides customisable mouse gesture functionality in all programs. However, if you only want gestures in Firefox, this extension is essential.
Another invaluable tool, the EditCSS extension allows you to edit the CSS of a page on the fly, and have the results of all edits displayed as you work. If you work with CSS-based layouts, this really does save huge amounts of time.
StumbleUpon is a very entertaining addition to Mozilla, and also available for users of Internet Explorer. Basically, it adds a toolbar to the top of the browser, with several buttons. Clicking "Stumble" will take you to a random site. If you like it, you click "I Like It". If not, you click "Not For Me". If you click "Not For Me", it will take you to another site. The more you rate, the more accurately the toolbar will take you to pages you like. It is a great tool for finding rare gems on the web - and there is a fairly active community to boot.
Alternatives to Internet Explorer
Who says the Internet has to be slow? Who says browsers have to have no features? Who says innovation is dead?
Debug MySQL Queries in PHP
do_query() is a PHP function that adds a little more to mysql_query, most importantly debugging help and error suppression.
Feeds
If you are using a news aggregator, please feel free to make use of the feeds from AddedBytes.com. They have been updated as of October 2004, and there are now several available, the common ones listed below.
If you want to subscribe to only one category, visit that category and you will see links to RSS and Atom feeds at the top of the page. You can also subscribe to the comments on any post, if you like.
- RSS
- Atom
I've recently discovered the wonderful Bloglines, and can't recommend it highly enough. I had too many subscriptions to manage easily, and now I only have one page to worry about. You can, if you like, see my subscriptions through bloglines or if you prefer can just check out my Blogroll.
Will The Spam Never End?
We all know it, and know it well. Some of us are inundated with it, and most of us agree something needs to be done about it. More often than not, measures to prevent spam are unactionable because of the effect they would have on perfectly legitimate business email.
Not only that, things are getting harder for ISPs. Even the ones that do care about spam (and some are quite happy for their users to do what they want) do not always act quickly, or sometimes at all, so stop it. After all, who wants to go out of their way to lose a paying customer? Not a lot of people, that's who.
Let's start with a few examples...
Example 1 - Spamming Scum
Internet pond life, the Spamming Scum posts indiscriminately to as many addresses as possible, getting those from wherever he can. His income comes from a very low percentage of clicks from the emails, and his investment is minimal. He'll often disguise the email, normally at least hiding his real email address, and where the email has come from. He'll try and get around spam filters, and will often succeed.
Example 2 - E-Mail Businessman
The email businessman is a fair bit better than the Spamming Scum. He also relies on clicks from email to make his money, and won't hide his own details from recipients. He will honour unsubscribe requests. And he'll normally be the kind of person who goes to the trouble of buying a verifiable targetted list of emails from a company that hasn't just scraped them off the net. Despite this, he's usually treated the same was as the Spamming Scum.
Example 3 - New Business
A new business (as said elsewhere) may often want to let other businesses (or people) locally know about their services, and so may email as many of both as they can (that may be interested, anyway).
Example 4 - Average Joe
As site owners, most of us get personal emails from our users, some of them selling something. Many site users may visit a site and then realise we might actually be interested in their product - and email us. As mentioned in another thread, sometimes it's welcome.
In deciding what to do about spam, we first need to determine what spam is. By most definitions, all of the above are spam. They are "unsolicted commercial email". But I think most of us can agree that while spam is not welcome, it's the quantity of pure rubbish spam that's the real problem. Most of us would probably agree that it's the first (and some of us, the second) group that we want stopped, and not just stopped - hung, drawn and quartered.
In a perfect world, I would be happy for other companies to email my business address offering relevant products that I might be interested in. If my mailbox wasn't filled with garbage (not that it is anymore, see Bayesian Spam Filter thread), then I would probably actually read most of it. If it was targetted, and I wasn't swamped, that is.
Most people agree that they know spam when they see it, but it's hard to come up with a catch-all definition that covers the mail we don't want and doesn't include the mail we do. Spam is always unsolicited, but not all unsolicited mail is spam. Spam is almost always commercial, but not al commercial mail is spam. Spam is always sent in bulk, but not all mail send in bulk is spam.
With that in mind, I'd like to see any sort of legislation passed to be something that seriously nailed the Spamming Scum (huge fines, slow torture) and was very clear on who, exactly, fell into that category. I'd like to see a fine so massive that any of the Email businessmen were very very very careful with their own mailings, and made damn sure that they didn't cross the line between legitimate business practice and just annoying people who don't want bigger breasts or to take a share of ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SIX MILLION DOLLARS ($126,000,000). The kind of fine that would be enough to make sure any businesses that were new in an area were also very careful with the addresses they were mailing.
I like the idea bragadocchio mentioned on this thread, about all commercial email having to be marked with ADV: at the beginning. It seems to make sense. If nothing else, then all commercial email can actualy be dealt with by a company on a weekly or monthly basis (after all, it's the sheer cost in time that bothers most of us). Users who don't want anything from anyone, no matter how good the offer, can filter out all advertising from their mail easily.
Unfortunately, these ideas just aren't going to be any use. One law passed in one country is no help against spammers in another, where they can operate unhindered. Closing all open email relays on the net might be a good start, but that won't solve the problem. And some relays are open for good reason. Making ISPs more responsible for their members might be a good idea. ISPs faced with a huge fine for any spam coming out of their network, whether or not it originated there, would very likely adopt a much stricter policy with email and be much more careful, but with so many spammers in so many countries, and so many ISPs who would be untouchable, spam wouldn't stop - it would just start somewhere else. Most spammers also disguise their location and email addresses, and while a lot of us know how to see through that, many people will just report any address they see on an email - often an innocent party - who may then find themselves kicked off their ISP, especially if the ISP was facing a fine. most ISPs would not take the time to find out if a customer was innocent before acting.
An interesting proposal is outlined here, but has flaws. The biggest of which is the one that comes up time and time again - whatever legislation is passed and however spam is defined, spammers can operate from any country in the world. Short of refusing to accept email from a country with no enforced anti-spam laws, nothing can be done to stop them. It looks like spam is here to stay.
Custom Colour Schemes
Expand the choice of colour schemes available in Opera with this simple hack.
About AddedBytes.com
ILoveJackDaniels is was a net handle, or 'nick'. As it happens, it's it was my nick, and is what I have been known as since around February 2001. At least, it was near then. It was one of those moments when, after a few months of trying to think of a nick I could use online that I'd remember and that was reasonably unique, a moment of inspiration caught and beat me. My drink of choice is was Jack Daniels.
In September of 2003, I finally got around to registering this domain name ILoveJackDaniels.com and putting together this site. In 2008, the Jack Daniel's trademark team decided that the domain was "confusing" and "asked" me to stop using it. I moved the site to AddedBytes.com on 30th June 2008, where it remains to this day. The current design is the 7th so far.
The site itself was, for a time, built in XHTML 1.1, and is now back to HTML 4 (for a million reasons), using CSS to specify fonts, layout - the aesthetics. Personally, I much prefer using CSS in web design than old-fashioned table-based design. The speed with which I finished the recent redesign helped hit home just how much a difference the seperation of style and content can make. It also made me realise that I need to improve my directory and url structure, add a pagination system for long articles, and how important it is to write XHTML with meaning in mind, not to fit your current design.
Using CSS this much in a site has, for me, been an eye-opener. I've learned a lot about accessibility (making this site accessible is an ongoing challenge), and about browser technologies. I've learned that I'm going to have to wait several years before I can do the things I'd like to do with this site, because Microsoft find it too grating to support standards properly (one day, I may put together an example page for Opera, Mozilla etc users, to see how this site could have looked).
At the heart of the site is bBlog (for now), an open source blogging system which has been heavily modified to manage the articles on here. Modifications include better URL rewriting, to allow the sections and articles to be properly navigable, article descriptions, search functionality, page titles, translation links and much much more. If any users of bBlog would like information on any of these or other modifications, feel free to get in touch.
To make life a touch easier, each page of the site is, believe it or not, printer friendly (note: It was when I wrote this ... not now. I need to fix the printer style sheet). A second style sheet is attached to each page, and will only be used when a page is printed. This style sheets hides the menus you see and the advertising. It changes the font to a better print font (serif fonts are better for print, sans-serif for the web, or so they say) and adds URLs of links after them so they are still at least useful, and adds decent margins. So don't be afraid to print anything out, ok?
In case you were wondering who the person behind the scenes is - I am Dave Child, a web developer from the south of the UK. I've been involved with web design since 1993 or so, when I set up my very first hobby site. I spent a few years working for myself before spending a year working for Fresh Egg in Worthing as a web developer, before moving to Juno Records in London, where I had the pleasure of redeveloping their very popular site.
In December 2004, I moved on to Propellernet, where I worked as the head of development and then an internet marketing consultant. In July of 2006, I moved to SNC Direct, a sports nutrition company, to manage and develop their stable of sites.
When I have a choice in the matter, I develop using PHP, but am quite happy with ASP and .NET, and have worked with most databases, including MySQL and SQL Server. I've been working with HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS and JavaScript since the early 1990s. I also like taking and editing photos, and I should think at some point I'll subject the WWW to a few of my attempts at graphic creation and editing.
When not at work, I am a moderator at In December 2006, I stepped down (not enough time to really do the role justice) as a moderator at Cre8asite Forums. Since joining there I have spent my time picking the brains of usability, accessibility, marketing, design, development and graphic experts, and feel like I have learned a huge amount through the forums. In summer 2007, I decided to start a fitness blog to chronicle my progress as I attempt to counter years of desk jockeying. I also run a site called TooYoo, a small but very friendly community site for the members of various consumer review resources, as well as a small Sudoku site and CrosswordCheats, a site built for Mrs Dave on a whim.
When not working, I try and spend as much time as I can outside away from computers. I've been with Mrs Dave (pictured right) since April 2000, and we got married on 22nd April 2006. I enjoy snowboarding and skiing, but don't get to go nearly as often as I'd like and would consider myself an enthusiastic if incompetent amateur photographer. I also, from time to time, play squash (not as often as I should).
I hope you enjoy the site and find it useful. Please do feel free to email me if you have any problems, suggestions or comments. If you like what you find here or find it useful, you can always say thanks by buying me something from my wish list.
AddedBytes.com is the online playground of