Web Development with WordPress and Thesis

I bought a cheapish Dell desktop (Studio 540 with Q8200 chip)  a couple of months back and have been pleased with it so far. However, I've just had occasion to go to the "Power Options" panel (not something you do often on a desktop) to find that I've been running the "Dell Recommended" plan which bizarrely combines a low Energy Savings ratio with a low Performance (3 on each).  In other words, my computer has been running at less than 100% performance (indeed, if you believe the rating system, it's been throttled back by 50%!) since I bought it. What's the point of that in a desktop? I could have bought a second hand computer from 3-4 years ago to get the same effect at much lower cost.

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Recently moved from XBox 360 to PS3 but am finding the need to update every single game before I can play it driving me NUTS. Bought “Little Big Planet” yesterday, slotted it in, spent the next hour downloading and installing 500MB of updates! Can’t they get the bloody thing right before releasing it? Why is this updating SO much worse than on the Xbox?

The console came with version 3 of the OS installed (released, I think, last month) and, before I could even use it, needed to be updated to 3.01: another 40 minute delay? What ever happened to buying a console, slotting in a game and playing it for heaven’s sake?

Overall, however, I like the PS3. Little Big Planet has the most amazing graphics and, of course, I get a Blu-ray player built in (though I haven’t yet watched a blu-ray disk due to their expense). Incidentally, the up-scaling software built into the PS3 is excellent: benefiting 3D animated movies such as Kung-fu panda and Toy Story especially. I certainly don’t feel as though I need to upgrade my DVD collection to blu-ray any time soon.

I love the integration of BBC iPlayer into the OS (although why can’t I download programmes? The system has a 120GB hard disk after all!). The overall experience is similar to the XBox 360 but much, much, much quieter: oh what a relief it is to not feel as though you’re playing games in a tornado.

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Yahoo’s developer team has come up with 34 best practices (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html) for speeding up your web pages. Now, some of them are marginal in effect but all the tips get you thinking about how you go about the most common activities (for example, inserting images into a web page) and how they affect the page loading speed.

Download speed is something that many designers pay little heed to these days. It was an essential aspect of the web designer’s skill set up until around 5 years ago but designers now seem to believe that broadband makes it unnecessary. This isn’t the case for a number of reasons:
1) Some people can’t get/don’t have broadband
2) Broadband performance varies markedly around the country and during the day. My connection, for example, varies between 3000kbps and less than half that. So, my perception of internet performance is altered according to the time of day I use it
3) It’s not just about brute speed: one of the main factors to slow down a page is the number of HTTP requests. Minimise these to speed up the perception of your site’s speed.
4) Everything’s relative. Whilst compared with dial-up, any site viewed on broadband will seem faster, once you’re using broadband you’re then influenced by the relative speed of each site. In other words, whilst a page that took 10 seconds to download might take 2 seconds on broadband, this will seem slow compared to another page that takes 1 second. People expect responsiveness these days.

Take a look at the Yahoo list and think about how easy or hard it would be to incorporate them into your development practice/server configuration. There’s always a judgement to be made about whether the effort is worthwhile but some of these are simply a change of practice and ought to become standard practice.

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The BBC’s new look website has now made it impossible to quickly see what is going on during a radio programme. I heard someone being interviewed today on Five Live and wanted to know who it was. Previously, by going to the website, I’d see the programme schedule for that day and be able to identify who was speaking. This is no longer the case: it’s been replaced by general news of the day and links to blogs.

I wanted to get in touch with them to voice this concern and eventually was directed to www.bbc.co.uk/feedback/?ref=/fivelive/ . As you’ll see this page (the page I’m supposed to use to contact them) is broken.

So, I then clicked the earlier link that said “report technical faults” only to be told to click the “contact us” link on the fivelive website. This link brings me right back to the same page (telling me to click “contact us”) so my only option, it seems to me, is to email the programme’s presenter.

What a load of old rubbish.

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Just been prompted by Carbonite to renew my subscription. That’s odd, I thought, it didn’t seem as though a year had passed.

On clicking the prompt, you get sent to a screen that invites you to pay but doesn’t tell you when your current subscription expires.

Curious, I logged into my account to find that my current subscription expires in THREE MONTHS! Very, very naughty Carbonite. By prompting me to renew, you are implying that my subscription is nearing expiry and, given that it’s a backup service, the temptation is simply to pay for a new subscription. Now, I’m sure the new one would only begin when the old one expired but why should I pay 3 months in advance?

I am now looking for an alternative backup service that doesn’t take the mickey.

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I’m enjoying my first foray into Facebook app development. Unfortunately, the documentation is relatively sparse and the book I’m reading (Wrox’s “Facebook Application Development”) is not entirely helpful. Basically the process is:
1) download the PHP Client Library (http://svn.facebook.com/svnroot/platform/clients/packages/facebook-platform.tar.gz)
2) Upload it to a new folder on your server (eg “facebook”)
3) Create a blank “index.php” with just “hello world” or whatever in it.
4) Set up an application in the Developer’s centre on facebook (www.facebook.com/developers) that points at your index.php

When you then go to apps.facebook.com/[yourappname], whatever you’ve programmed to happen in index.php will appear within Facebook.

You then need to learn “FBML” which you can use to bring in details of the current user and his/her friends and for simple logic but, otherwise, you’re just programming in the normal way, on your own server and interacting with Facebook (using FBML or the API) whenever you want to update information.

Pretty simple in practice but a lot to learn.

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I’m building a site using the CodeIgniter PHP framework and I’m absolutely LOVING the form validation function. I’ve just turned a full day’s work into (literally) 20 minutes.

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