commafruit.co.uk. welcome.

I found the Standards schmandards website via Fangs - a plug-in for Firefox which produces a text version of the speech output delivered by JAWS. But there is a raft of other content here, including this list of government guidelines regarding accessibility. What really sold the site to me was this snippet from the about page:

…we will not bitch about web standards all the time. You already know it is good for you. Also, we will not go fanatic on you and say that you can’t use Flash or that your web site sucks if it doesn’t display properly in Lynx…

Disclaimer: I realise my own site doesn’t meet most guidelines, changes are afoot though.

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So, I’ve finally upgraded this site to use a version 2.x series Wordpress. This version (2.3.1) includes tagging support built in, which was a big plus for me as I’d be looking at installing something like UTW, but putting it off because I knew I planned to upgrade. Installation/upgrade of Wordpress is impressively straightforward by the way.

Anyway, after going through and tagging most of my entries, it was clear that I had a small number of tags with like 20 posts, and then lots of others with 1-5, which meant I had a list of words with a couple of them highlighted, but unable to see the difference between a tag with 1 post and one with 4. Luckily, I know PHP.

The code below replaces the wp_generate_tag_cloud function in the wp-includes/category-template.php file. Essentially, rather than taking the default distribution of number of posts for a tag then calculating the size, it takes the natural log (aka ln or log^e), which results in a more even distribution, and so more similarly sized tags!

This code was marked up using the wonderful GeSHi.

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Yahoo! acquired Jumpcut over a year ago, but it can hardly be said to be making waves on the web. It’s a video sharing site (a la YouTube), but with emphasis on mash-ups, sharing editing etc.
Since I don’t actually have any use for this all I’ve done is sign up and post a video I took in Croatia.

The site (app?) seems to be attracting mostly adult material, possibly to Yahoo!’s disappointment. They’ve come under fire over this recently.

Edit: Actually, this post reminds me of 10 Seconds by Heather Champ.

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On Wednesday I went down to London for the Future of Web Apps conference at ExCeL, was a fairly packed couple of days, so worth listing a few* of the talks that I enjoyed most and the impressions I took away.

Heather Champ & Derek Powazek We’ve Got This Community - Now What?
Non-technical discussion about managing a community, and how to deal with potential problems that arise. Example: rather than blocking problem users, make the site incredibly slow for them, so that trolling becomes tedious rather than fun.

Robin Christopherson - The Art of Attractive Yet Useable Sites
Insightful look at the state of the law in accessibility as regards the web, and the current (woeful) condition of it in practice. Most interesting for me was the demonstration of how screen readers see major websites (thought I could have done this research for myself), and how badly built some of them are, Amazon, for example, was comically bad. The only people to receive any praise for their efforts in accessibility were Google, who are really going out of their way (e.g., gmail has hidden notes for screen reader users).

Heidi Pollock - Taking Your Application Mobile
Extremely nervous sounding talk about the web for mobile devices, recurring theme being the extreme fragmentation in the standards used by different devices, and how as a developer she never aims to achieve perfection across all platforms, or even many of them (there are over 3000 differing mobile web devices). One of the best presentations of the event IMO.

Leah Culver - Web app dos and don’ts
Bits of advice for web development from the head developer for Pownce. Talk was full of practical advice, I just still don’t really get the point of the project (someone asked what the point advantage over say, email was, and the answer was that Pownce would be more "fun", what!?)
BTW, I have invites for this, if anyone would like one please reply to this post.

John Aizen & Eran Shir (both from Dapper) - Practical Semantic Web
A fascinating look at how some of the effects of the promised Semantic Web can be achieved using the existing web content and tools such as Dapper. This intersects with both my dissertation and one of my major modules for this year, I will likely write more on this in due time.

Erika Hall - Copy is Interface
Largely common-sense (or what should be) information about use of language on the web, but demonstrated in an entertaining way, worth getting the slides for.

At the end of the first day there was a live filming of Diggnation, for which well over 1000 people were in the audience. Constantly interrupted by drunks, and Kevin/Alex bantering with each other and the crowd, this was brilliant to watch, but I have no idea how they’ll edit it for the web.

Other stuff: Adobe AIR looks incredible. They were really pushing it (as the lead sponsor), giving out free O’Reilly guides (little ones) and giving constant demos. Can see me getting very into it in the near future.

* Just look at the schedule, I’m not summarising all that!

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Updated the portfolio section. Looks a lot better than it did a year ago!

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I’ve just added addthis.com boxes to all my main sites - very easy, recommended if for anyone running a website.

Essentially, addthis.com provide a widget which allows users to easily add the referring page to the most popular social networking sites. Since the widget is hosted by the provider, they maintain and update it, so if del.icio.us (for example) suddenly change their submission format, or some new service appears, addthis.com will update their end, and I won’t have to worry about it.

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I don’t know who you are, maybe you don’t either. I can look at the server logs and see where you are, what browser you’re using etc., but does that really mean you? More likely, this represents the machine you happen to be using - there is nothing human about this information.

Are you a different person on-line to the one you are off-line? Have you just one on-line identity? If you have more than one, how strictly do you segregate the different identities?
The reason I’m asking all this is that I have several on-line identities - in effect I am several different people. Until recently I’ve always kept them separate, and I’ve certainly kept them completely apart from my "real life" person. I now wonder, is this such a good thing? There are a few points to consider…

• Am I losing out by keeping the different versions of me apart? A (now ex-) coworker and I spoke a couple of months ago about his website. It’s a typical tech/geek affair, but he publishes some really quite polished articles about .Net programming, Linux, and the web. Unfortunately, he doesn’t link it to himself in real life at all, nor does he use it on his CV etc., for reasons I could not understand, beyond vague fears about privacy. It strikes me that he would be well served to use this as a showcase of skills, if only as a supplement to more concrete reference etc.
• Is it honest to be so fragmented? I maintain different handles at different hangouts on the web - could it be that this is dishonest, in that I’m never entirely frank wherever I am? I would never behave this way in real life (explicitly concealing aspects of myself from others), yet we think nothing of doing so on-line.
• Is this state of affairs sustainable? It’s not just having different names and passwords, if a behaviour or persona is altered depending on the situation/location, it could be easy to lose track of yourself, and start to blur the line between just being, and playing a character. Granted, I’ve not even begun to feel this way - but in relative terms the web is in it’s infancy, and this seems to be the direction we’re headed.

People love to say (and think) they are “not a number”^w, indicating that they are not serialisable, they are unique - but I wonder if this isn’t a fallacy. There must be thousands of people in the world with the exact same name as me (especially as I have no middle name), but I am guaranteed to be the only person with my particular mobile phone number - which I’ve had since 1999, a significant portion of my life. We can conclude from this both that simply a name is not enough to be considered one’s identity, and that if other identification methods (such as numbers) are more effective in distinguishing people, they should not be dismissed.

The reason I’m bringing all this up is that lately I’ve been changing my attitude to identity, especially on-line. While before I liked to keep everything separate, semi-anonymous, and certainly in no way linked to my off-line self, now I’m looking at consolidating a few usernames and opening up a bit more. The first thing that brought all this on has been the way social networking has shifted the way I (and I think others) view interaction with the web. Where previously it was just accepted that one had a pseudonym for use on-line, sites such as Facebook not only encourage you to use your real name, but demand that the you use a valid email address (or they used to, I’m aware that Facebook have since opened their doors - more on this and Facebook in general later I think).
Even more recently, the thing that’s made me think seriously about acknowledging this site in particular as my own is that I’ve been slowly updating my (as yet mediocre) portfolio. If this is to have any value in attracting clients, demonstrating myself etc, it must be provably linked to me as an individual.

The problem of identity management will ultimately come down to individual preference - people have to work out for themselves the method which works out best for them.
Myself, I’m going to take care to be mindful that I am in fact a single entity, and make sure that my output reflects that.

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Got my confirmation of attendance for the Future of Web Apps conference/expo. Not something I’m really used to, though I did go to the Google Developer Day last May.

The speakers list looks amazing, most interested in seeing: Heather Champ (flickr), Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress - you’re looking at it), Derek Powazek (if only to see who’s behind JPG Magazine), John Resig (of Mozilla, jQuery fame) and Kevin Rose (who will also be doing a live Diggnation filming).

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This idea has been kicking around for months, essentially, webrecipes is will be a recipes database, but since I’ve done nothing for it so far, and I’m not going to have any time to dedicate to the project in the next few months at least, maybe it’s best to announce it now. It’s been sitting online with a little static content for weeks, but with no incoming links.

I really didn’t intend for this thing to stagnate (I’ve got some good ideas - and look at that URL!)

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reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA^w system using two words. One of them is a known control word, the other is an unknown, un-OCR-able word scanned from a text in the process of being digitised. The form requires only that the user gets the control word correct - the other word is assumed to be correct based on this. The results are fed back to reCAPTCHA, who compare several interpretations of the same scan. Once there is sufficient confidence in the word, it is committed to the digital version. In this way, scanned texts can be human-converted in a distributed fashion.

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And so it is, that I’ve added Google AdSense ads to both this page and Peterborough in Winter. How much difference it will make I don’t know, but here’s hoping as little as possible to the user experience, and maybe a little to my wallet. We shall see.

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