knowledgescape» Web Development

Simple Content Management

Kathy Bragg — Sat, 23 May 2009 08:07:03 +0000

Sometimes you just want a simple way to let your users edit the pages on their site without having to yell for a developer all the time. There are many many CMS offerings out there, with varying degrees of complexity. Most of them require quite a bit of wrangling. Wouldn’t it be lovely if you didn’t have to sacrifice a chicken in order to get your new CMS working?
Perch is there for when you *don’t* need a moon on a stick. For when you just want to edit some pages without any mystic voodoo. Perch will be ready for release at the end of May, but pop over to edgeofmyseat.com for more information

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Archaeology Group Site Refresh

Kathy Bragg — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:44:10 +0000

I joined a non-local archaeology group last year, mainly because they had a website, and the local groups didn’t have anything I could find. Shallow, I know, but a web presence is so important to me – I like to be able to get access to information at any time of day, or when I’m out and about. If you can’t offer me a website, then I’m mostly not interested. In fact, you barely exist to me.

I was slightly disappointed to find that the information on their site was not really up to date, so it instantly lost credibility with me: if there’s one thing I dislike more than lack of data, it’s untrustworthy or stale data.

Somehow, I ended up on the committee and started poking my nose into their website – the problem wasn’t that they had nothing to say, nor that they were doing nothing worth mentioning. The problem was technology. Archaeologists aren’t, for the most part, nerds, so the problem of how to get stuff onto the site was the stumbling block.

Obviously what was needed was some kind of friendly content-management system that would allow any of the committee to make announcements, publish activities and talks and generally tell the world about the exciting things that we do.

I was already a Wordpress user and was itching for an excuse to use it as a CMS. It works surprisingly well for what they wanted it to do: members login area, Events (with extra data), easy management of images etc. At some point I will get round to listing all the plugins I used – I’m still documenting it all for the archaeologists!

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Obligatory comment on X-UA-Compatible

Kathy Bragg — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:03:52 +0000

This strikes me as a continuation of those ‘Best viewed in $browsername $version’ badges, that irritate me beyond all measure.

I will use what version and what browser I choose, to consume your content. If I choose to have the text chiselled out onto the back of a passing badger, that is *my* choice.

At the moment I’m suffering my way through an enormous web application, targetted at IE7 only (as it’s an intranet application and we are currently using IE7), but I would not dream of testing only in IE7, as I realise that time progresses (shocking, I know), and as IE crawls more and more towards standards compliance, I’m hoping that one day the playing field will be level enough for me not to have to test in n+1 browsers. Things looked fine in IE7 that looked skewiff in Safari3, which told me I’d got something wrong. I don’t want to be lied to by a browser, so being tied to IE7 forever sounds like my idea of hell.

It wouldn’t be quite so bad if IE8 went for ‘latest-version’ by default. That way, things can progress naturally. I *can* see the appeal of being able to specify IE7 mode if you have to (if you’ve hacked together something terrible in a hurry and can’t fix it before they rush out IE8 asap) to buy you a little more breathing time if it looks like trolls toenails in IE8. But we don’t want to get stuck in 2006, do we?

What saddens me most is the fact that it seems to be tearing the webdev community apart. There are some quite personal attacks going on and it’s sad to see WaSP eating itself. I’m sure it will sort itself out, we’re all adults.

I think the real problem is not necessarily the browser developers, it’s the web developers themselves. WaSP and co. are more or less a tiny minority of idealists (I’m not knocking idealism, I suffer terribly myself). Most web developers are cowboys. Yes, sweeping generalisation, but if you look at the majority of sites you get a good idea of the level of standards-awareness that there is out there. And yet, that’s not necessarily the fault of the developers either. I was consulted on a web project and mentioned accessibility. I got the response of ‘but who enforces that, do we have to do it?’ from the person commissioning the site. With attitudes like that, there is no real incentive to push for standards compliance in projects. It’s always quicker to cut corners and knock something together that displays and behaves okay in IE6 and doesn’t suck too much in IE7. Gets the job done, doesn’t it?

Have depressed myself with that, I always find it delightful to discover that some people *do* actually care about doing things properly and cleanly. I evangelise about nice clean code, use of CSS, maintainability, accessibility and basic sanity, but sometimes I feel like Scary Bag-lady haranguing passers-by.

What the web standards community *really* needs to do is to reach out a bit more, beyond the elite crowd, to the bums-on-seats level of web developer. Enthuse and fire these people with your message, get corporate penetration with the benefits of standards compliance – make it a *standard* approach to web development.

Only then, can we win the browser war.

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