CompuSkills Blog

For people using WP to run their blogs:

It appears that the files for 2.1.1 have been hacked into and corrupted, all wordpress 2.1* users are advised to upgrade to 2.1.2 as soon as possible.

You can read more on the dev blog: WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Blog Software, Software, Hacking

Two weeks ago we said how we were looking at trialling Expression Web, seeing what sort of sites it produced and how it compared to the likes of Dreamweaver and Bluefish (our current favourites).

Sadly, after two weeks we still cant get into the software well enough to make use of it. This is not a “review” and it is important for us to emphasise that it may well be a good package - but it certainly does not gel with any of our working practices.

In the end, trying to use this package was causing too much difficulty in re-learning things so we have drawn the experiment to a close and returned to what we know best.

It may be a good package for some one new to web design, or people more adept at learning new things, but it certainly is not for us.

Tags: Expression Web, Dreamweaver, Microsoft, Bluefish, Software, Web Design Software, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET

After committing the cardinal sin of using the “Web 2.0″ phrase in a previous post, I was curious enough to look round some other sites to see what sorts of nonsense there is out there.

By pure chance, I also looked through the logfiles and statistics on several of the sites I have access to and I found some recent indexing by a bot which identified itself as “complex_network_group” from http://cantor.ee.ucla.edu/~networks/crawl . To check what bot it was (and decide to allow or block via a .htaccess edit), I visited the site in question.

It appears to be a project of the UCLA complex networks group who carry out research into “the science and engineering of complex networks and systems.”

Now the main thrust of this post is about the lead sentence on the Crawl page mentioned above. It outlines the Objective and reads: (verbatim extract)

To develop, a multi-paradigm network modeling framework, together with a characterization of tradeoffs between speed and accuracy for multiple modeling approaches, as a function of different types and scales of networks, protocols, traffic and application types, and metrics.

Seriously, that is a single sentence. Wow. What an amazing combination of buzz words. I can only assume they used a random word generator for this…

Technorati Tags: Bot, UCLA, Technology, Crawler, Web Search, Buzz+Words, Technospeak, Gibberish, Search Engine, Internet

Short post today - lots of work to keep us all busy, so time is tight. As part of a current project, we were looking for inspiration and came across an excellent photoshop tutorial about designing “web 2.0″ header images. (Yes, the dreaded web 2.0 word, sorry).

The tutorial is really easy to follow and produces stunning effects. Well worth a visit. (and no, I dont know when Technorati decided to add the image icons to their links)

Technorati Tags: Photoshop, Web 2.0, Tutorial, Web Design, Web Layout

What is a server-side language? Server side languages carry out operations on the remote web server, usually in response to requests sent by the user’s computer. Server side operations can access data or functions that aren’t available to the user. For example, server side languages can serve up dynamic content from a database or can process orders in an e-commerce application. Server side languages that are commonly used on the web include PHP and ASP, although there are lots more (most of these are currently more minority languages).

Here are Compuskills, for a variety of reasons, we use PHP as the server side language of choice - unless a client specification requests a different system.

Technorati Tags: Server Side, PHP, ASP, FAQ, Frequently Asked Questions, Software, e-commerce, Compuskills

Hot on the heels of the completed re-design of the Compuskills web site, we have begun an overhaul - rebuild of the parent site at WhyDontYou (most people will be used to seeing the blog there, as the main site has been off line for some time with all pointers on that domain going to the blog).

This will all change soon. The WhyDontYou site is being redeveloped, with a view to installing a bespoke CMS which will interface with the WordPress blog and allow regular updates of the main site content.

You can follow the progress - at least from the user interface perspective - of this development on the Testbed. Currently the site is a static page as the backend is still underdevelopment. This will change in the next few weeks though.

The projected “go live” date for WhyDontYou is 1 Jul 07.

Technorati Tags: Compuskills, Web Design, PHP, UK Company, Site Makeover, Why Dont You

For quite some time now, CSS Zen Garden has been an excellent example of the lengths graphic designers can take webpages with nothing more than CSS.

As a project which is largely open to anyone, it obvious comes up with a mixed bag - some are really good looking sites (such as The Original), some are cool if unusable (retro theatre for example) and some are at best average (such as Floral Touch).

The project has even spawned a book, although I am loathe to recommend this as personally it struck me as being a poor transition between web and print.

Anyway, of late, it seems that the CSS Zen Garden is slowly falling into disuse. The site seems to show “Retro Theatre” as the most recent entry and I am sure that has been the case since before Christmas. In the past, the Zen Garden was showing new designs almost weekly but this really is no longer the case. Sadly, this wonderful resource seems to be heading down the road towards becoming a museum peice. This really is a shame. I suspect that publishing their book has changed the focus of the site and it’s participants but I hope this is not the case.

All I can say is, if you have any design skills at all then please, try out the CSS Zen Garden Challenge and submit a new design. (Failing that, get posting to OSWD)

Technorati Tags: Open Source, Web Design, Open Source Web Design, CSS Zen Garden, CSS, Designers

As mentioned previously on this blog and elsewhere, we have currently been undergoing a site overhaul on the main Compuskills website.

This has now been (successfully) completed and the site has gone live a few hours ahead of schedule. This also means that the testbed site is no longer functional.

Thank you for your patience.

Technorati Tags: Compuskills, Web Design, PHP, UK Company, Site Makeover

What is usability? Everyone agrees that web pages should be easy to use. However, defining usability is something of a battleground. There seem to be as many definitions as there are usability gurus. Some generally useful ideas from the mass of usability material include: Don’t make users scroll sideways to get crucial information. Don’t put information more than thee clicks away. Don’t use mystery navigation, such as navigation that relies on icons. Test your pages to death on a range of people who don’t know what to expect.

Wherever possible avoid features that don’t work in all browsers. (This is a lot harder than you might think, given the wide array of browers out there now and how each of them has an almost random interpretation of the “standards.)

Technorati Tags: standards web design Compuskills web standards usability

As mentioned last week, the Compuskills site has undergone a bit of a makeover, with considerable changes to the backend (the server side PHP) which should make it easier for future maintenance to take place.

Everything has progressed well, (you can see the development in progress on the testbed site) and it looks like the deadline will be met.

Tags: Compuskills, Web Design, PHP, UK Company, Site Makeover