In short, you’re paying for the trust, not the actual encryption. Anyone with the appropriate software, which is widely available for free, can create their own certificate that provides encryption. However, using such a certificate will generate a browser warning when a user tries to create a secure connection. The warning will say something to the effect that “the connection is not trusted.” If you want to avoid the warning it costs something between $50 and $500. But there’s a justification.
I often keep tabs open for items on my todo list. So I get very upset if I lose my tabs. Sometimes I have two computers running or I dual-boot between operating systems and the tabs open on one are different than the tabs open on another. Xmarks now supports keeping these synchronized! I’ve just enabled this feature so haven’t played with it extensively yet but I’m excited about its potential.
In case you haven’t used XMarks before, it also supports synchronizing book marks between browsers. It works for IE, Chrome, Safari and Firefox. On some of these browsers you can also synchronize your passwords. Give it a shot at http://www.xmarks.com/
For a while I’ve been re-evaluating wordpress and have come to the conclusion that for common blogging tasks, it’s better than Drupal. It’s taken a while but I’ve migrated my site to back to WordPress (I’m using v3) from Drupal 5. It’s not perfect, but in the spirit of open source’s mantra, “release early, release often,” here it is. Expect to see some changes as I customize it and tweak it.
Today Apple is supposed to make a big announcement. I don’t know yet what that will be but many people think it’s related to a Tablet PC. Apple’s success in the iPhone and App Store business has reminded me of one of the web’s biggest mistakes and we seem on track to repeat it. I’m stunned because it really hasn’t been that long. How can we be doing it again so soon?
It’s that time where people make their predictions. I’ll chip in my 2 cents worth regarding technology changes in the future. The last decade, I think, can be described as the decade of the web. The next, in a word, will be mobile.
A wise person said back in the mid-90′s that people need to communicate and be entertained but they don’t need to compute. This is so true. A lot of people have a big fat computer in order to email their family, share pictures and chat with their friends on Facebook or twitter. Over the last three years we’ve started to be able to do this nearly as well, or in some ways even better, with a mobile phone. Some people will start to think that they don’t really need a PC at all.
Among the elite hacker community it is sometimes considered cool to have an unstyled website. I’m not certain what makes this cool, but I respect it none-the-less. However a few absolutely minimal styles can make your site easier to read. Here they are:
body {
font-family: sans-serif;
line-height: 130%;
font-size: 91%;
}
The latest craze is to write an iPhone app. I’ve been preaching for a while that mobile apps are the way of the future but I don’t like the idea of iPhone apps and here’s why.
First, I have to give credit to Apple. They’re brilliant, though I’m convinced the place they’re at now is exactly what they intended a few years back. If you work on the premise that any good capitalist company is bent on total market domination (not all companies are but it seems to fit Apple) then what they’re doing is right on track to achieving this goal.
Designers have been using grids for a long time in the world of print and advanced layout. Websites have kind of used grids in the form of tables but this become unpopular with the rise of the semantic web and css based layouts (for good reason). Modern CSS frameworks give you a powerful grid for laying out your web pages and often bundle in a multitude of extra features. I’ve now reviewed four grid systems and thought I’d quickly summarize them.
Unlike the other grids this one is just a grid. To get the full benefit you need to use it in combination with the other css components of the YUI toolkit, fonts, base, and reset. It has great documentation, easily and sensibly ties into the YUI js library and has three features that do stand out: nesting grids which is not as simple as it sounds, a fluid, 100% width page layout and it was built to accommodate IAB ad unit guidelines.
The typography is poor in comparison to other kits but if you like YUI’s other features you can easily snag the typography from another framework and plug it in (after the reset!). All said, I feel like it’s a pretty mediocre css framework. It doesn’t come off looking sexy and does not feel designer friendly. Better typography built in and prominently linking to photoshop or other graphic format files (like SVG) would help.
Not just a grid, it’s a complete framework which incorporates a reset, which sets all the browsers built in styles to a plain default, and then reconstructs the styles in a way that will be consistent across platforms. It then adds a beautiful typography layer which optimizes layout to maintain a nice vertical rhythm. What this does is helps your lines of text to match up and feel balanced even in adjacent columns. It gives the page a subtly more harmonic feel that you’d have a hard time describing when you see it.
You’ll also find styles for forms and a beautiful print style sheet. Blueprint is a fixed-width only layout system. This makes it very designer friendly. Uncompressed, the primary css file (not including IE special rules or print.css) is 11k. There is an included script that will help you to customize the grid for your needs including minimizing the styles for production. This allows you to have a grid with any number of columns you like. It is a very easy grid to love.
In many ways an evolution of blueprint, it’s fundamental concept is that the right page width is 960px. Recently a grid generator has been produced that lets you create a grid that meets your needs. A sister project has also risen that creates a fluid width version of the grid for sites that don’t want a fixed width.
The css file for this project weighs in at under 6k, which is nice, however it lacks the forms and typography support that blueprint has. In both cases default styles are very good but doesn’t have the same out of box elegance. In its favour there are readily available templates for numerous graphics packages. I strongly recommend you evaluate this one if you’re considering blueprint and likewise, if you’re considering using 960gs that you also consider blueprint. They have a lot in common with each other and also have some very distinguishing differences.
The newbie on this list, it is the motivator for this list. I’ve not used it but it brings some very interesting ideas to the table. It has support for HTML 5 first of all. Secondly, it deprecates IE6 and focuses on the latest browsers. Like blueprint, it has a strong emphasis on typography and includes some great form styles. There is a PSD in the zip file for designers to use.
Summary
If you’ve never used a grid you should definitely give it a try. 960gs may be the best compromise for beginners because it is far more attractive out of the box than YUI yet has documentation that is almost as good. If you want no compromise typography, form and print styles out of the box you should start with blueprint. If you are developing with HTML 5 you may want to consider baseline. If you like tutorial videos from engineers then you should try YUI.
I’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions, please leave a comment.
Amazon sent me some recommendations and they are good. 7 out of 9 look like something I want to read. Kind of for my own future reference here are the books they recommended:
* Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers by Steve Souders
* Complete Web Monitoring: Watching your visitors, performance, communities, and competitors by Alistair Croll, Sean Power
* High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers by Steve Souders
* Web 2.0 Architectures: What entrepreneurs and information architects need to know by James Governor, Dion Hinchcliffe, Duane Nickull
* Using Google App Engine by Charles Severance
* Erlang Programming by Francesco Cesarini, Simon Thompson
* Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets by Andrew King
To be fair, I could probably learn everything I want to know about Erlang form the wikipedia page or the language’s website, but I’m still impressed with Amazon’s ability to pick up subjects I’m interested in, presumably based on aggregate data from many other web devs out there. It gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling to know I’m not so esoteric after all.
I’ve been using my new computer for a little over a week now. I bought the Mac Book Pro 13. One of its features that may not jump off the page to you when looking at the tech specs is how great the screen is. To my horror I’ve gone to some websites and realized I’ve made some serious errors in optimizing my images. Things that look fine on a typical computer screen but look retarded on a really good quality monitor.
If you do image optimization or web work you should seriously consider investing in a very good monitor. Who knows who will see your work and laugh at you because of the mistakes you don’t even know you made? Oh I am so embarrassed.