It began with AdBlock… this extension to Firefox automatically removes adverts from the pages you browse – including the most annoying animated Flash horrors. It even updates itself to make sure that it stays one step ahead of ad-serving sites.

Unfortunately there were a couple of persistant sites that remained troublesome to visit. One of those was Football365, which used Javascript to include a couple of diversions, including a speedy tickertape (and we all know how annoying those can be). In stepped NoScript, which allows you to set up a whitelist of sites which should be allowed to run scripts. Bye bye ticker tape!

So now I had a calm and much less cluttered Football365. I remember a Firefox feature which would let me take it a step further. A custom UserContent.css allows you to write a CSS targetted to specific domains, meaning you can completely override the styling of a given website. For F365 I removed a couple of blocks I wasn’t interested in or that cluttered things up, made the layout full width, and increased the font size a little, as well as a few other little tidying tweaks.

From an fixed-width animated monster with sound-effect ridden adverts, I’ve now got a sane and readable site which doesn’t torment me with its layout, and in just three simple steps. The most dramatic of these is possible due to the use of a CSS layout underlying the F365 pages, a handy piece of foresight by their web team.

It surprises me that no-one offers a web-based build server – specify your source control connection details, set up a couple of tasks (build, test, report) and hit “go”. Is there some obvious problem with this idea that I’ve missed?

I want a build server but I don’t want to have to maintain the install or faff around with configs. I’ve tried TeamCity, which seemed ok, but the interface wasn’t great and it doesn’t support MbUnit.

I’ve started using Beanstalk for Subversion hosting, and it works very well indeed, so maybe that’s what’s got my thirst for web-bases apps going.

Blueprint is a “CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time”, and is similar to the YUI Grid project which had a lot of coverage last year. It’s kicking up a bit of a fuss because it requires you to use particular CSS class names within your HTML, in order to get a particular layout for your page.

Surely the conclusion to draw from this is that Blueprint isn’t really a CSS framework, but it’s an augmentation for HTML? You don’t actually have to get involved with CSS at all to use Blueprint, instead relying on marking up your HTML to fit your design…

Google Gears is an interesting idea which is still in its infancy. I’m interested in the use of offline storage for web apps – you get the benefit of a regularly updated web application with locally stored data – which is interesting in terms of privacy. This could be more beneficial for application developers than for users, since it allows them to provide a central service but give their subscribers the option of keeping their data to themselves. For financial software, for example, this could be a boon.

Of course this does mean such applications lose a primary benefit of the web app – that of backup and the ability to roam. Keeping a user’s data on their local machine means that they’re responsible for their data integrity and for moving their data from machine to machine.

Most applications which use Google Gears won’t come up against this problem, because they’ll be syncing data back and forth between the local machine and the remote server (or will they?). But I think there’s going to be a new breed of application which relies on the client a little bit more than we’ve been used to in the past.

I was recently reading Steve Pavlina’s excellent website and came across some post which detailed Steve’s decision to disable comments on all of his posts. It was quite timely, because I’d recently revamped the single post page on this site to better display large articles and I didn’t have time to implement the comment form. At the time I wondered if that was such a bad thing because I wouldn’t have to worry about comment spam, but after I asked for feedback on my recent Monorail screencast I’m not sure I was correct. Exactly how were people supposed to give me feedback? (more…)

Shopify seems to be doing pretty well at the moment, and deservedly so. It’s nice to see the human face behind upcoming companies like jaded Pixel though. I really think that Shopify is the only sensible choice for people implementing budget e-commerce systems, it is affordable and simple.

In their infinite wisdom, Microsoft don’t let you do a simple install of both browsers side by side. I’m sure there’s a very interesting technical reason behind this, but all it really does is make live difficult for developers. Tredosoft came up with a viable alternative when they packaged a couple of hacks together with an IE7 installer to make IE7 Standalone, and now Microsoft have acknowledge the grief they’re giving us. They are offering a time-limited Virtual PC image containing XP SP2 with Internet Explorer 6, so that when you upgrade your main machine you can boot this VM to test with.

It’s not perfect but it’s a surprising solution from Microsoft and there’s no denying it will work well.

I think it’s quite common today to think that because everyone’s got broadband, page load times aren’t quite as important. But for competing web applications, having your site respond half a second faster than that of they next guy could be another plus point for you. Aaron Hopkins provides an extremely interesting look at improving load times from a number of perspectives. Hey, he’s even got graphs.

Amazon EC2 is a server-on-demand service which allows you to scale up your operation seamlessly and in a cost-efficient manner.

By creating an EC2 server instance you have root access to a full machine which you can manipulate as you would a normal machine. You can use custom or pre-made Amazon Machine Images (AMI) to create a server which meets your needs and containing your own applications.

It works in conjunction with Amazon’s S3 service, which is a storage system controlled over webservices. Amazon have produced a way of scaling any application on-demand. They specifically mention databases and webservers….

Something is happening. URLs as timeline:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qa-dev/2006Jul/0011

http://www.zeldman.com/2006/07/17/an-angry-fix/

http://www.webstandards.org/2006/07/26/misplaced-anger-a-rebuttal-to-zeldmans-criticism-of-the-w3c/

http://www.molly.com/2006/08/14/angry-not-zeldman-meyer-and-fair-concerns-about-the-w3c/

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/08/14/angry-indeed/

And of course years of posts and emails and discussion leading up to this. What will change? I think that the web at large has been less and less interested in what the W3C has to say over the past few years – they are an abstract body who operate at a level so high that their heads are now above the clouds.

Of course what is needed is unified, positive action. The Firefox explosion was the last time that happened, and look what we did, look how things changed.

This can happen again. Something is clearly broken, even if it is just the lines of communication.