44 posts tagged “adrian-holovaty”
2003
Signing comments on blogs
Adrian Holovaty has implemented reserved comment names in his blog, a feature that prevents anyone apart from him from using the names “Adrian”, “Adrian H.” or “Adrian Holovaty” when posting a comment. François Nonnenmacher suggests extending the idea to allow people to “confirm” their authorship of comments on any blog using a TrackBack sent to their site that in turn causes them to be sent an alert email, which they can then use to confirm their comment. I like his idea of authentication based on URLs (email addresses are no good; they should not be publically displayed for fear of spam harvesters) but I think I’ve come up with an alternative authentication scheme that removes the need for the user to manually confirm authorship. This is pretty complicated, so bare with me.
[... 762 words]BBC News Feeds
Adrian Holovaty has the scoop on the BBC’s new RSS feeds, one for every news index page of their site. Adrian has also written a bookmarklet to find the feed for any section of the BBC site.
Better DHTML navigation
Adrian Holovaty demonstrates how standards compliant code and effectively written javascript can decimate the size of a clunky navigation interface, and make it more usable and accessible to boot: Web standards improve 2theadvocate.com navigation.
Web standards for news sites
Adrian Holovaty’s open email to Staci D. Kramer of Online Journalism Review makes an excellent case for the adoption of web standards by online news sites. It’s written in nice, clear non technical terms and does a good job of explaining the web standards movement in a short space of time. Could definitely be useful for forwarding on to non-technical people (managers for example?) to help spread the word.
Safari conditional comments
The current extended discussion over whether or not Safari should have some kind of specific CSS blocking technique built in (sparked off by Mark Pilgrim) reminds me of a relatively unpublicised feature of Internet Explorer called conditional comments. These specially crafted HTML comments allow web authors to specifically hide code from versions of IE, or alternatively to hide code from any browsers that are not a specified version of IE. Here’s how they work:
[... 198 words]Using page titles properly
Adrian Holovaty eloquently demonstrates why real page titles (as opposed to titles stuffed with meaningless marketing keywords) are so important, using local entertainment listings as his example. One site that would do well to take his advice (despite not being in the entertainments listings business) is The Register, which has been failing to provide story headlines in page titles for as long as I have been visiting it. This is almost certainly a flaw in their content management system, but in 2003 it is an inexcusable error to make.
2002
Blockquote citations
Inspired by Adrian Holovaty, I spent an hour this morning getting dirty with the DOM in an effort to replicate his funky CSS blockquote citations effect but with links that you can actually click on. The resulting code is now active on this weblog—check the javascript out here.
[... 86 words]Trade it on Trodo
Adrian Holovaty has revealed his previously hinted at secret project. Trodo.com is kind of an online bartering site
. You give away stuff you no longer have a use for to earn credits, which you can then spend on requesting free items from other people. It’s a very interesting idea, and the trading model is explained in depth in Adrian’s comments section.
Content to code ratio
Adrian Holovaty has been investigating the content-to-code ratio of various news sites compared to various blogs. Unsurprisingly the blogs win hands down due to the tendancy to use CSS to separate structure from presentation. Adrian has put together a PHP script to calculate the ratio which can be accessed online or downloaded for personal use. Incidentally, from the comments in the code I learnt that PHP’s strip_tags() function neglects to strip the --> at the end of an HTML comment.
Pull quotes and page titles
Adrian Holovaty has followed up his discussion of page titles on news article pages with a look at the oft-abused pull-quote. Adrian points out how pull quotes can lead to poor accessibility for text browsers and screen readers, and suggests that providing a “skip quote” link could help improve things. Adrian’s comments section attracts a number of professional web deverlopers working on all kinds of news sites so the discussion is likely to be well worth watching over the next few days.
Newspaper sites and the link element
Adrian Holovaty advocates the usage of next/previous link elements on newspaper sites to add optional linear navigation. His comments include some interesting discussions on whether or not this feature would really be of use on that kind of site.
CSS in the real world
Adrian Holovaty: CSS in the real world. Adrian uses CSS to reduce the markup for a list of news headlines by 75%:
[... 56 words]geoIP
Adrian Holovaty in a blogite thread about features that can be added to blogs:
[... 151 words]Comments improvement
I’ve improved the comment system at the bequest of Adrian Holovaty. URLs posted in a comment (both those beginning with http:// and those beginning just with www.) will now be converted in to links.