July 15, 2008

WordPress 2.6

Christian Decker wrote this in the early evening:
WordPress 2.6 has been released:
I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5. WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.6
After the amazing 2.5 release with its hundreds of new features this release seems to be a bit minimalistic, but I installed it anyway. Actually this post is being written from the new Press This button which is a feature I’ve seen some years ago, but then disappeared again. Using WP-Cache I had no downtime at all, since all my posts were cached and served from that cache :-)

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April 29, 2008

The seven rules of unobtrusive JavaScript

Christian Decker wrote this terribly early in the morning:
Christian Heilmann has written a great article about why Unobtrusive JavaScript is the way to go and what the best practices are. I strongly recommend that you head over and read it through. For me the most important points are:
  • You don’t expect JavaScript to be available but make it a nice-to-have rather than a dependency: definitely true as JavaScript should be an enhancement rather than the show itself.
  • You expect other scripts to try to interfere with your functionality and keep the scope of your scripts as secure as possible: true, that’s one of my main criticisms about JavaScript. Not having clean separation seems a big step backwards in evolution.
  • Traversing the DOM is expensive and can be slow, that is why it is a good idea to leave it to a technology that is already in use in browsers. I like to spray hooks on the finished HTML when I need to have simple ways to access DOM-elements. Also I really like caching elements that I searched earlier in variables so I don’t have to search for them again.
  • Using CSS to do manipulation on many elements at once without having to search for the elements (section 3): this is really a great idea, new to me, but I’m sure it’ll come in handy.
  • A really important part of unobtrusive JavaScript is to understand how browsers work (and especially how browsers fail) and what users expect to happen. It is easy to go overboard with JavaScript and create a completely different interface with it. Drag and Drop interfaces, collapsible sections, scrollbars and sliders can all be created with JavaScript, but there is much more to those than just the technical implementation. Agreed! Don’t overdo it, or the users will find it hard to use.
  • The other thing to remember is that you can stop events from being reported to parent elements and you can override the default action HTML elements like links have. However, sometimes this is not a good idea, as browsers apply them for a reason. An example would be links pointing to in-page targets. Allowing for them to be followed makes sure that users can bookmark the state of your script. Oh how many times have I seen <a href=”#” onclick=”…”> to respond to an event. Don’t do it, please.
  • Wrapping functionality in objects provides namespaces and isolation of your code. Better yet: you can define public interfaces! (section 6)
So thank, you very much, Christian, for this article, let’s hope many developers start applying your tips, because they make the world a better place. I know I will :)

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April 15, 2008

Akismet back, full throttle

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:
After ranting against Akismet some days ago, and receiving many suggestions about how to solve the problem, I got the spam under control (at least I hope so…). The trick was to use the standard option in Wordpress to blacklist some words. So I drew up a short list of words that kept popping up in the spam comments and, voila, suddenly I have clean comments again. Thanks to everybody suggesting how to get rid of the spam, I might write a small post in the future about all these solutions as there are quite a few interesting among them :D

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March 30, 2008

Wordpress 2.5

Christian Decker wrote this in the late afternoon:
WordPress 2.5 has been released with a major overhaul to the interface and a range of new features. The biggest change is in the appearance of the administration backend, which is described as being a “Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard.” The WordPress dashboard is now widget friendly, and users can include items such as stats, offering similar functionality to MovableType. Other new features include multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, code friendly WYSIWYG, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and improved search. A demo video from Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg above, and further details on the WordPress blog here.

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March 28, 2008

The entrecard effect

Christian Decker wrote this at around evening time:

I was wondering lately what the actual effect of using entrecard on my blog is, so I stopped dropping cards for a few days until the drops on my blog were almost none and then 5 days ago I started dropping again and guess what the traffic went straight up:

EntreCard Stats change

While this surely looks promising however the bounce rate went through the roof with an increase of a whopping 20%. Still not bad enough? After 3 days of dropping the time on site reached the all time low of just 23 seconds…

So EntreCard is nice if you want to jump start your blog, or pad in some additional users, but it’s not the way to look for quality traffic (as in dedicated readers that take the time to appreciate your effort in writing the posts). After all there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.I personally will continue using entrecard because some droppers are bound to stick around

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