cazmockett.com

As web designers, we all know how important it is that you are aware of your target audience, and what sort of browser they might be using to view your sites.

I was idly fiddling with the Sitemeter Stats for my blogs today, and was intrigued by the variation in browser share between them - largely reflecting their readerships, and how “geeky”/computer literate the visitors may be. They’re all hosted on Blogger and have referrals from a variety of sources.

First up, this blog shows the largest number of different browers - even getting a few percent of views with Konqueror and Opera 9. I see 2% of folks are still straggling along with Netscape 5 too! The majority are on Firefox 2 - just edging IE7 by 6%. I guess this wide spread of browsers reflects the “geekery” of the content and people using niche browsers are likely to read webhead stuff!

[Browser Share pie chart for this blog readership]

The second chart is my Rugby Mad blog - the first one I started back in Feb 2006. Although the subject is just limited to rugby, I’m guessing that the readers represent a more “average” web user - the blog was linked from the BBC’s Six Nations blog last year, and I got massive numbers of hits from that. They are certainly a less geeky crowd than above. This is reflected by the stats - nearly half of them are using IE7 - with IE6 the next largest chunk at 28% <sigh />. Firefox has plummeted 20% compared to the geeky blog. And it looks like around 8% read from a Mac (although I suppose some could be using Safari on a PC now). But no Netscape in sight!

[Browser Share pie chart for my RugbyMad blog readership]

My Photographic blog is most similar to the web design one - although there aren’t any die-hard Konqueror or Opera fans amongst the readership! The Netscape stragglers are back in about the same numbers
[Browser Share pie chart for my Photographic blog readership]

Last of all is my newest blog, My Year In Pictures. It’s been running less than a month, whereas the rest have been going for a year or more. I guess potential users of older browsers may have upgraded before this one went live (I think the stats are derived from the last 12 months if the blog has been going that long). The most surprising is Firefox 2 with a whopping 42% share, a good 8% ahead of IE7. There’s still around 18% of users clinging to IE6. Safari and Netscape figure in the few percent.

[Browser Share pie chart for my Year In Pictures blog readership]

So, what does all this tell me? It just shows that with the proliferation of new browsers, while Firefox is doing well in the geeksphere, IE7 is gaining ground - but IE6 is still alive and kicking (us) amongst the “average” web user. And yes, there are still some poor folks using Netscape - people, if it’s within your power, upgrade to a nice shiny new browser!

When I build sites for clients, I’ll always design it for Firefox. Then test/fix for IE7 (some niggles but not major problems) and pesky IE6 (usually requires more tweaks). I’ll also have a look at them in Safari (PC) and Opera 9.02 - there may be slight presentational differences, but no show-stoppers.

For a laugh, I’ll also take a peek in IE5.5 (and 5.02 if I’m feeling masochistic), but I’m not going to waste any time fixing bugs for them. Let’s face it - none of the above readers have registered as using them - and I’m guessing on average, these stats are pretty applicable for most web users these days, no matter what content they are browsing - so why should I flog myself unneccessarily?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Flickr and tagging recently, having just had to bash a load of tags onto my BarCamp pictures.

Lots of my mates are members, and when we’ve got together for socials, we share the pictures via Flickr afterwards. Many tag the images by subject, or use something like Upcoming’s machine tags: upcoming:event=138806, which refer to the relevent event tag, and can be used by Upcoming’s API to display photos from that event (held on Flickr), in the event page on Upcoming. “Old hat”, some of you may say.

The other thing that regularly happens is that folks tag pictures with people’s names or nicknames. Thus, you can see all the photos of me on Flickr (which have been appropriately tagged), whether they be in my photostream or someone else’s. But here’s where we get the problems.

Some people have particular tags by which they would like to be known, as well as their normal names. Ben (74 results currently) is a case in point, who also goes by the nickname of Kapowaz (56 results, some of them the same). Mark Norman Francis (390 pics) (aka Norm! - 2,324, not all of them him) thinks he’s King Of The Britons (122). Adding all these tags by hand every time gets very tedious.

Now Flickr is very good at letting you organise your pictures, by set, date of upload, geographical position, etc. Their drag and drop interface is easy enough to get your head round with a bit of practice.

So I was thinking, why not let each Flickr user asign their own tags to describe themselves. Then give the Organiser Panel the facility to set which Flickr users appear in the photo, and that user’s tags then get applied automatically. As long as you know that a person in one of your pictures is a Flickr member, you ought to be able to drag their icon onto a picture to set up the tagging, even if they are not in your friends, family or contact lists (these could easily load by default in the appropriate new “choose Flickr member” panel):

[mockup of the "choose member in photo" facility, via the Organiser panel]

Or when you come cross an individual picture in your Flickrstream, you can currently add it to a group via one of the fuction buttons at the top. Similarly, you could have:

[mockup of the "add member in photo" facility, in the Flickrstream view]

I’m sure that would save some donkey work on everyone’s part, and would be quite interesting to follow the reference tag trails around Flickr until you get dizzy.

Comments anyone?

Sheila The Sheila has tagged me with a little blog ditty, and in the spirit of New Year I thought I would carry it on. The idea is this:

“For those of you going “huh?”, I have been blog tagged, a game started by Jeff Pulver which seems to be spreading quite quickly. The object of the game is to reveal 5 things about you, which most readers probably don’t know, then nominate 5 friends to do the same.”

So, here are my five “surprises”:

• I had my first photograph published when I was 8 years old.
  It was taken when I was seven, at Darnholm, on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. I used my father’s manual camera (he had set the exposure for me) and managed to pan the shot when the steam train came round a curve under the bridge. Dad regularly submits pictures for publication in preserved railway magazines, and so he sent it along with some of his, and it was published in Modern Railways. So I’m a bit of a closet steam-head as well as nethead.
• I mushed a team of six huskies for a week in the arctic circle.
  We toured northern Sweden and Norway. It was the best trip I’ve ever done, but totally knackering. We ate for England, but expended so much energy, I’d lost 4lbs by the time I came home. My experiences during that week have taught me that teamwork is invaluable, and that plastic is not as good as polystyrene for making loo seats for use in sub-zero temperatures!
• I started learning to play Bass Guitar in 2002.
  I’d wanted to play bass since I was a teenager. Then one day I woke up and thought, “why don’t I just go and buy one, rather than dithering all this time?” Not sure the neighbours were pleased. But my amp doesn’t go up to 11! I started out with a cheap 4-string model, but now have a custom 5-string Iceni Funkmeister, with a purple paint job. I guess I’m a late starter when it comes to rebellion and rock-goddess pretentions, ha ha.
• I’m a PAGB-accredited judge, and regularly visit photographic clubs in East Anglia and North London, to judge their competitions. For some reason, they like my opinions and keep inviting me back.
• Danny Grewcock (England and Bath Lock) once signed my rugby shirt. I was still wearing it at the time. ‘Nuff said.

And I’m going to tag these good folks to reveal themselves: Litlove, Andy Mitchell, Bobble, Prof. John Flood and his RATS, FakeBob.

I’m A PHP Newbie
For some weeks, I’ve been meaning to try my hand at some PHP development, having done most of my projects to date with .NET. I bought the excellent book Blog Design Solutions in September, and have been gradually reading my way through it in my spare time. It gives advice on installing and tweaking some of the most common blog engines such as Movable Type, ExpressionEngine, WordPress and TextPattern, but the last chapter leads you through building your own blogging solution.

I thought this was a good place to start for a PHP newbie, since there were copious examples and plenty of advice about setting up your test environment, a notorious minefield to tread safely on your own.

Setting Up The Test Environment
Unfortunately, this is where the pain and suffering began… I downloaded the lastest stable Apache release (as adivsed by the book), which was supposedly 2.2.3, as the Win MSI installer. It half loaded up, but would not run as a service on my WinXP Pro machine. The Apache icon appared in my SysTray, but the context menu was blank, and it did not appear in my list of services to start manually! After going round the loop several times, I gave up and went back for the 2.0.59 release instead - which worked first time!

Because I’ve already got IIS running as my default web server on localhost, I had to tell Apache to use a different port - 8080 is the conventional one for a second web server. Then you can use this in your URL to call on Apache to serve your pages:

http://localhost:8080/blog/index.php

I had already installed MySQL 5.0.22 a while back, along with useful tools such as the accompanying Administrator, Query Browser and Migration Toolkit, but had not really used any of it in anger since.Consequently, it took a few minutes to remember what I’d chosen as the root password for the MySQL Administratior package! Eventually, I set up my database (all very straightfoward with the Admin plugin, you don’t have to go messing about with SQL statements to make a new table etc, it’s all done from a neat little GUI). I’d also got PHP 5.2.0 installed by now.

Connecting To The Database
The next hurdle came when I tried actually running a PHP page with a database connection. I kept getting an error:

Call to undefined function mysql_connect()

After some reading around in my book Beginning PHP and MySQL 5 book (another one which has been propping up the coffee table of late but came into it’s own for this), it turns out that PHP5 does not ship with native MySQL support embedded; you have to download some extra libraries and then go fiddling around with the php.ini file. I found this tutorial page really useful in explaining what was needed. And for all the knocking that Microsoft gets in various quarters, I don’t ever remember this much effort being required to set up IIS to run with the .NET framework! Bah, humbug.

Once the environment was properly configured, the actual blog development wasn’t too bad. I had a few “moments” of frustration trying to chase down some syntax typos which caused various things to blow up, but you get used to that with hand coding!

Telling The Time
Another tricky thing to get right is date and time formatting. My PHP book gave me info if you want to use PHP to display the current date:

<?php echo “”.date(”l, jS F, Y”); ?>

Gives you “Wednesday, 6th December 2006“.

There are occasions when you want to format the date in the SQL statement, and trying to get your head round a seemingly-arbitrary set of case-sensitive parameters in the format string is difficult. Which is where Dan Winchester’s guide to MySQL date_format was also very handy. You might use something like this:

SELECT post_id, title, post
DATE_FORMAT(postdate, ‘%W, %D %M %Y‘) AS dateposted, DATE_FORMAT(postdate, ‘%H:%i‘) AS timeposted
FROM posts WHERE post_id=$post_id LIMIT 1

dateposted would display “Wednesday, 6th December 2006” as before, and the timeposted variable shows “22:45“. I split these in two so the parsed date string could be displayed separately from the time portion - if you made two posts in a day, it’s nice not to repeat the day/date element every time. If you wanted to lump them together, just use this instead:

SELECT post_id, title, post
DATE_FORMAT(postdate, ‘%W, %D %M %Y‘ at %H:%i) AS dateposted
FROM posts WHERE post_id=$post_id LIMIT 1

This will give “Wednesday, 6th December 2006 at 22:25” as one string.

Future Developments?
So now, I have my own blogging engine running on my localhost using PHP and MySQL. I’m not about to share the new blog with the world, as it largely consists of a personal diary and various rants, but it’s been a very worthwhile exercise in dipping my toes in the murky PHP waters.

I may decide to develop the code further, and perhaps use it to host this blog on my own server in due course, but for the moment, it’s staying right here at blogger.

Generating RSS
I’ve been meaning to get some rss feeds sorted out for my photographic sites for some time. There were some technicalities which I was wracking my brains to overcome, and for a while, I couldn’t make up my mind which format to support. But in the end, it only took a couple of dollars to pull my finger out - I found a great tutorial at CommunityMX about blog authoring, which gave me the final push.

I also found the rss2.0 specification and feed validator for Atom and RSS invaluable in getting a valid feed sorted out.

Where Are My Feeds?

• http://www.cazphoto.co.uk/rss/
  is the feed for my general photography
• http://www.rugbypix.com/rss/
  is the feed for my rugby photography

Feed Reader Interpretations
One thing I’d not really taken much notice of, as a consumer of other people’s feeds, was how various feed readers actually present the information. But once I started authoring feeds, it’s become a bit more obvious how each aggregator parses the xml file to display the feed. Some will only show 20 posts (no matter how many are actually in the feed), others keep a cached copy and don’t seem to want to update the feed if the order of posts hasn’t changed but the layout and content has. All rather frustrating if you’re trying to author a feed and test it!

Some Anomalies
First off, Bloglines keeps a cache of the feed, and so it’s only showing an early version of the rugbypix feed (without thumbnails) in this screenshot:

Also, if a feed has 40 items (I sometimes post a large batch of images so didn’t want to limit the feed to the last dozen or so), it only shows 20 - the oldest 20. So when other feed readers show the last two matches (40 images = 2 games, 20 images each), Bloglines will only display the last but one game’s pictures, not the latest 20. [Add: between composing this and actually posting it, Bloglines has now caught up and refreshed the feed - but it did take about 48 hours!]

The cazphoto feed looks a little better (I’d got the hang of formatting by now):

Next we see what it looks like in YahooMail Beta feed reader:

Quite a nice presentation, but it doesn’t show the date up very well.

Google’s feed reader makes a nice job of things in expanded view:

Plus it offers a cutdown list view if you so wish:

I also tried the Sage plugin for Firefox, which gives yet another take on the display, showing a 3-pane affair, feeds at top left, item summary of feed in bottom left and a rather more snazzily-laid out view of each item in the right pane:

So there we have it - a small sampling of feed readers. What’s your favourite feed reader, and how well does it render your chosen feeds? One final (surprising) thing I found out during my investigations was that the standard Flickr Photo Feeds don’t validate! Oops!

Publicising Your Feed
It’s no good having a feed and no-one knows it’s there. Adding a suitable link (often showing the icon) to your website can help. Also, add a link in the head of your page to tell feed readers your feed is available. This takes the format:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”My Feed ” href=”http://www.mysite.com/rss/”>

Third Party services such as pingomatic can also help raise the profile of your feed. Happy pinging.