RichText

While I’m on the subject of Internet Explorer, I thought I’d share some tools that I use for debugging sites for that browser.

Anyone who uses Firebug will testify how easy it makes tweaking CSS and debugging javascript in Firefox. However, IE doesn’t always behave like Firefox. There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing that little yellow warning triangle in the status bar of IE, giving you a (seemingly meaningless) line number for an error that doesn’t occur in trusty Firefox.

Well, there’s a ‘Lite’ (javascript) version of Firebug which works in all browsers, albeit with a reduced feature set.

To use it, you can insert this script into the page you want to debug (this technique is good if you if you need to work while disconnected from the Internet – just download the js to somewhere local).

<script type='text/javascript' 
        src='http://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/1.2/firebug-lite-compressed.js'></script>

... Or (and this is even easier) just drag this Firebug Lite link to your bookmarks bar, and you can use Firebug Lite on any page by clicking on that bookmark.

Another script I’ve found useful is CompanionJS. This only works in IE, and depends on the (free) Microsoft Script Debugger being installed first, but it’s really easy to set up and use (instructions here).

CompanionJS gives you a Firebug-like bar in the bottom of the browser, and will pop up a debugger if an error is encountered in your javascript – no more hunting for IE-specific javascript errors!

Google are now actively discouraging users from browsing with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 – See this TG Daily article for more details.

For anyone involved in web development, this is great news. At Swirrl, we’d already dropped IE6 support, so that we could concentrate on new feature development – With our small team, we couldn’t justify the time it was taking us to make things work properly on that browser (IE7 is bad enough!).

However, according to Google Analytics, between 5 and 10% of our visits are still from IE6. I’ve always been a bit perplexed about why this figure is so high. I know that some companies may have legacy internal apps which were written solely for IE6, but why should they prevent their employees from browsing the rest of the web with a modern (not to mention more secure) browser like Firefox 3?

Hopefully, with Internet giants like Google actively trying to move people away from crummy old IE6, that percentage will fall away to a negligible figure.

Thanks to Richard Grundy for putting me onto this via Twitter.

On my early-2008 15” MacBook Pro (the same one on which I experienced the strange vertical stripes), there’s always been a lot of sound interference on the headphones jack. This interference takes the form of a series of quiet R2D2-stylee electronic bleeps or pops, and is most noticeable on quiet sections of music or at the beginning or end of a section of silence.

It’s fairly easily to reproduce: Just turn the volume up and down a few times and every so often the noise would be heard after one of the little ‘blip’s that accompany the changing of volume.

This hasn’t bothered me too much as I normally listened to music through an Airport Express connected to my main sound system. However, I’ve recently moved my desk to another room, so I wanted to be able to listen to music via the headphones socket (through headphones or external speakers), and the bleeps were really annoying me.

This problem is well documented in various forum threads on the internets, and someone suggested that it was due to the sound card being poorly shielded and picking up interference from other components inside the computer.

So, I thought I’d try an external sound card. After a bit of research I settled on the Griffin iMic. It was only about £25 (~$35) and it’s done the trick – no more bleeps. It’s also really easy to set up: just plug it into a USB socket, plug your headphones (or speakers) in to the iMic and change the output via the sound preferences pane.

At the end of last month, I went to a Startup 2.0 event in Manchester which featured a great presentation by David Terrar. (Slides here).

In May 2006, Andrew McAfee of Harvard defined Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”. More recently Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen redefined it as “A system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.”

the application of Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. blogs, wikis, social networking, IM, mashups) to the enterprise.

David’s talk put into words some of my thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 – i.e. that sharing in general is good for business: both inter- and intra-organsation. In applying Web 2.0 principles (i.e. principles of the community driven, participatory, 2-way web) to business and the enterprise, benefits can be had for all.

The adoption (or not) of Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to depend on generational or demographic boundaries, but rather whether those in decision-making positions realise how it can affect the bottom line, especially in today’s economic climate. As David said, Enterprise 2.0 can help with many aspects of business, including (but not limited to):

idea generation, co-innovation, customer service, amplifying word of mouth, new product development, capturing knowledge, market research, project collaboration, public relations, member networking and employee communication.

Some of these provide obvious efficiency benefits and some help in generating sales and revenue.

Additionally, Enterprise 2.0 applications are frequently available as SaaS (software as a service). This removes the requirement to hire someone to maintain and secure a server inside the organisation. Or, if a company already has someone working in this capacity, it frees them up to be assigned elsewhere.

Instead of investing a large amount of money in the development of a bespoke application (whether in-house or outsourced to contractors/consultants), many Web 2.0 apps are available free or relatively cheaply. They can be used in the enterprise to achieve perhaps 80% of what that bespoke application would have, at a fraction of the cost.

In my experience, it’s often the case that custom application development doesn’t achieve what it sets out in the first place (at least on the first iteration), and the very nature of Web 2.0 tools empowers users to customize their experience themselves, helping to alleviate this problem.

As I mentioned last month, this blog is now running on Phusion Passenger. To mark the occasion I’ve changed to a dark, Passenger-inspired theme. I hope you like it. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the Passenger site).

Anyway, as part of moving across to Passenger, I also decided to sort out my feed-redirects. A while back, I had tried to ensure that all requests for a feed were redirected to the Feedburner version of the feed, so that I could keep track of numbers of subscribers. I had even found this blog post by Robby Russell which seems to describe how to do just that, but it wasn’t working for me.

It turns out that the version of Typo that I’m using redirects to /articles.rss or /articles.atom when a feed is requested, so Robby’s rewrite rule didn’t work. Here’s what I got to work for me…

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^FeedBurner.*$
RewriteRule /articles.(rss|atom)$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/richtext [R=temp,L]

sudo a2enmod rewrite

RewriteEngine on

I hope this helps someone out.