Just testing the iPad app for WordPress, looks pretty slick and responds well.
Typing I have found to be a little sensitive but I am sure I will get used to it in time!
If anyone wants to suggest apps I should be checking out please leave a comment below.
Robin Christopherson works at Abilitynet and gave an excellent talk last year at FOWA Dublin 2009 about some of the traps to avoid to keep your website accessible to all.
This year he was talking about pretty much exactly the same thing, which would be annoying only the need for accessible websites hasn’t went away and people are still making the same mistakes.
I won’t go through every example he gave but here are some of the important notes I took from his talk entitled Accessibility in Web Design.
One really cool thing I learned was that Opera Mini as a force single column mode, I have been a user of Opera Mini for ages and didn’t know about this, one setting change and my experience on most websites using that browser has improved dramatically, vertical scrolling is basically eliminated.
Robin talked about Project Canvas, the following snippet is from their website and it seems like an interesting an worthwhile project.
Project Canvas is a proposed partnership between the BBC, ITV, C4, Five, BT and Talk Talk to build an open internet-connected TV platform, subject to BBC Trust approval.
Finally here are a few links he shared with us;
He mentioned some really valuable stuff and it was a very enjoyable presentation.
In my last writeup I mentioned that the content Owen DeLong was covering was a little dry but incredibly necessary.
Eoghan McCabe‘s and Des Traynor‘s (both from Contrast.ie) talk entitled Five Lessons We’ve Learned Sexy or Meaningful builds a lot upon the theme of necessity as they talk about why it is important to not always be chasing the sexy things in life.
They basically go through five areas of business and explain why in most cases the sexy option is the option you want to avoid like the plague. This was an excellent talk delivered by two fantastic speakers.
With regards to business strategies they discussed things that didn’t work;
And they concluded that we should be looking long term and to focus on the things that aren’t going to change.
With regards to the people you are involved with they mentioned a couple of things;
Their third topic for discussion was about investments, basically they highlighted the fact that investment is sexy and reminded us that our business doesn’t really need that much start up so why would you really need to chase money in the beginning?
Fourth on their list was the section on design, they warned us to watch out for trends and don’t immediately follow them. I couldn’t agree more with this, it is so tempting to make all your corners rounded now and have a nice shadow effect around divs, but just because it is the flavour of the moment doesn’t mean you are giving any real value to your users.
They gave an example of a good meaningful website – Craigslist. They point out that the design hasn’t changed and whilst it isn’t sexy, it is very functional. I would argue that sites like Amazon and Ebay would be in the same boat, not great to look at but usually easy to use.
Their talk ended with a section on marketing, here they listed some more key points;
I wanted to play about with Google’s Skipfish to see if it could automate any of my security scans and grabbed the source code from the code library.
When I tried to make the file whilst running Ubuntu 9.10 I was presented with the following error:
cc -L/usr/local/lib/ -L/opt/local/lib skipfish.c -o skipfish -O3 -Wno-format -Wall -funsigned-char -g -ggdb -I/usr/local/include/ -I/opt/local/include/ -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=0 \
http_client.c database.c crawler.c analysis.c report.c -lcrypto -lssl -lidn -lz
In file included from crawler.h:26,
from skipfish.c:39:
http_client.h:26:25: error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
In file included from crawler.h:26,
from skipfish.c:39:
http_client.h:189: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘SSL_CTX’
skipfish.c: In function ‘main’:
skipfish.c:154: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘SSL_library_init’
http_client.c:37:25: error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
http_client.c:38:25: error: openssl/err.h: No such file or directory
http_client.c:39:18: error: idna.h: No such file or directory
http_client.c:40:18: error: zlib.h: No such file or directory
In file included from database.h:29,
from http_client.c:45:
http_client.h:189: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘SSL_CTX’
http_client.c: In function ‘parse_url’:
http_client.c:285: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘idna_to_ascii_8z’
http_client.c:285: error: ‘IDNA_SUCCESS’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c:285: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
http_client.c:285: error: for each function it appears in.)
http_client.c: In function ‘parse_response’:
http_client.c:1516: error: ‘z_stream’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c:1516: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘d’
http_client.c:1521: error: ‘d’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c:1531: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘inflateInit2’
http_client.c:1531: error: ‘Z_OK’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c:1532: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘inflateEnd’
http_client.c:1537: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘inflate’
http_client.c:1537: error: ‘Z_FINISH’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c:1540: error: ‘Z_BUF_ERROR’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c:1540: error: ‘Z_STREAM_END’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c: In function ‘destroy_unlink_conn’:
http_client.c:1636: error: ‘struct conn_entry’ has no member named ‘q’
.
.
. SNIP SNIP!
.
http_client.c:2188: error: ‘struct conn_entry’ has no member named ‘next’
http_client.c:2192: error: ‘struct conn_entry’ has no member named ‘q’
In file included from database.c:33:
http_client.h:26:25: error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
In file included from database.c:33:
http_client.h:189: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘SSL_CTX’
In file included from crawler.c:30:
http_client.h:26:25: error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
In file included from crawler.c:30:
http_client.h:189: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘SSL_CTX’
In file included from analysis.c:28:
http_client.h:26:25: error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
In file included from analysis.c:28:
http_client.h:189: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘SSL_CTX’
analysis.c: In function ‘maybe_xsrf’:
analysis.c:397: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘time’
In file included from report.c:33:
http_client.h:26:25: error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
In file included from report.c:33:
http_client.h:189: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘SSL_CTX’
make: *** [skipfish] Error 1
Some digging about made me realise this is a fairly common problem even if your machine has a fairly good set of dependencies downloaded.
If you run the following command it should act as a catchall and set you up to be able to play with this tool.
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev build-essential zlibc zlib-bin libidn11-dev libidn11
Onto number 5 with my run down and onto a talk by Owen DeLong entitled Content Providers must lead the way to IPv6.
Owen is an IPv6 Evangelist with Hurricane Electric who gave a rather worrying talk about how we are going to need to move to IPv6 sooner rather than later.
Networking is a very dry subject matter and even an Evangelist like Owen could do little to spark up too much in the way of excitement about the topic but it is very important and something we need to be paying attention to.
Basically his talk focused on the fact that IPv4 addresses are running out and could be gone in 2011. What this means is ISPs and hosting companies have very little time to get their infrastructure sorted in order to deal with both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.
The main action point I took from the talk was that I need to contact hosting providers for my websites and find out what provisions they have made for IPv6, because it was clear from the talk that the days of IPv4 are drawing to a close and whilst there will be IPv4 legacy systems in place for some time it will begin to get phased out sooner rather than later.
Owen hosted a University session later on in the day which covered how you can prepare your servers which I will talk about in a later post.
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