Archive for the ‘CSS3’ Category

Why It’s Time to Update Your Browser

Sunday, April 22nd, 2012

Why It's Time to Update Your Browser

Let me start with a little profanity: Internet Explorer.  Okay, so maybe it’s not the type of profanity you were initially thinking, but in the Internet world, Internet Explorer is one of the foulest, most cruel phrases anyone could say.  Why? Simple.  It’s terrible mainly due to its inability to follow simple web standards and user basics.

I will be fair though, with the release of IE 9, Microsoft has finally begun listening to consumers and web developers alike, by releasing software that follows web standards a bit more strictly. The only new problem we, web developers, face are people who don’t, or simply refuse to update.

Not using Internet Explorer? I’d like to give you a high five.  In case you’ve been living in Windows98 for the past several years, companies such as Apple, Google and Mozilla have made great strides in building better browsers to best Microsoft’s.

It wasn’t until IE9 that Internet Explorer finally supported HTML5.  Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari have been supporting it since 2009, whereas IE was two years behind.

HTML5 support isn’t the only reason to update your browser, though.  Recent improvements Apple, Google and Mozilla have been implementing are hardware acceleration, user preference and bookmark sync features, as well as faster rendering for the jQuery JavaScript library, which can be found on most websites.

Here are a few other reasons you should update your browser:

  • Security updates – Most releases usually have some form of security updates, whether it’s dealing with SSL, HTTPS or other small operating system related fixes
  • A better web experience – Take a look at http://dowebsitesneedtobeexperiencedexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/ Crazy URL, but hover over the word you see. Do you see a black background with white text?  How about a blue and purple backgrounds?  Do the words appear differently?
  • Themes – Everyone likes a little personalization and customization, right?  Why not break away from the typical gray/sandy colors and jazz up your browser with a new theme?
  • HTML5/CSS3 – Animations are no longer confined to Flash.  With CSS3, animations and transitions are fully supported, speeding up webpage load times.
  • I’m a happier person – Building a website to look aesthetically pleasing in a browser takes time.  Making it work in IE7 requires a lot more time.  In fact, it usually requires the use of its own stylesheet, just to make web pages appear correctly.
  • Beautiful interfaces – Currently, everywhere you look, advertisements and pictures are using color gradients to make products more visually appealing.  With modern browsers, creating beautiful websites is much, much easier and doesn’t require the use of hundreds of images.

Posted in CSS3, HTML5, jQuery, Website | No Comments »

My Name is David M. Auble, and I Oppose SOPA

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012
STOP SOPA

STOP SOPA

This is important — I’m sure you’ve heard a little bit about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), but I think it’s important to stand out against it.  If you search anything on Wikipedia today, you’ll not be allowed to view the results.  Instead, you’ll be automatically redirected to a page asking for your zip code to contact your state representatives and tell them you are against SOPA.

It’s important to oppose SOPA because to summarize it, webmasters would be in charge of filtering EVERY bit of information posted to their sites.  For small companies, this would be a tremendous task, as they’d have to filter all comments, posts, or bulletins before being displayed online.  This would in turn cut into company budgets, due to having to hire someone full time to monitor the information.  On a larger scale, websites such as YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia, would be responsible for filtering every post that’s made.  This would create a hassle, as a team of people would have to moderate every single post/comment.  With thousands of Twitter messages, Facebook status updates, and videos uploaded to YouTube every second, you can see how this can begin to be a BIG issue, and a big bottleneck for most websites.

It’s important let everyone know that you oppose SOPA.  We have several late-aged men and women making decisions about how the Internet is being formed and how it “should” be managed, instead of letting the youth dictate how information should be shared.  It’s no secret that the world’s youth download/share music/videos/media in an illegal manner.  It’s the same as recording a song to a cassette tape from the radio.  The government and other agencies will never be able to stop people from breaking the law — it’s simply impossible.

SOPA is affecting your freedom of speech, in the digital format.  Although the principle of regulating what is shared online is a good idea on paper, SOPA has been developed for all the wrong reasons.  Voting begins on January 24th, 2012, so it’s imperative everyone speak up!

For more information, look at Google’s “Doodle” today — you’ll see that the Google logo has been censored.  Do a search on Wikipedia — you’ll be surprised at what you may find.. or won’t find.

If you oppose SOPA, please sign the petition below:

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

My name is David M. Auble, and I oppose SOPA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E46

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

Please feel free to pass this post on to anyone and everyone you know.  People need to know and be educated about SOPA and the real threat it can be.  Watch more information:

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The Panda Effect

Monday, December 5th, 2011

The Panda Effect | Google PandaBy now, most businesses are implementing some form of basic SEO.  Whether it’s optimizing page titles and structure, or optimizing all pictures, content and folder structure, it’s important to build your site with SEO in mind.

Most people agree that Google is the leading search engine (by a significant margin).  By receiving over 65% of all search traffic, Google has been busy at work with trying to return the most relevant results as quickly as possible.

Recently, the search engine giant has released their latest version of their algorithm, Panda.  With the release of Panda came a series of changes and new factors that are taken into account when “grading” a website. The Panda release affects nearly 12% of all search results.

Let’s take a look at some of the new factors Panda takes into account when crawling a website.

  • Focus on the basics: UI/UX
    It may sound scary, but Google’s web bots (the Googlebot) are becoming more human-like by “understanding” page layouts.  By taking factors such as bounce rate, time spent on each page and site, page response times and conversion rates, the Googlebot is able to determine if the page contains content that people are actually wanting to view.

    With this information, the Googlebot is able to make an educated guess as to how people are engaging with your website.

  • Content Quality, Including Spelling
    Something our content writers always ask themselves is “How original is my content?”  It’s no secret that Google has virtually limitless space to store indexes of your content.  Because of this, it’s relatively easy for Google to determine the uniqueness of your content.  Pages with trustworthy and reliable content are favored more by the Googlebots, too.

    It seems trivial, but you would be surprised at the number of websites that have small spelling and grammar errors.  Googlebots recognize this and actually penalize sites with errors.  By looking through a website’s PageRank, or how reputable the website is, spelling and grammar affect this significantly.

  • Ad Spacing and Layout
    If you’re like me, you probably despise ads.  Googlebots are no different.  If they deem your page to have too many ads, your website may become flagged as a link farm, or may be seen as a page that serves no purpose other than to advertise for other companies. Being flagged as a link farm will severely affect your rankings, as most link farm websites have no real value.
  • Cleanliness of Code
    Any developer will agree that clean code is much easier to manage.  By writing clean code, it’s much easier to ensure your website renders the same way in any browser, regardless if it’s Internet Explorer or Chrome.  By validating your website against the W3C, this is your best ally in making sure everyone and Googlebots can view your website properly.

The Internet changes constantly. Google recognizes the inevitable changes and continually updates their algorithms.  Panda is the latest big change and certainly won’t be the last. By keeping these tips in mind, a website can please the “Google Gods” and improve its page rank.

Posted in CSS3, HTML5, Website | No Comments »

HTML5, Web Video and VideoJS

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

Now that the new year is here, I’ve decided to make a few resolutions — resolutions not only for my personal satisfaction, but also some of my programming abilities. One of these is I would like to dive head-first into the world of HTML5 and CSS3. I’ve been approached several times about my knowledge on these topics and unfortunately, have had to turn away. Not anymore.

Enter VideoJS.  VideoJS is an outstanding player that’ll not only play the videos in the standard HTML5 formats (OGG, OGV, MP4, WebM), but if the browser doesn’t support HTML5, it will automatically change to a Flash embedded video.  This is an outstanding plugin, and my hat goes off to the developers.

Enough talk, let’s see this thing in action.


Take note as to how the video is rendered.  If you’re in Firefox, Safari, Opera or Internet Explorer, it should render as a Flash video.  If you’re on an iPad or iPhone, it should play, using the MP4/H.264 codec.  If you’re using Chrome, it should play as an HTML5 video, since it uses the HTML5 <video> tag.  If, for some reason you do not see this video, please let me know so I can look into why it is not working properly.

I have noticed a few problems with this new way of handling videos online. First, the new file formats drastically increase the file size. The files of these videos are ranging from 13MB for the MP4 and an outrageous 43MB for the OGV file. Because of this, the files take a fair amount of time to play. Granted, I may not be using the best encoders to convert my videos, and this video was shot in 720p. The fact that still remains is the files are huge.

This all brings up a big question.  What is the best browser that’ll support all of this?  I suppose the answer is Chrome, seeing how it displays much of the new HTML5/CSS3 standards pretty well.  I’m a die-hard Firefox fan, so I won’t be changing any time soon.  HTML5 will be around for a while and still hasn’t caught up to the popularity of Flash-based video.. yet.  I think there’s great potential in Firefox4, but without having tested it out, I’m not sure of it’s capabilities as of yet.

I’m not an expert at any of this by any means, these are just my opinions and I’m still learning. Feel free to leave some comments and/or insights on this topic. I’m hoping to generate a little bit of feedback, in order to learn more.

Posted in CSS3, HTML5, jQuery, Reference, Website | No Comments »