After making the initial version publicly available many features were asked for and implemented. With the scope of the project considerably larger now, I’ve taken a moment to step back and clean up the code. It’s been a slow process, but with the refactoring almost done and a stable version in hand I can finally start to add in new features! I’ll try to post my progress as I go and will make a release candidate available once I have one.

Also, if you’ve used the forum in the past, you might notice that I’ve removed the link for it. There was just too much spam on the board to deal with. I will reinstate it after I have time to get an appropriate solution up and running, but in the meantime I have put an email link there instead.

If you have any questions about the status of the project please email me.

While the above statement is true, website accessibility actually applies to a wider band of people and has benefits that include better search engine optimization and ensuring that your website is available on a multitude of devices. A better way to think of it is that you are enabling more people to use your website. Just think about that for a second… Why wouldn’t you want more people on your website?

If you’re interested in learning more about website accessibility here’s an informative, high level write-up that I recently found:

Understanding Web Accessibility

Among other things it includes advice on overcoming accessibility issues in existing sites and has a list of benefits from a business perspective, both of which can be invaluable.

When doing markup it’s easy to identify elements in terms of paragraphs, lists, divs, and spans, but try not to forget there are other tags which can aid you in semantically marking up your pages.

<Q>

The Q tag should be used for short, one-line quotations. This tag will add language specific quote marks around the text for you automatically — which is quite cool. Unfortunately Internet Explorer does not support this. You can remove the generated quotes by adding q:before, q:after {content:'';} to your stylesheet.

<BLOCKQUOTE>

Most people are familiar with using the blockquote tag to indent text. This usage is presentational and should never be used. The correct use of the tag is for when you want to markup long quotations.

<CODE>

The code tag is for fragments of code which are displayed on the page. There are also similar tags with minor semantic differences such as samp, sample output from a program; kbd, text the user should type; and var, a program variable.

<ABBR>

When you use an abbreviation you cannot be sure that the user will know the meaning. To make the page accessible you could use the abbr tag to pass along the meaning. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn’t support the hover tooltip for the title, but degrades gracefully.

<ACRONYM>

Similar in usage to the abbr tag this is for acronyms and is supported by all browsers.

<INS>

The ins tag is for document changes where text was added at a later time. By default this text appears underlined.

<DEL>

The del tag is for document changes where text was removed at a later time but you still want to appear for historical reasons. By default this text has a line through it.

<OPTGROUP>

Probably one of the least known, but more useful tags. Optgroup is used to group similar option values. A great use for this is to create multiple select boxes which update each other when changed and still degrade gracefully when Javascript is turned off.

Before you start wondering why you should care it would be a good time to point out that Apple just released wifi compatible iPods. They too can browse the internet. Now how many people do you know who have an iPod? There are quite a few I’m sure. Within a few years that number will only grow and with iPhones becoming popular the chances a visitor to your site is using the mobile version of Safari just went up.

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

I taught myself PHP using version 4 and it’s sad to see it go, but at the same time I’m happy. There are tons of improvements in the current version and so many hosts out there only support an older 4.x version. This makes developers choose between having their applications run on the majority of setups or taking advantage of modern day functionality in PHP.

It’s not hard to move your code to PHP 5. In fact, most sites will probably run fine without any problems — at most they’d only need a few tweaks. If you need to transition your application from 4.x to 5.x there’s a Migration Guide available on the PHP website.

One of the points, “Minimize HTTP Requests,” is basically the age-old idea of not putting 50 large images on a page at once. Who wants to download all of that? With web applications becoming more and more complex lately there’s a tendency for people to have lots of external CSS and Javascript files included. This rules applies to these cases as well. There are plenty of major sites right now which have 10+ includes in the header — this is no good. Optimize that! You can usually combine a lot of these scripts and styles which results in not only a single HTTP request, but can also be cached by the browser.

There’s also a few server side tips which are good to have in your bag of tricks. Most servers do not have expires header set by default and, because you cannot see it, most people don’t even know to look for it. In short, it makes sure the browser knows it can cache your content so subsequent requests are loaded from the browser cache. The same goes for using Gzip. This is the most effective way of automatically getting your file size down and saves on bandwidth. Certain Javascript libraries have been known to shrink from 100+k to 17k when it’s enabled!

There’s also a few things in Yahoo’s list that, while I know they apply to larger presences, do not apply to the average website. If you aren’t running a major website with a worldwide audience you probably aren’t going to want to worry about a Content Delivery Network. This is also the same for ETags; if your site isn’t spread out around multiple servers you aren’t going to have to worry about clashing ETags either. It’s always good to have an understanding of theirs concept and have that knowledge stored away for when you need it.

Know for the best part about — if you didn’t jump straight to downloading the plugin that is. After you’ve gone through these concepts I bet you really don’t want to check every website manually. Well, you don’t have to! That’s where the FireFox Firebug addition YSlow comes in (a mouthful isn’t it?). I’m assuming you’ve already been using the Firebug plugin; this addition adds another tab which will run all of these tests for you and give you a grade. To get started just load up a website, open the Firebug pane, and on the YSlow tab click Performance. There are a few other tabs to go over there, but this is enough to get you started. Now go and optimize your sites!

It happened a week or so ago, but I wanted to mention that the Safari 3 Public Beta came out for the Mac and Windows (download it). I’ve had it installed for awhile on my Mac and it has some interesting additions.

Of notable interest is Safari 3’s new treatment for form elements. You can now style them so that they no longer take on the native aqua look of the Mac OS and textarea’s now can be dynamically resized. The latter I actually find quite nice to combat those itty bitty text boxes that are used from time to time. As for the former, I’ve always liked that Safari displayed the OS controls as-is. I’m sad to see that go, but I know other people will be happy that their styles will work now.

Safari 3 also has a new Web Inspector which can be enabled through the debug menu (on a Mac, I’m not sure on Windows). It’s similar to Firefox’s invaluable Web Developer Toolbar / Firebug plugins and I’m sure developers will welcome this with open arms. While I love Safari for daily browsing I have never really used it for developing, because of it’s lack of debugging tools. I’ve heard that in the nightly webkit builds this feature boasts improved functionality, too, so I’m excited about that.

Now maybe I should go hang the pictures in my place before I get used to the plain white walls.

• Fixed a bug where the SEO URIs would drop a letter if it was an accent.
• Fixed a bug where pagination wouldn’t work while browsing a tag that had a space in it.
• The IPTC Headline is now read and used as a title when importing an image.

So what are you waiting for? Go download it now.

Jillian and I have been apartment hunting for the past few weeks and have finally settled on a place in Santa Clara. I haven’t seen it yet (aside from pictures), but she really likes it. This should be interesting! Looking for places in an area you’re not familiar with is tough, and this will be a good grounding point until we get to know our surroundings better.

So, just like that we’re off and expect to be leaving San Diego around June 1st. If you’re local you should have gotten an invite to our going away party next week. If you didn’t, stop reading this and go and check your email. If that’s still no help let me know and I’ll see what happened.

Wish us luck!

What I’d like to be able to do is export from JuxtaPhoto via File > Export directly to JuxtaPhoto with tags, titles, and albums intact. I know this can be done — I’ve seen it done and can provide samples if needed — but alas I ‘m not a Cocoa developer…

So this is my call for help to see if there’s anyone interested in donating a bit of their free time and talent. I can provide any changes need to JuxtaPhoto, a SVN repository to store the plugin code, and, of course, credit. I’m in no rush if you are busy at the moment; I am too with a big move ahead of me. I just wanted to throw the idea out there and see if anyone was interested.