Found a site that I thought should exist, and as if by magic it does: AlternativeTo. Fed up with Basecamp? Thinking there must be SOMETHING better than iTunes? Big lists of alternative options. That’s all. Good to know it’s there.

Another Pobo site has gone live at innovate-fs.co.uk. It’s the first in-house design for a while, and I’m pretty pleased with it: it was tricky to try to convey the gravitas and trustworthiness required in the financial services sector while avoiding being dull. It took several iterations and some constructive feedback, but we ended up with a clean, simple look leavened with a careful selection of stock images and icons. Have a look and see if it’s on the right side of the line…
Wordpress is the content management system underneath the site, and WP continues to provide a wonderfully flexible and extensible basis for a wide range of projects. It offers a huge amount of power, and for free. It sounds too good to be true but it’s a rare exception to that rule. This site didn’t require too much in the way of fancy add-ons, but one plug-in that has proved itself worthy of inclusion in the pantheon (which I will create in due course) is Contact Form 7: all manner of options for creating form fields, validating them, requiring opt-in (to ensure a user has read terms and conditions, for example), spam prevention and nice feedback see it earn its place.

There’s a good piece in the current issue of .net magazine on the evil that is CAPTCHA – images of letters and numbers distorted to nearly, but not quite, the point of illegibility. Alastair Campbell, their ‘Access All Areas’ guru, makes a series of good points, viz. everybody hates them, even people with 20/20 vision have trouble with them, they’ve all been broken, they’re sent to sweatshops in the Far East for ‘translation’, and also not all spam is submitted by robots: human beings can be malicious too, just more slowly.
But something has been troubling me about these things for a while: aren’t they illegal? The Disability Discrimination Act requires that the same experience is offered to everyone regardless of physical impairment. Blocking a visually-impaired user seems to be pretty clearly in breach of this; and even if an alternative is provided, such as audio, now you’re excluding the deaf-blind, and so on and on.
It’s surely just a matter of time before a court case tests the as-yet woolly extent of the DDA’s provisions as they apply to websites. The RNIB keeps threatening to bring one, but the threat seems to have been enough in each case so far to get modifications made to the offending site. But when it happens, and it will, I wouldn’t bet against CAPTCHAs having to be ripped out of millions of sites across the UK and beyond. And not a moment too soon.

I’ve just completed a new site for the Edinburgh publisher Canongate to promote their Life of Pi Readalong. They’re trying to get 31,400 or so people reading Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winner in August, and the site exists to get people signed up.

It’s based on the Wordpress content management system with some cool plugins for things like the comment wall and video player on the front page. Wordpress has really come of age recently, and the range of plugins means that it is an extremely versatile and extensible system. Some of the most useful, though, just make marginal adjustments, like restoring images to excerpts of posts: normally Wordpress strips them out, but that made for a bit of a text-heavy page.

We used Mailchimp to manage the mailing list: signups are sent to Mailchimp and then data about the list is retrieved to show who has signed up and how many are going to be part of the Readalong. The Mailchimp API is pretty easy to use, although we had to modify a few things to speed it up.

We started by using the Mailchimp database directly, so every time we needed to get the list of readers, we’d ask Mailchimp for it. Sometimes this worked okay, but a lot of the time it was slooooow and sometimes it would just time out and fail. Not ideal. So, wary of duplicating data and getting out of sync, we looked into keeping a local copy of the Mailchimp list. Running a cron job every ten minutes or so and getting a fresh copy was the first option, but it’s a bit brutal and when the numbers get large, rather a strain on bandwidth. Thankfully, Mailchimp themselves came up with the solution: webhooks. These are functions that can be invoked by developers when a particular event happens, and the results are sent to a specified URL. In our case, subscriptions and unsubscriptions trigger POST requests to a page on the Life of Pi site that uses the data in functions to insert or delete records in the database. Not much fun to test, but now it’s up and running, it works beautifully and we’re all synced up.

Anyway, the counter is ticking along nicely, so let’s hope they pass their target. I have to say I wasn’t sure about the novel when I read it, but there’s some good background and critical analysis on the site that has persuaded me to give it another look…

I’ve just added a news section to Hand Up Media’s site, bringing in the latest in the fair trade world as supplied by the BBC and the Guardian. HUM previously had an HTML-only host, so the only way to include this news section was using javascript. Two problems – no javascript, no news, and also search engines, which rate fresh content highly, generally don’t run javascript.
Their host eventually upgraded and offered PHP, so I took the opportunity to grab the feeds on the server side, solving both those problems. PHP5 has much improved XML parsing over previous versions: the simplexml_load_file function reads in an xml file and makes it available as an object:


$bbc = "http://newsapi.bbc.co.uk/feeds/search/news+sport/fairtrade";
$bbcrss = simplexml_load_file($bbc);


Then, in the case of RSS, take the item element and loop through its contents:

$bbcitems = $bbcrss->channel->item;
foreach ($bbcitems as $item){
$item->source='the BBC';
if (time() - strtotime($item->pubDate) < 5259487){
$news[]=$item;
}
}

Also in there, I just check that the story is less than two months old before adding it to the $news array, and add a ’source’ element because that’s not included in the RSS in any proper form. Last thing to do (after adding news from other sources to the same array) is to sort it in date order using usort:

function _cmpAscA($m, $n) {
if (strtotime($m->pubDate) == strtotime($n->pubDate)) {
return 0;
}
return (strtotime($m->pubDate) > strtotime($n->pubDate)) ? -1 : 1;
}
usort($news,'_cmpAscA');

This function takes the array and a function as arguments: the function checks each element’s pubDate value (converting it to a UNIX timestamp) and changing its order in the original array accordingly. Then all that remains is to output it in a list and style it up…

I thought it might be interesting to put a moving portfolio image as my ‘featured project’ on the front page of the site. I needed to capture a 950px-wide website, and end up with a 600px-wide SWF. I tried a few different applications:-

RenderSoft’s CamStudio can capture direct to AVI or SWF (SWF was what I ultimately wanted) but neither gave the option to resize the video (I wanted to reduce the image from 950px wide to 600px). TechSmith’s Jing is a much more 2.0 type of affair, but while it seems really useful for quickly getting a point across over something like MSN, again it lacks resizing options. Nice app and well worth checking out; but not right for this.

Debugmode’s Wink is free and really easy to configure, at least for these purposes. It lets you choose the area of the screen you want to capture, then just press shift+pause and away you go. Then you can adjust the size of the resulting frames, delete frames and do whatever you need to do before rendering it as a reasonably lightweight SWF. It takes a few goes to get something reasonable, but if you’re not doing an actual screencast, with audio and timings, it’s a nice quick job.

Congratulations to James McKay, whose portfolio sites I recently completed: he’s moving to Norway and needed one site to arouse interest in potential employers and the other to show them his work when he popped over to Oslo a couple of weeks ago. And, at the first attempt, he landed a job, so all that meticulous work and the long hours paid off! Have a look at www.james-mckay.com