The NY Times Design Manager Khoi Vinh has been answering a variety of questions over the past week from readers. Today’s question was most interesting:

Q: Regardless of platform or browser, NYTimes.com looks the same. This is not an easy feat to accomplish because of inconsistencies between browsers and how they handle HTML and CSS. How do you do it and with which tools?

— Neil Mansilla

A: It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

But really the browser-to-browser consistency that you see (and I have to admit, it’s far from perfect) is the result of a vigilant collaboration between many different groups — the visual designers and technologists in the design team that I lead, their counterparts in our technology staff, and the many, many detail-oriented people who come together to make the site a reality every hour of every day.

I’m not usually one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I’m a bit peeved with Google and their Analytics utilities.

For the past year or so, I have been using Google Analytics and have been extremely impressed with the reports it provides on all of my Web sites. However, there has always been one aspect of the Analytics utility that’s driven me crazy: the tracking code always causes javascript warnings.

I was hopeful, however, when I logged into my Analytics account today and noticed that Google is providing new tracking code for Analytics users. I copied the code and promptly pasted it into the template for one of my sites. Much to my chagrin, when I loaded the page in Firefox and checked my code debugger, I found that the new code produces just as many, if not more, errors as the old.

Why is it so difficult for these large organizations, including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and so many more, to produce usable, clean, efficient, error-free code? Why do we have to continue putting up with these types of issues from organizations that probably employ more full-time coders than anyone else in the world?

UPDATE - I’ve added some screen shots of my error console after the jump.

(more…)

The other day, our IT security guy contacted me to let me know that my computer had accessed a Web site that potentially installed some adware/spyware on my computer. He asked me to run some standard scans (virus, adware, spyware, etc.) to make sure that my computer was clean.

I went ahead and ran the scans and found that my computer appears to be clean. However, while doing research to figure out what had caused the problem in the first place, I came across a very interesting Web site.

YouGetSignal.com is a Web site that offers advanced IP related searches. You can search for the physical location of an IP address, complete with a Google map to display the results. You can use a visual traceroute tool, which is also accompanied by a Google map.

The most interesting utility I found, though, was an IP lookup that allows you to list all of the domain names associated with a particular IP address. I got some very interesting results when I searched for some of my own domains.

For instance, the IP address associated with one of my hobby sites hosted at Netfirms (dcevolution.net) came up with 164 other Web sites using the same IP address.

However, when I searched for Web sites using the same IP address as the hobby sites I have hosted at site5 (dchelp.net), the only results that came up were my other sites.

Searching for centernetworks.com brings up 760 domains using the same IP address, while htmlcenter.com brought up 48 domain names, which all appear to be offshoots of htmlcenter.com (although some of them are rather questionable, so I’m not sure if they are actually associated with htmlcenter or if it is just a weird coincidence that they came up with the same IP - or if the owners of those Web sites are using some sort of proxy to hijack htmlcenter’s IP).

Still, it’s kind of fun to search for that sort of information, and extremely interesting.

AdaptiveBlue, maker of a variety of semantic Web products is announcing the launch of AB Meta tonight. AB Meta is simple HTML code that makes pages “smarter” by tagging them properly so that tools, including those from AdaptiveBlue, can take advantage of them.

Some examples of products that can take advantage of the AB Meta code include: books, music, movies, recipes and restaurants. I spoke with AdaptiveBlue CEO Alex Iskold who told me that his team collaborated on AB Meta with a large Web company which he can’t name currently but they will become public in the near future.

I like this type of markup because it serves an actual purpose - the classify and correctly identify a page. This will help machines better serve us the right content because the creators of the content have explained to the machine what the page is specifically for.

Check out the full AB Meta spec here.

I saw an interesting article on Yahoo! the other day. It appears that someone at Carnegie Mellon came up with the idea to use a CAPTCHA script to mask e-mail addresses. Basically, they provide you with special link code to put in place of your normal mailto link. You can use the link anyway you want, but the script generates some HTML code automatically that looks similar to:

user<a href="http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01quxf658CWzRNQC34kj75Ug==&c=5Sc_I7orZzXLkOX6E7fontrPSKXj6NS2QC0a-5mV5Gk=" onclick="window.open('http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01quxf658CWzRNQC34kj75Ug==&c=5Sc_I7orZzXLkOX6E7fontrPSKXj6NS2QC0a-5mV5Gk=', '', 'toolbar=0,scrollbars=0,location=0,statusbar=0,menubar=0,resizable=0,width=500,height=300'); return false;" title="Reveal this e-mail address">...</a>@example.com

In the example above, the whole e-mail address would actually be username@example.com, but the rest of the username is obscured by the script. Of course, they also supply you with just the address to the CAPTCHA page, so that you can build your own link any way you want.

The link, in turn, leads to a page with a CAPTCHA script. Once you correctly answer the CAPTCHA question, you’re lead to another page with the complete e-mail address. The script is called Mailhide, and it appears to be a completely free utility. It’s such a simple idea that I can’t believe no one thought of this before.

(more…)

I installed a Wordpress blog on my development server the other day and began playing with it. The first real challenge I faced was how to pull my Wordpress installation into my Web site’s template.

My issue is, I’m using a content management system (CMS) to manage the bulk of my Web site’s content. However, I wanted to use Wordpress to manage my various blogs. I obviously wanted my blogs to look like the rest of my Web site, so I needed to come up with a plan to integrate my Wordpress installation into my CMS, somehow.

Basically, what it came down to was that I needed to find a way to store all of my Wordpress output into PHP variables. Once I had done that, I could plug those variables into my template. The main problem I ran across, however, was the fact that 99% of the functions Wordpress uses to build its output utilize echo commands rather than simply returning the output.

That was no good for me, obviously, as it started printing content onto my page before the template had been processed.

PHP came to my rescue, and with very little headache. PHP’s output buffer was the simple answer to my problem.

(more…)

Last week, Brightegg announced a private label CMS option. Last month I had the chance to speak with Brightegg CEO Jim Kieffer who provided some background on what Brightegg is. Below are my notes.

Brightegg provides templates and hosting to easily create a Web site. It appears to target small businesses where the owner isn’t ready to hire a Web developer and/or designer but is looking for a cookie-cutter approach and a few clicks and they are live online.

Jim noted that they are building a strong designer community by allowing designers to earn a revenue share on any of the “premier” themes purchased on Brightegg. The share is 50/50 and there are free designs to select from as well. If you select a premier theme, you can select exclusivity as well. The exclusive custom themes start at $699 with non-exclusive starting at $199.

(more…)

I’ve recently become aware of an issue with managing comments in Wordpress 2.5. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or if it’s simply a poorly implemented “feature”, but I’m going to call it a bug.

(more…)

While working on one of my Web sites the other day, I had the need to install some sort of file browsing script that would allow the user to choose a particular file, then insert a link using TinyMCE.

I realize that MCEFileManager is available, but it is commercial software, and I was really looking for something free.

I happened across a script called fileNice. It’s a pretty nice file browser and is extremely simple to use. There are quite a few things I probably would have done differently had I written the script, but it works pretty well, and it took me about five minutes to install and configure rather than five weeks (or months) writing my own full-featured file browser.

(more…)

On our sister site CenterNetworks, we use the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal. I’ve used nearly every CMS package, both free and the systems costing large sums of money and Drupal is my favorite.

On CN we get hammered with spam every day. So much spam that I had to turn off comments after three months because every post (some 2000+) gets hit.

One thing I’ve noticed is that within moments of posting some new content, spams begin to come in. Not minutes, hours or days, but moments. And after doing some research into our system and into the way Drupal handles content, I’ve realized why this happens.

(more…)