Peterbe.com

My crossword solving website Crosstips now has a cute little chart in the lower right hand corner. It's a sparkline. The line indicates how many searches have been done in the current month. The screenshot was taken on the 28th of April so it's the searches done in April and it's near the right hand side which is the maximum.

These charts are made with Google Chart which is something I've never had the great opportunity to try before.

Making the chart was quite a pleasure actually. I had it up and running within minutes just my looking at some examples. The lib I used to make it happen was pygooglechart which was, despite its lack of documentation, really easy to use.

How useful this sparkline is to the people who try to get unstuck on their crosswords I really don't know but it sure looks cool.

I don't have any stats to back this up but if I look around the office almost a lot of people use Gmail or Hotmail or something web based. My family uses Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail (and me on Gmail) for example. So it bugs me when websites use the mailto: thing. Especially if they rely on the Subject line.

Here for example, on the EDF Energy Contact us page, they have a long list of "Email us" links. They're almost all going to mailto:customer_correspondence@edfenergy.com but all with a different subject line:

mailto:customer_correspondence@edfenergy.com?subject=Dual Fuel enquiry
mailto:customer_correspondence@edfenergy.com?subject=Dual Fuel sales enquiry
mailto:customer_correspondence@edfenergy.com?subject=Energy efficiency enquiry
mailto:customer_correspondence@edfenergy.com?subject=Priority Services enquiry
mailto:customer_correspondence@edfenergy.com?subject=Electricity prepayment enquiry
mailto:customer_correspondence@edfenergy.com?subject=Gas prepayment enquiry
mailto:customer_correspondence@edfenergy.com?subject=Home movers enquiry
mailto:customer_correspondence@edfenergy.com?subject=Green Tariff enquiry
mailto:customer_correspondence@edfenergy.com?subject=Meter Reading enquiry
mailto:customer_correspondence@edfenergy.com?subject=Bill payment enquiry
mailto:myaccount@edfenergy.com?subject=MyAccount query
...

Does that mean that I have to somehow copy the Subject line from each so that my email gets routed to the right department? I just don't know. Why can't they have different email address for each thing or a web form where I can email them there and then?

Using mailto: should be done very sparingly. Considering that most people (like my mom) don't know to right-click and select "Copy email address" I prefer this way to show an email address:

<a href="mailto:more@userfriendly.com">more@userfriendly.com</a>

I've got a public ical at: http://m.fwckungfu.com/calendar.ics

This works in Google Calendar and in the iCalendar Validator but when I try to import this as a file in Apple iCal I get this message:

"Error subscribing to the calendar

Data downloaded from http://m.fwckungfu.com/calendar is not valid."

WTF? Who's ass have I not kissed to get this working in Apple iCal? Does anybody know any reason why Apple iCal is being so trixy?

I've now made a simple interface alternative (not AJAX) to Crosstips. This one doesn't do any fancy AJAX to look up works and you just type in the unknown letters as a space (or a _ or a . or a *) so you don't have to know how many letters it is.

Here's an example

It feels refreshing somehow to go back from AJAX back to plain old GET requests. The best thing about this is that it will work on a mobile phone too. The way I've wired the page is so that if you visit the site with a mobile device (not an iPhone though) it will load the extremely cut down version of the layout which is more suitable for mobile phones. This means that people will be able to get unstuck doing crosswords in bed.

I'm pretty damn sure I won't pay to see this movie in the cinema. I'm pretty sure I won't want to download it illegally and watch it either. But I have to admit this is a pretty awesome way to show the trailer.

Just watch it and you'll see what I mean.

My play site Crosstips.org is available in British English and American English. Obviously the difference is small but it's important.

What I've done is that if you're located in, say, France and visit the site it offers you the following language choices:

• Svenska [goes to krysstips.se]
• English (GB) [goes to en-gb.crosstips.org]
• English (US) [goes to en-us.crosstips.org]

But if you're located in, say, England it only offers you the following language choices:

• Svenska [goes to krysstips.se]
• English [goes to en-gb.crosstips.org]

And likewise, if you visit the site from US computer you just get two options and it uses the en-us.crosstips.org domain. As an American or a Brit why would you be interested in the other English? I think this is a really good usability trick. It reduces the noise by removing options.

There's a new restaurant on my street called The Albion. I went there for lunch today and had the steak and kidney pie with bread. It's a proper restaurant so including tip it came to £11 with tap water. Not cheap but the service was good and the food was really great. They've got a great delicatessen section with the usual tins of overly prices Italian olives and organic vegetables and yummy desserts.

Now, this blog is not a restaurant review blog but rather a (web) technical one. What strikes me is that these guys don't have a website! How can you not have that these days? Or perhaps they do but I just can't find it anywhere on Google. There's a Albion London advertising agency a stone throw from the restaurant and there's a The Albion in Islington but no Albion restaurant in Shoreditch London on Google.

If you're going to spend thousands of pounds on a nice chairs and lamps, like this restaurant clearly has done, then why not spend a couple of pennies on SEO and getting a decent website. Granted, it's a new restaurant but it only takes Google a couple of weeks to review its indexes. Come on my-new-favorite-restaurant-around-the-corner!

I actually don't mind a bit of adverts on websites but sometimes it just gets too much. On this page I couldn't even read the text since as I scroll down the huge ad over the text scrolls with the page.

Feels greedy like they've just thrown more and more ads in without thinking about the original design.

When V8 was announced to the world jointly with the launch of Google Chrome there was a lot of buzz about how fast it was.

Then, the guru of Javascript, John Resig couldn't hold back his announcement about Tracemonkey and how it was faster than V8

Now there's a third one that apparently beats them all: SquirrelFish Extreme

"As you can see, SquirrelFish Extreme is 36% faster than V8, and 55% faster than TraceMonkey."

Personally I take all of these things with a shovel of salt since what matters isn't how fast it can compute raw Javascript code but how well it all works together with the browser and the browser's graphic routines and stuff and most importantly how the DOM tree is updated by the Javascript instructions.

Closing note; the most important thing is that there's something happening and this will mean that Javascript becomes more and more reliable for web developers and not just reliable but also faster so apps like Google spreadsheet might one day become usable. To quote John Resig on his closing notes:

"I fully expect to see more, massive, projects being written in JavaScript. Projects that expect the performance gains that we're starting to see. Applications that are number-heavy (like image manipulation) or object-heavy (like relational object structures)."

Does anybody know roughly how many of the spambots out there that support Javascript?

We've all heard of honeypots and things like that that try to catch out spambots because they render the forms they pre-fill differently. The ideal solution is extremely convenient for non-spambots (you and me) and extremely effective in keeping out the spambots (porn and viagra sellers). With a bit of Javascript you could for example do the captcha technique for the user on the assumption that spambots don't render Javascript. And for the few poor suckers who don't have Javascript but are human (e.g. lynx users, blind people, paranoids) they'll just have to complete the captcha. For example, suppose you have a captcha quiz that says : "Capital of United Kingdom: Rome, _ London, Paris" and then an AJAX request fetches the correct answer from the server, fills it in and hides the whole captcha.

The big question is: How many of the spambots out there support Javascript? I guess the best experiment would be to write a tempting form for spambots and in it you let Javascript enter some value on submission.

If it turns out that spambots do render Javascript, one could perhaps combine server side cookies with it such that the first time you complete the form you have to prove that you're human the hard way and on all consecutive entries a Javascript does it for you.

Why I like this idea is that you can write your server-side code as if Javascript didn't exist and then softly add the sugar that Javascript can be an be 100% unintrusive.

Obviously a technique like this wouldn't work on a mainstream site like *.blogspot.com or ebay.com but for the 90% of all sites out there that aren't mainstream it could work.