Category: Internet

Opera and WebKit

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:software-category ]Opera is moving to WebKit but the question is… is it a good thing?

I’ve used Opera for a long time, in fact I actually bought it way back before it was free software.  With the announcement that they will be discontinuing Presto (their HTML engine) and moving to WebKit a basic question comes up… is Opera still Opera without Presto?

Obviously Opera is more than Presto, the UI Opera has created is by far the best out of the box experience of any of the major browsers.  As long as they can maintain the UI when they swap out Presto then I think it will be successful.  However there are lots of pitfalls that may crop up.  Dragonfly, the developers tool built-in to Opera is an amazing tool that’s made my life quite a bit easier over the years.  Will Dragonfly work with the new renderer and JavaScript engine?  We’ll have to wait to see about that.

On a bigger picture kind of view, the loss of Presto is a pretty big thing.  There were really only 4 major rendering engine’s in general use, Trident (IE), WebKit (Chrome, Safari, etc.), Gecko (Firefox) and Presto.  With the loss of Presto that leaves only 3.  The good news is that it doesn’t look like we’ll lose another one for quite a while, Microsoft is firmly behind Trident and is actively moving it forward.  Mozilla simply won’t move from Gecko and they have the money (for now) and developers behind it.  While WebKit is the darling of the industry at the moment.

The next to go will most likely be Gecko, with Firefox loosing market share to Chrome and Mozilla’s reliance on money from Google, it seems unlikely they can hold out for the long-term.  Google will eventually get enough market share with Chrome they don’t need Firefox anymore and will start pulling back their funding.  That would leave just two and it would be Microsoft against EVERYONE else.  Of course, unlike Opera, Mozilla’s will be a slow slide down to oblivion so it won’t happen soon, but maybe within the next 5-10 years (check back then to see if I’m right or not ;).

Of course Microsoft could do a 180 and dump Trident, and they have done weirder things in the past (can anyone say Sidekick?), but that doesn’t seem very likely.

Overall I think it’s a big loss for the Internet but there’s not much we can do about it.  Maybe Opera will open source Presto once they switch over to WebKit, but that doesn’t seem likely, it would just encourage someone to build more competition to Opera.

 

HMV Digital Canada

Greg

[sc:entertainment-category ]I have to admit I came late to the MP3 party, not using them, but buying them.  iTunes was not a store I wanted to shop at and most of the other big ones were not available in Canada.  That changed a couple of years ago when HMV opened an MP3 store.

I’ve used hmvdigital.ca for a couple of years but when I went to the site recently I found they were no longer selling MP3’s, but instead had gone to a digital subscription service.  There was no indication of the old MP3 store and no sign it had every existed.

One of the things I do remember noticing when I first started using hmvdigital.ca was that while it was a front end, the back-end was actually powered by 7digital.  Thinking that perhaps 7digital held the accounts as well I went to 7digital.ca and voilà, I could login and get to my purchase history again.

Perhaps HMV might want to at least put a pointer for its loyal customers over the years to where they can get access to their old accounts in stead of just trying to get them all to sign up to a new monthly plan.

And honestly, I don’t want to pay a monthly fee to listen to music.  Nor do I want to stream it from the cloud.  There’s nothing wrong with “owning” (I use the term loosely) your music and having it on your local system.  It makes much more technical sense but I guess it doesn’t make the companies as much money…

Even More WordPress Plugins

Greg

[sc:wordpress-category ]This is the latest in an ongoing series of posts here at JumbleCat about the plugins I find useful for WordPress.

The first three were:

  1. Happy 1st Birthday JumbleCat! AKA WordPress Plugins!
  2. Total Backup for WordPress
  3. Some More WordPress Plugins

Since then I’ve added quite a few more to JumbleCat.

After The Deadline for Comments

This plugin allows your users to use After the Deadline when writing comments, a nice touch that hopefully improves the quality of the writing!

Automatic Updates/WP Updates Notifier

I’m combining these two as I’ll probably disable WP Updates Notifier soon but I think it’s worth a mention if you don’t want to use Automatic Updates.

First off Automatic Updates does pretty much what it says, when an update to either the WP Core, plugin or theme is available, it automatically installs it.  You can select which of the three you want to do and it sends you a nice little e-mail when it runs so you know something has changed on your site.

Of course for many premium sites that have lots of visitors this may not be the best thing to do as updates can sometimes break things.  In this case I highly recommend WP Updates Notifier as it will send you an e-mail when an update is available, letting you test it before you go ahead and update your production site 🙂

Highlight Search Terms

Another plugin that is aptly named.  If a user searches your site, this plugin highlights the search terms that were found on the page.

PHP Server Info

Anyone who’s run a web server with PHP or done any kind of PHP development knows that php_info() is pretty much a required part debugging.  This plugin adds a menu item to the WordPress admin interface that show’s you the output and nice and clean fashion.

Rich Text Editor For Comments

Much like After the Deadline for Comments, this plugin enhances your users commenting life with the same kind of rich editor found when creating posts etc.   This plugin seems to have disappeared from WordPress.org and the author’s site doesn’t seem to be available right now either.

Always Remember Me

This is a new plugin by Ozh who created the awesome “Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu“.  It auto checks the “Remember Me” during login and extends the remembered timeframe from 2 weeks to 1 year.

Delete Me

This plugin allows a user to delete themselves.  Simple and to the point.

Inactive User Deleter

Finally this plugin allows you to search for users based on various criteria and then delete them in bulk.  Useful if you have a lot of spam users that register.

 

WordPress 3.5 Upgrade

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:wordpress-category ]So WordPress 3.5 was finally released after a few delays and while it doesn’t bring anything new that I need, it does have all the various fixes in it so upgrading is always a high priority on my list.

First things first, WordPress has an amazing update process that’s been rock solid in the past but I’m still paranoid (as everyone should be 😉 and execute a full backup of my site using Total Backup.  I’ve used Total Backup for a while and it’s good, however the lack of scheduling is starting to make me think of looking for another solution (or more likely just adding the functionality myself).

Once the backup was done, the standard update process executed without issue and 3.5 installed.  Everything looked good.

The next day I was editing a post and when to change the scheduled publish time and instead of the time/date selector appearing, nothing happened when I clicked on the “Edit” link.

I have a local installation of WordPress I use to test out new plugins and themes and it wasn’t an issue on that install.

I disabled pretty much all my plugins and that didn’t help.

I pulled down the backup and did a binary file comparison (using Beyond Compare, an awesome app!) between my test site, the production site and the WordPress 3.5 core files, nothing of note.

After some more poking around I finally had a flash of inspiration and realized my test site doesn’t use the same theme as I use on JumbleCat (Arjuna X) so I enabled it.  Eureka!  The test site was broken in the same way.

I went to the theme authors site but the support area they used to have is gone.  Doing a quick search brought me here, which explains that theme uses an old version of the jQuery UI library that conflicts with WordPress 3.5.

The thread suggests replacing the 1.8.10 version of the file with the 1.9.2 version but keeping the original file name.  I don’t like that solution as it could cause other issues with other plugins so instead I did the following:

  • Download version 1.9.2 of jQuery-UI from http://jqueryui.com/
  • Place the new jQuery-UI file in arjuna-x/lib
  • Edited arjuna-x/functions.php, update the reference for jquery-ui-1.8.10 to 1.9.2 version

This makes it all nice and clean and most importantly, functional.

 

The “Best” Online Provider

Greg

[sc:internet-category ]A friend the other day asked me what I considered the “best” online provider.  We’re not talking about an ISP, but instead a web-based company that provides the services you use everyday.  This question is really several questions all rolled up in to one, so let’s break it down shall we?

First, what are the qualifiers for best?

  • Has multiple service offerings (since service sites like Twitter and Facebook don’t count)
  • Owns the components it is offering (sorry Yahoo)
  • Quality of services
  • Privacy policies
  • Transparency
  • Uptime
  • Company Foundations

Let’s tackle them one at a time…

Multiple Service Offerings

Any online provider these days gives you basic e-mail, but what about the other things you want.  Search, storage space, maps, maybe some office style applications?

The two big names here are Microsoft and Google.  I’m not that familiar with Apple’s offerings, but they too have some of these covered.  Services like Yahoo fit in here two as their sheer breadth of services boggle the mind.

Microsoft has come on strong in the last little while in this space and Google has made some “interesting” choices (like their recent move to drop IE8 support).  I’d have to call it a tie between the two these days, they both offer a lot of services for free (half a point each).

Owns the components it is offering

This category kind of is here to trim the field from the above.  At the end of the day Microsoft and Google invest huge amounts in to their services and build them from the ground up.  Many of the competing providers just can’t do that.  I’ll give Apple an honorable mention here as they do invest in their own services, sometimes to the detriment of their users 😉

I’m going to just give this one to Google (one point for Google), Microsoft does partner with some others like Nokia to deliver some of their services, but it is very close either way.

At this point I’m only going to focus on the two companies that really made it through the first two rounds, Microsoft and Google.

Quality of Services

Both MS and Google take service quality seriously and even a little as a month ago I would have handed this to Google just because they keep moving their products forward much faster than Microsoft.  However with the introduction of Outlook.com and a series of updates to most of their online properties, I’m going to call this one a tie instead (half a point each).

Privacy Polices

And here’s where it gets interesting, Microsoft and Google have very different opinions about your privacy.  Google looks at users as a source of revenue and uses any and all information it has about you to sell ads.  It’s Google’s Achilles heel, they only have one source of revenue and it is their task master.  The recent combination of all their privacy polices across all their services shows how focused they are on this aspect of their business.

While Microsoft isn’t a saint, in comparison they look pretty good.  So I’m giving this one to Microsoft (one point for MS).  In the end it’s the lesser evil.

Transparency

See above, Google is crippled in this area in the same way.  To protect its revenue stream it is very secretive just about everything.

Microsoft has always played it tight to the vest, but they have nothing on Google in this area.

This one goes to MS as well (one point for MS).

Uptime

Doing a quick search I didn’t find anyone tracking uptime of the major providers, but I think it’s safe to say that both have pretty good uptime numbers.  On a personal note I seem to hear about more Google outages than Microsoft, but that isn’t definitive.

I’m going with a tie on this one (half a point each).

Company Foundations

This is kind of a catch all, both companies are massive enterprises that make boat loads of money each year, but there is a difference between the two.  Microsoft has a diverse portfolio of products and services that make them money.  Windows, Office, Exchange, SQL, Xbox, etc are all big money makers and if any one of them failed Microsoft would continue to exist.

Google on the other hand is a one trick pony, virtually all of their profits come from their advertising business.  If that were to ever falter, the rest would not be able to continue.

This one goes to Microsoft (one point for MS).

Summary

And the tally is… Microsoft:4.5   Google:2.5

There you go, for me at least Microsoft is the best online provider.  But of course that’s only my opinion 😉