Wulf's Web-Den

Just a short post today to try out the code from TwitterCounter and see how many people follow my tweets.

After last week's expensive brandy (spilt over my Mac keyboard) and subsequent slow recovery (mentioned the following day, I am pleased to announce that things are back to normal and the Mac keyboard is working again.

This is good from an economic point of view (no extra costs), an ergonomic point of view (the Mac keyboard is smaller, making it more flexible on the desktop) and also an environmental point of view. Not only does it mean that I don't have a broken keyboard for the bin but also it lets me start using the USB hub feature of the Mac keyboard again.

One of the shortfalls of the Mac Mini is that, although it relies on USB as its major connectivity, it only has four USB ports on the back. Take up two of those for computer and mouse, plug a graphics tablet into the third and keeping the fourth free for the printer or memory sticks means they are all committed. I was going to use an old USB hub to give me more flexibility but one of its weaknesses was that it was yet another device that requires plugging in. Therefore, getting the Mac keyboard, with built in 2-port USB hub, saves a little bit of energy as well.

That brandy wasn't expensive at all. It came with a free lesson; the next glass will be drunk well away from the computer desk!

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I am still using the spare keyboard this morning; the Mac one seems to be recovering but was still tending to produce random results (and to start typing nonsense, even without my help!) when I tested it last night.

Meanwhile, I have been musing on the idea of how I can keep up my daily blogging even when pressed for time, like I am this morning. I am still regularly using Twitter, which I can update easily, even from my mobile phone. I wonder if there is some way I can insert my tweets into my regular blog?

Even better, what if I came up with a protocol so that I could choose which posts were to be included as part of this microblogging and which were the ephemera of conversation, good for the moment but just confusing if they were left on my blog without context? There are already some codes in use. For example, if your tweet starts "@basswulf", I get it flagged up as a reply. Starting a message "d basswulf" sends it as a direct message (not publicly visible but even more sure of attracting my attention). I also use the #hashtags idea from time to time.

If I picked an unused character (perhaps ">"), that could be used to filter out the posts I also wanted captured in my blog. Neat idea: now I need to figure out how to do it. It would certainly help me on mornings like this when I'm too busy to write another three or four paragraphs for my blog (whoops!).

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I had a late supper last night - pasta, pesto and some home-made bread - and was washing it down with a small glass of brandy when I made a hand to mouth error and spilled what was left. Unfortunately I was working on the computer at the time and so some of it fell on the keyboard.

The keyboard still seemed to work so, after mopping up the surface, I tried to wrap up what I was doing. However, I noticed that the keys were no longer responding so I shut it down and went to bed.

This morning the keyboard still wasn't working (although the mouse, attached via the keyboard, was still operational) and there was liquid visible at the bottom of the keyboard (one of the cool Mac keyboards with a transparent shell), so I switched off the machine again and set to work.

I've had it open several times, each time penetrating deeper. I've not only mopped up all traces of liquid and, for good measure, brushed out all the other crud that has accumulated over the past year. I've even had all the keys off the top. Unfortunately, however, it still hasn't come back to life. I'll try again at lunchtime but, meanwhile, am typing this on a keyboard borrowed from another computer in the house.

It looks like it was an expensive glass of brandy; I am only glad that I wasn't using my laptop. Even if the Mac keyboard revives, I am operating a strict "no drinks on the worksurface" rule from now on!

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About a year or so ago, I replaced my 17" monitor, which was starting to go a bit fuzzy with a 19" one picked up from Freecycle. Both were CRT monitors - huge and not the most energy efficient solution but capable of yielding excellent colour and not dependent on what angle you viewed them from for the picture you saw.

Unfortunately the 19" monitor started to go this week, with short spell when the brightness of the screen dropped right down. Doing a lot of graphics work, that is a showstopper for me and so last night I popped down to the local PC World to pick up a replacement.

Consequently, I am the owner of an ASUS VW202S 20" widescreen LCD monitor. It works okay although doesn't seem as crisp as my previous one (not that there were any CRT options to choose from). At least it gives me more desk space.

The packaging was fairly environmentally friendly - it was an ex-display model, sold as seen, so I just got a bit of bubble wrap to protect it rather than a box and polystyrene. I still have to dispose of the old one, which will need to go to the local dump rather than being dropped in my bin. I wonder if anyone on Freecycle will find a use for a 19" CRT monitor that doesn't work perfectly?

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As I read Chris' latest blog post, Confessions of a compulsive view-sourcer, I could definitely recognise myself. Does it matter what is "under the hood" on a web page? Definitely if you end up having to maintain it and most probably if you are not using exactly the same browser as the site developer used to test it.

Messy code is often an indication that the page was generated with a WYSIWYG tool like Dreamweaver or Frontpage. The problem with this paradigm is that, unlike print based design where the output from the printer is what other people see, it is important to remember that, with web design, what I see is not necessarily what you get.

I try to test my pages on a number of browsers but I can't cover everything - for example, there are an increasing range of mobile browsing devices and I also keep in mind the variety of visual impairments that affect what people can see even using the same set up as me. Therefore, the love of clean HTML which Chris and I share is not just us being geeky but also about putting our technical skills to work so that the web can function as a network of information for everyone.

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When I first started using Googlemail I assiduously checked the spam folder once or twice per day and deleted all the junk, keeping things neat and tidy and burning up some more time.

After a month or two I realised two things. First, I hardly ever saw a false positive (a message that shouldn't have been in there). Second, although the storage space wasn't infinite, it was increasing all the time and I had plenty of headroom. Therefore, I stopped deleting spam messages and left them to be automatically deleted after a month. If I got word that a message had gone missing, that would give me a month's grace to look.

The number of spam messages climbed to over 1,000 and then stayed constant for some time. However, I have just noticed that it has decreased now to about 650 messages. Does that mean that, somewhere out there on the Internet, the war against spam is slowly being won?

It is a nice thought although I will hold my judgement for just a little while longer!

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