Ack… it’s almost December!
It feels like MAX was two weeks ago, not a month. December is coming quick and there is far too much to do… two big time wasters for me at the moment are Twitter and the Blackberry Pearl. Used in combination with Google Talk and productivity comes to a crawl. A post will come later on the Pearl. The first impression of its web browser makes this web person shake his head—why can’t a good browsing experience come to really good handhelds?
Other things on the whiteboard include:
- a UW home page update that will offer a lot more links and content for people (due Jan 2nd 2007)
- a total take down of the 50th site and some polish for the launch
- personal profiles and calendars in UW events along with some bug fixes (out in two weeks)
- BarCampWaterloo
- WatITis presentation: UW on Rails
- Something else… something cool
Lets see how much of this I get done in a month… I should just leave Thunderbird off for the month.
Why sites break in IE 7…
The whole IE 7 thing has been pretty entertaining thus far. You have IT folks everywhere hyper-ventilating over a browser update that will eventually help out web standards and you have web developers (myself included) being caught in tough spots because they failed to really test IE 7 while it was in beta. My mistake was ignoring the influence of a conditional comment on printing (placing a ‘gte’ in it seems to do the trick) but other than that UW pages should be fine if you don’t have anything above your DOCTYPE and you didn’t create more conditional comments with IE specific CSS.
Roger Johansson has summed up nicely the three top reasons sites break in IE 7. I think that covers 99% of the problems. The lessons learned with IE 7 is that having a CSS/HTML site is great but if you cut corners and worked towards IE 6 in quirks mode you are likely going to pay a hefty price when an IE 7 user views your site. If you having problems with IE 7 on your site, take a look at Roger’s post. The discussion that follows on his site should be helpful as well.
Update: Wake up and smell the IE7! – Vitamin feature
BarCampWaterloo take two: Dec 5th, 2006
Thanks to the efforts of Simon Woodside we have a location and date for the next BarCampWaterloo – Tuesday December 5th at 5:30pm in the Accelerator Centre. This BarCamp will follow more of a DemoCamp format so come prepared to demo your software/web/tech project and leave the slides at home. It is open to everyone (you don’t have to be a Waterloo student), just be sure to sign up on the wiki. This is the evening before the campus IT conference, WatITis, but it isn’t connected. I think attendees of WatITis might enjoy BarCampWaterloo
Either Sasha or I will demo the new features that will be built into UW Events and I hope to get a lot of really good feedback from everyone there.
UW home page stats snapshot: Browsers and platforms from Nov 05 and Nov 06
Given the IE 7 mention in the Daily Bulletin today and a message I got from John Jaray in the Computer Store that Apple sales are up 69% this year over last, I thought maybe some numbers on what we have seen on the home page might be timely to give web folks. I am currently using Google Analytics on the UW home page to get these numbers and can compare with numbers from a two week long period last year in November of 640 000 users in 2005 to 682 000 for 2006 so far this month this year.
Sorry for the lack of pretty graphs. What to note in this is that:
- Firefox has increased 5% in the last year to 21% nearly (without a campus roll out),
- IE 7 is close to 6% of our IE user base
- Mac/Apple machines have increased from 2% to 4% of the user base over last year
- 800×600 use is under 4% (yet we still design for it)
With the number of users on the home page, 1% is a lot of people.
Once we get a full month of Analytics data (it was off for a year), I will post it in web.uwaterloo.ca for people to have a look. For now, here is what I have to compare…
Browsers Last year (Nov 05):
- IE – 80.1% (of that, 99.13% IE 6, 0.33% IE 5.5)
- Firefox – 15.89% (of that, 1.0.x approx 99%)
- Safari – 1.51%
- Netscape – 1.34%
- Others – under 1% (Mozilla, Opera, etc)
Platforms last year (Nov 05):
- Windows – 96.72%
- Mac/Apple – 2.32%
- Linux – 0.62%
- SunOS – 0.33%
Resolution (Nov 05):
- 800×600 or below – 6.36%
- 1024×768 – 59.27%
- 1280×1024 – 12.65%
- Others are above 1280×1024
For this year the test size for November is similar so far, 682K:
Browsers this year (Nov 06):
- IE – 75.90% (of that, 93.83% IE 6, 5.90% IE 7, 0.09% IE 5.5)
- Firefox – 20.73% (of that, 1.5.x 74%, 2.0 is 13%, and 1.0.x is approx. 13%)
- Safari – 1.93%
- Netscape – 0.71%
- Others – less than 1% (Mozilla, Opera, etc)
Platforms for this year (Nov 06):
- Windows – 94.92%
- Mac/Apple – 4.28%
- Linux – 0.61%
- SunOS – 0.16%
Resolution (Nov 06):
- 800×600 or below – 3.57%
- 1024×768 – 47.78%
- 1280×800/1024 – 32%
- Others are above 1280×1024
That is a lot stats
Expanding UW Events – planning
Sasha (the Co-op) is slugging it out with the UW Events Ruby code, trying to create some new features for the folks on campus. What are those features? Well some are things Mitch and I considered while Version 1.0 was in the works, other things I think might be useful in the future, but generally they are features I hope the UW community will find useful (as well as others once the project goes to RubyForge).
Essentially we are going to allow public personal calendars that will be in both hCal and iCal (and import iCal) and have notifications/alerts by email and SMS. This means we have to extend our personal profile page and functionality without changing the core code of the system—something that seems relatively easy with Ruby on Rails. We will have to build a better profile for people as well so it can include custom data, not just what we get from UWdir. Not sure if that belongs in Kiwi or in the UW events app. Kiwi has a single job to do and it does it well, not sure I want it to be a profile system.
We are thinking about integrating the upcoming.org API and the Facebook API but we shall see how that goes. If you have any requests, make them now
