brain tags Je Maintiendrai

WAP

Braintags is also available in WML format, so you can read your favourite ;-) site using your WAP enabled telephone. Just point your telephone to http://wap.braintags.com/.

As this is the first time I tried to create something in WML, it surely is full with mistakes. Just let me know, so I can change it and learn something more.

Semantically incorrect

If you are creating (X)HTML code, you always have to make sure that you use the right tags elements to specify the meaning of certain parts of the text. After that you can use stylesheets to determine how these parts will look. This is what they call the semantics of the text.

A lot of web designers abuse tags to accomplish a certain look. If they want a bigger text, they use the <h2> tag element, while the text is not a header at all, if they want to indent a text, they use <blockquote>, even though they are not quoting. I won’t go into detail why this is a bad thing, there are plenty of resources explaining this better than I could. But a lot of designers like me who try to do it correctly still make some mistakes. Today I realised that my pages have two semantically errors:

For my navigation lists, I use — as many other sites — unordered lists (<ul><li>XXX</li></ul>). But my navigation links do have an order! My archive links are ordered chronological, so the correct thing would be to use the ordered list (<ol><li>XXX</li></ol>) instead. By default, an ordered list is shown with numbers in front of each item, but it is very easy to remove them, just as I removed the bullets from my unordered navigation lists. I have seen many sites doing this wrong, and most examples of you will find on internet also use unordered lists.

Another thing I thought about today is that when I display trackbacks (comments on another site about my text) I am quoting another site. Therefore, I should be using the <blockquote> tag element (or <q>). I have looked around at other sites, but nowhere have I found trackbacks marked up as quotes.

You might think that these are minor issues, but since I am rewriting my templates anyway, I better do it right, not?

Bad lay-out

I use this site a lot for testing out things. You could say that this site is Forever under construction. Today I have been testing again, and as a result, it looks more horrible in Internet Explorer. And since I am going on holidays, I am not going to fix it until next week. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I have been working on the menu. The whole page header is situated inside a <div>, with an inline ordered list with bottom border as menu. Until today, I did nothing to position the menu, which resulted that the menu walked outside the header if you changed the font size. Not too beautiful…

So today I relatively positioned the header, and specified an absolute position of the menu, so it is always at the border of the containing positioned element, the header. It solves the problem perfectly, but not in IE. I tested the new stylesheet in IE6, and the menu appeared at the bottom of the screen instead of the bottom of the header. I don’t know yet why IE is behaving like this, but promise to look further into it next week.

Access Statistics

I just love numbers, and check the access statistics of my sites almost on a daily basis. Sometimes when I visit a site, I also check the statistics of that site. What kind of people are reading that site? Where do they come from? What were they looking for? All very interesting information…

My own visitors could not have a look behind the screens of this site, since my access statistics are located on the management control panel, safely protected by a password. The application to generate these statistics is called AWStats, which I was using already before I moved to my current hosting provider. Since I knew the structure of the application, I figured that it should be possible to install AWStats myself, and have my copy point to the data files that are generated automatically by my provider’s copy of AWStats. And that is exactly what I’ve done. I only needed to copy the main awstats.pl file, the lib directory and the icons directories, and could use the existing configuration file (after changing the DirCgi parameter) to have everything working.

So now everybody can check my access statistics!!!

Maybe someday I will create an About this site page, on which I will put a permanent link to my statistics. Some people put this link on their home page, but in my opinion this feature is of no use to the general visitor, and only adds bloat to the home page.

I need some time!

So many things to do, and only 24 hours in a day. I guess everybody sometimes has the feeling that too many things lie around unfinished. For me, these are some small, usually technical, things as fixing the stylesheet of this site so the menu appears on the right place in IE, converting this site to PHP (so I can degrade pages to XHTML1.0 for IE), fix the light in the stairway, reading hundreds of pages I have bookmarked lately, look for a new computer for my in-laws, build a wireless network at home, put the latest Link on the Fimcap site, paint our front door, learn how to use ZOPE for future use for Fimcap, install freeBSD on my laptop…

Looking at this list, I wonder where all my time is going. Lets see: 9 hours sleeping, 9 hours working, 1.5 hours household (cooking, cleaning, ironing), 2.5 quality time (hours drinking beers on a terrace, watching TV on the sofa, reading the newspaper), 1 hour taking care about myself (eating & shower)… that leaves me 1 hour each day to be productive! I definitely need more hours in a day.

Google AdSense and XHTML1.1

Visitors using older browsers like IE might have noticed that I recently started serving advertisements through Google. People using more modern browsers as Mozilla or Firebird might not have noticed this, since these advertisements are not visible for them. This is not because I want to tease IE users —everybody is free to use any software to visit my site—, or give compliments to Moz users —their clicks are also worth some money—, but only because Google’s scripts are not working when send as application/xhtml+xml. I found the following errors in my Javascript console:

Error: w.google_ad_client has no properties  
Source File: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js  
Line: 37

Error: google_ad_width is not defined  
Source File: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js  
Line: 128</code></p></blockquote>

Of course I reported these errors to Google, but all I received was the following reply:

Hello Jeroen,

The errors that you were experiencing last night were due to an AdSense system upgrade yesterday evening. This upgrade unfortunately created some technical difficulties and were temporarily unable to serve ads to sites in certain browsers. Not all browsers were effected.

However, our engineers have identified the problem, and I am happy to inform you that the issue is now resolved. Ads are now running on AdSense websites and you should not be seeing these errors anymore.

We value you as an AdSense publisher, and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused you. If you are continuing to have problems with this or have any other questions or concerns, please let us know by replying to this email. One of our AdSense specialists would be happy to assist you. Thank you for your patience in this matter.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Of course I answered them that the problem still exists, but until now I haven’t received an answer.

[Update 2003.09.26] Answer from Google:

Hello Jeroen,

Thank you for writing us about this issue you are experiencing with your AdSense code. Unfortunately we are unable to replicate this problem. We taking your page, http://braintags.com/archives/2003/08/applicationxhtmlxml/, and running it through the W3C’s XML validator tool ( http://validator.w3.org/), we find that the entire page including our JavaScript code is currently XML complaint. (See Results: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fjeroensangers.com%2Farchives%2F2003%2F08%2Fapplicationxhtmlxml%2F). Unfortunately we are unable to replicate this problem you are experiencing.

From previous emails it appears you state you are having this problem in Mozilla 1.4. Here is a list of browsers that supports our code https://www.google.com/adsense/faq-tech#q10. Are there other browsers on this list that you are having difficulty with? Also can you include a screenshot of the error since we are unable to replicate this problem on our end. Please include any additional information you may find may be useful in helping to resolve this issue.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

It looks like they don’t understand anything about specifying the MIME type when sending a page, so I send the following reply.

Hello,

I know that my page is XML compliant, that surely is not the problem.
You have not been able to replicate the problem, because you have not used a gecko-based browser. Normally I send my pages with MIME type text/html. This is what IE and the W3C validator get. Only to browsers which tell me in their request headers that they accept the MIME type application/xhtml+xml (like Mozilla and Firebird), I use this MIME type to send my files.
Note that even though the validator did not complain, I did not send it a valid page, since the specification tells that XHTML1.1 should be delivered as application/xhtml+xml.
To reproduce the error, just visit my page with Mozilla or Firebird, and you will see that the AdSense box will not appear. The only screenshot I can send you is the JavaScript console, but it only contains the two messages I have send before.

Kind regards,

Jeroen Sangers

[Update 2003.10.01] And finally Google realizes that their script is not working:

Hello Jeroen,

We appreciate your taking the time to offer us this feedback and encourage you to continue to let us know how we can improve Google AdSense. As AdSense is still a young program, new features are under consideration and your feedback is very helpful. This information has been passed on to our engineers and they will look into allowing our ads to be served in xhtml+xml pages.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

It took them almost a month —I reported this problem on September 4^th— to realize that something is wrong. Let’s see how long it will take them to fix this problem.

Back on ICQ

There are many ways to keep contact with the rest of the world. By far the best way is to meet them in a bar, drinking a beer together. Unfortunately, this is not always a viable solution, so I also make use of electronics to keep contact. Number two on my list is the good ol’ phone, which has the benefit of meta-communication (emotions, emphasis,..) over the other electronic methods. Then I use of course the internet to communicate, I am using e-mail (more personal), Usenet newsgroups (good for technical problems) and this site. However, it might take a while before I receive feedback to the things I express using these media. Then we have the two I’s: IRC and IM. The first I use when I have a technical problem that needs to be fixed urgently, the second for all personal communication for which using the telephone would be overkill.

Considering IM, at work I use Microsoft Messenger a lot. We have a lot of contacts abroad, and small companies are not able to hang on the phone to talk with the other side of the world for half the day. Since we are basically a Microsoft shop, and most people have Messenger already installed on their machines, we are using this. Personally, I am not a big fan of Messenger, mainly because you have no option of connecting without giving away your e-mail address. For business use this is no problem, but for my personal use, I prefer a solution that does not give away more than strictly necessary. Until I moved to Spain I have been using ICQ at home, and today I started using it again to be able to solve some problems on the fimcap site.

So back to ICQ! I installed the Lite version at home, and everywhere else I can use the web version. For those people who also use ICQ: my number is 11807773. Everybody else can use my Messaging Center to send me a message when I’m on-line.

For my Dutch readers

Pixies reunite!

How could I have missed the news! One of my favourite bands is getting together again. Although the Pixies are not well-known by the general public, they have greatly influenced many big bands as Nirvana and the Distillers. I was lucky enough to see them perform life in Vredenburg, Utrecht during their Doolittle tour, and later have seen spin-offs Frank Black & the Catholics and the Breeders; all very impressive concerts.

I surely hope that they will cross the Atlantic with their new tour.

Breaking the silence

A good holiday is a holiday without internet connection. I had a quite good holiday, so you haven’t read any news from me lately. I did connect to the internet once in a while, but that was only to fix the computer of my parents and to install Mozilla Firebird (if you’re learning to surf the internet, you better do it right). I won’t bother you with my holiday stories, since we didn’t do that much. I was happy to see my friends and family again, and for those that I could not meet: sorry, maybe next time better.

For them moment I have plenty of things to arrange, so I won’t fix the menu bar on this site to work with IE and probably I won’t write a lot neither. That’s all for the moment, I better continue processing my overly full inbox…