SkyHorse.Org

How does your website look like under Dillo 0.8 on a FreeBSD?

Ever wondered how your web site looks like under Epiphany 2.22 running on FreeBSD 7.0? Ok a bit too obscure, how about on FireFox 3.0.3 under the now ubiquitous Ubuntu 8.04 without installing neither of them? Browsershots.org can help.

This free service produces screen shots of any web site URL as it is rendered using a multitude of operating systems and browser combinations, from the common Windows IE7 to the Dillo 0.8 on FreeBSD which only one nerd in a bunker knows about.

Check it out at http://www.browsershots.org

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• HTTP and HTTPS tags without using JavaScript

Posted in Programming, Web Design | No Comments »

HTTP and HTTPS tags without using JavaScript

Very neat trick I found out recently is that if you omit the protocol from an HTML src tag it will use the same protocol as the current URL, which is ideal if you need to have one universal HTML tag that works with both HTTP and HTTPS without having to use JavaScript tricks to detect the protocol.
This is great to use with ad server tracking pixels for example, or any other images:

Standard HTML code:
<img src="http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/images/logo.gif">

Relative protocol version:
<img src="//www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/images/logo.gif">

A few important details:

• The browser will use the same protocol for the image call as the base URL where the tag is on, akin to a relative-path URL. This means e-mail clients and the sorts (like file explorers) will not be able to use this (as there is no base URL)
• Tested on IE6 + 7, FF2 + 3 and Safari 2 + 3.
• Syntax is part of the HTML spec since 1995, just not widely used (don’t know why)

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Posted in Computing, online media | 1 Comment »

Advertisers pulling out of Facebook: Reaction reaction reaction

It was going to happen sooner or later. After BBC’s Panorama report on the people, sites and advertisers behind some of the worst ‘user-generated’ content on the UK web space it took just a few days for the fire to spread to the marketing director’s desk and for him to call off any ads placed next to questionable content. I can imagine the 7 year old kids (that’s how young on-line media buyers start working these days, according to industry veterans) frantically searching for all the ‘bad’ pages before the journalists or competitors had the chance to find them.
They missed the BNP group page on Facebook. So, advertisers pulled out of the entire site. I remember that day, the day I opened several pages on Facebook and I managed to not have a single ad being displayed. I immediately shouted “overreaction”, to which Mr. T. who I was next to me retorted that marketing directors couldn’t care less and all they probably did was pick up the phone and hail “STOP” out loud. That’s how it works in media, reaction reaction reaction.

But I don’t think online media is the same as regular media. A web page is not an outdoor, in the sense that it does not exist per se, it is only ‘created’ when someone visits it. When you say ‘RBS ads were seen on the BNP page on Facebook’ its not like someone happened to walk nearby and saw that ad next to BNP supporting material. What you really mean is ‘someone opened the BNP group page on Facebook and they got an RBS ad at the same time’. The small difference is that someone went to that page, on purpose. We could criticize the BNP itself, or defend it, but that is not the point here, as it seems to be in the general discussion about this topic. The point is RBS was advertising a service, not to benefit the BNP financially (no one gets financial gains from the advertising on Facebook but Facebook themselves, at least for now) but to reach an audience that could be -or not- supportive of that political viewpoint. Is this wrong? I don’t think so. To me it is analogous to putting up an outdoor near a community that support the BNP: would you even think twice about it? Since the ads do not benefit the political group but only Facebook I honestly don’t know what the whole fuss is about. But maybe that’s because I’m a techie…

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Posted in online media, Web Design | No Comments »

The Next Web Awards

The worldwide award for future accomplishments!

The public awards for upcoming disruptive services, that will change the web.

The ‘webby’ awards, v2.0

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wunderLOOP: The start of a new wave of online advertising

Panama, Yahoo’s new advertising platform, and its super abilities, is not the only online advertising technology that is going to be making waves in 2007.
wunderLOOP, a Luxembourg-based behavioral advertising and content targeting company, is about to announce a big round of funding that would allow the company to expand and take on its bigger rivals.

http://gigaom.com/2007/01/26/skype-zennstrom-euro-angels-fall-for-wunderloop/

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Posted in Computing, Web Design | No Comments »