I worked with the very talented Jamie Scott on developing this platform from designwork produced by Breeze Design. All pages are developed in standards compliant, accessible, and cross-browser compatible xHTML strict, CSS, and with interface enhancements using JQuery. All integrated with a CakePHP backend. This very large site includes several complex front-facing and admin templates, ajax-powered FAQs and content managed sections, two separate sign-up processed, and JASON powered search, results filtering, and advert comparisions.

Although written over two years ago, his post ‘Compression using Canvas and PNG-embedded data‘ from May 2008 is one such solution. So why am I only coming across it now? There’s quite a few interesting competitions running at the moment asking developers to develop web apps in less than 10k, Alex Le recently submitted an app using Seidelin’s compression technique to get within the size limitations.

The solution itself is very simple:

• compress your JavaScript and CSS into a 24 bit PNG, saving file size and combining all the files into one filet;
• serve this PNG file to the user (only one HTTP request);
• on the client side, draw the PNG using the canvas element using drawImage();
• read all the pixel data using getImageData(), 4 bytes per pixel in the image.

Although this solution only results in similar compression results to serving the same components gzipped, the results still mean that everything is compressed into one request and it has been demonstrated that actaul transmission is much faster in this format compared to normal binary data via XMLHttpRequest and x-user-charset so this is an extremely efficient method of compression.

Unfortunately not all browsers support it – Internet Explorer 9 has a bug in their implementation of canvas which causes every byte after the 8192th to be read as zero. Of course, whilst we’re still supporting the likes of IE6, this becomes even less important.

For me this is a very intriguing proposition though – I envision a time in the future where this technique could be used to compress an entire front end into one image: all of the CSS, JavaScript, HTML and all of the graphical elements (in sprite form); all inside one lossless, compressed, PNG image. The only thing that’s needed on the client side is the JavaScript function to paint it out again onto canvas.. Very interesting indeed!

Via: Ajaxian, Nihilogic

Don’t start CSS class or ID names with a numeric character!

I’ve never been able to find any ‘official’ documentation about this but the principals are essentially the same as any other parsed programming language: it’s very pot luck whether selector names will work in your CSS if they start with a numeric character. I don’t know if this is just a limitation on the sort of environment I tend to develop in (FireFox with FireBug) but the resolution is very simple: always start your ID and Class names with an alphabetic character and not a number. Which is a little annoying since the website I’ve been working on is called 2degrees…!

Unfortuantely when placed in the footer this causes the images to load twice and more-or-less double the page load times because the script doesn’t kick in until the images are already in the download pipeline. Until I can work out away around this, I’ve therefore had to mvoe my JavaScript block back to the head.

The good news is that with the image loading delayed and the JavaScript moved back to the header I’m still seeing an improvement in page load speeds.
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One of the Yahoo! Developer Network’s suggestions to help optimise a website and speed up load time is to move JavaScript from the head of your document to the bottom. It makes perfect sense: JavaScript files can often be big (JQuery 1.4.2 for example is 70.5kB, even when minified) and if they appear in the head of your page they will download first, blocking further parallel downloads (such as graphical elements and CSS) which would be more useful in offering display elements to the page, giving the impression of faster page loads.

According to HTTP/1.1 specification, browsers should only “maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy“. Realistically with the widespread adoption of faster internet connections since these specifications were written, they are a little out of date and I generally find that browsers will use up to four simultaneous channels per host however it still gives you an idea of what happens when you keep your JavaScript in the head: it blocks out the rest of the page.

You can get around this limitation by hosting different elements of your site under different domains, or allowing Google to host your AJAX libraries (which also has quite a few other advantages) – this means that the visitor’s browser will download a minimum of two files in parallel from each URL.

Unfortunately using alternate domains isn’t always easy or cost effective, especially in WordPress installs. Fortunately there’s a very easy to use plugin available for WordPress called JavaScript to Footer.

Just install it through your plugins panel, activate it and reload your page. It’s as simple as that! If you use WP Super Cache you might also want to clear our your site cache to see the results, but that’s all. It took me all of ten minutes to research, and two minutes to set up. Have a look at this page’s source if you need any further convincing.

Obviously this doesn’t do anything to minimise the actual load size of your page – the JavaScript files will still be grabbed and will still require just as much of yours and the visitor’s bandwidth, but at least the page itself will start to form on the visitor’s screen quicker. It’s worth mentioning that this isn’t a solution for everybody – if you use the document.write function for example to insert sections of your page, they won’t work in the footer. Using modern JavaScript libraries and techniques however will minimise any problems you may have with moving your JavaScript to the bottom of your document.

Unlike their films and entertainment counterparts, as well as those animation studios based overseas, companies in the animation and games industries in the UK do not receive the same tax breaks. In the current economy this is slowly but surely squeezing the UK’s animation heritage out on the global marketplace whilst other countries (where tax breaks in this arena are a given) are able to thrive.

As we watch a continuing trend of outsourcing of this type of work outside the UK, our final exports are our expertise and without equal treatment as other entertainment industries in the UK receive, there is no way to compete or way to help the next generation of animators, set designers, lighters, animators and developers learn their trade.

There is a petition set up which I urge you to sign here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/save-uk-animationgames to put pressure on the coalition government to make the changes we need to see to stop this skill set disappearing from the UK altogether. You can also join the FaceBook Group to join in the discussions and meet other animation specialists.

The hotel is immaculately presented throughout with quirky French décor, bright and airy colours, rare vintage prints and stylish but comfortable furnishings. The room was just as lovely as the rest of the hotel: very comfortable memory foam beds, a big light bathroom with local pebble flooring, hot and cold water (consistently – the hot water never ran out), a huge wet-room style shower and big fluffy white towels daily. Best of all for us was the air conditioning which kept the room cool, and the balcony and roof terrace where we could stand and watch this sleepy town full of international festival-goers pass by.

The staff were very friendly and genuinely went out of their way to help people. When we arrived they had only been open to the public a matter of days and I suspect that they were finding the heavy influx of people coming in off the camp sites begging for rooms a little overwhelming. We were lucky to find ourselves a room – every time we were in the foyer another group of people would come in desperate to get out of their tents and into the air conditioned rooms, but the staff were always polite and even went as far as to allow some people to sleep on air mattresses in the upper (incomplete) rooms free of charge. There was even fresh coffee and pastries ready and waiting for us every morning.

The hotel is still very much in it’s infancy and the website relatively primitive but you can get more information about them here: http://hotelbenicassim.net/ and read some of the reviews that have already been posted on Trip Advisor – there’s no sign of a negative comment on there yet!

I’ve included some photographs below but honestly you would need to pay them a visit to fully appreciate what they are offering there. We’ll certainly be back next year for the full duration of the festival!

I’ve been working with the platform for six months or so now on some pretty high-profile sites and enjoyed it. It’s a very robust and expansive system very well-developed for use in music and film social websites.

You can see more Eos videos on YouTube here.
You can also read more about the Cisco Eos platform and see a list of some of the websites developed on it in their Wikipedia article here.

One thing that I’ve never come across before but has been highlighted in these indexing results is WordPress post attachments, which is where WordPress displays all the images you’ve attached to your post as individual attachment pages within the post. I can imagine numerous uses for this feature but for me it’s a bit of a pain: I find a huge number of visitors are coming to my site for the pictures, so allowing my visitors to see the images in an attachment page without even showing the rest of the post content is a little bit of a waste.

I had thought that this was just a default setting in WordPress somewhere but I’ve been unable to find the option anywhere and information about it online is pretty flaky. The best piece of advice I found came from a very old discussion on the WordPress support forums where riversatile suggests a workaround hack.

It utilises the wp_redirect and pages functions to detect the attachment’s parent URL and redirect the visitor there.

Although a bit of a hack, the only thing that really bothered me about this approach was that wp_redirect defaults to a 302 redirect (‘moved temporarily) which means that Google and other search engines will continue to index the pages and will have a knock-on effect in your rankings as a result. Fortunately in the WordPress documentation for wp_redirect, it is very easy to include a different HTTP redirect.

So, all I have done to change riversatile’s code is included a HTTP 301 redirect. Since I don’t want my visitors to be able to visit the attachments pages individually anyway, it works far better for me to use HTTP 301 ‘moved permanently’ rather than temporarily. From an SEO perspective it also means that any rankings that the individual attachment pages have gained will be transferred over to the main post instead.

All you need to do is:

1) Create a new PHP file called image.php
2) Paste this line into it :

post_parent), 301); ?>

4) Upload it into your theme folder

And that’s all! As you’ll see on my own site, attachments such as this one here from my Mega Rig Shark & Squid Attack portfolio item now redirect back to the post page automatically.

Obviously there’s a few things worth bearing in mind: it’s not fool-proof: anyone with redirecting disabled on their browser won’t get redirected and it’s not best practice to redirect visitors away from their intended content. My only argument against this is that they can still see the images in the post themselves so they don’t lose access to the image altogether, and since it’s using a 301 redirect rather than a 302 then in theory nobody should be visiting from the attachment pages directly for very much longer anyway since the search engines will stop listing them.

From my own personal experiences, from the people I’ve worked alongside, and from the people I’m close to it seems that globally, most employees hit a depression and a slow-down in productivity around seven to nine months into a new job. My own experience primarily comes from creative studios and digital agencies although from what I can tell, it’s far more wide-spread than just these fast-paced and sometimes high-stress working environments. As an example I know of people working in social care and publishing who go through the same phase.

I’m surprised that there isn’t more written about it already and having worked in management roles in the past, it isn’t something that is immediately obvious so let me make it perfectly clear: it’s around this time that the majority of your staff become dissatisfied and start to think about moving on.

How serious this is is very much dependant on the individual and whether it’s noticed and acted on in time, but I could reel off a list of at least ten people I know of who, in the last year (out of around 25 who I’ve talked to about it) have made the move to new employment as a result of it.

The causes

There are many factors that can be attributed to it, all of them play a role but only one need be astringent enough to push the wrong buttons and leave your staff dropping their resignation on your desk.

After the first seven-plus months your staff member is well-settled into their job but environmental factors such as a high workload or a perception that the job isn’t all that it was cracked up to be can be very powerful repellents.

The most powerful environmental influence is always going to be dissatisfaction in the general office population: I worked at a company where several members of staff would spend their smoke breaks and lunchtimes bemoaning the job, the workload, other members of staff, and waxing lyrical to one another about other opportunities, escape plans, and holidays. This negative vibe rubs off on other staff members easily and I can see where I personally fell foul of this.

After the first few months your staff member will also have undertaken a lot of work, probably worked late to hit several deadlines, and felt let down when this wasn’t recognised or repaid in a way they feel negates the time they put in. This is particularly evident in agency environments and although they may feel the first few times that it was a one-off or irregular occurrence and thus acceptable, the more it happens and the more it starts to feel like they are being taken advantage of, the more frustrated they will become.

On the other side, the excitement and ‘newness’ of the role will have worn off by this point and this will only serve to amplify the situation more.

All of these issues stem from internal organisational factors but external factors will be the power behind, or the final straw in an employee’s dissatisfaction.

In technology-based environments recruitment agencies play a key role. They get a bad rep and can do more harm than good but equally they save time and money by allowing your company to essentially out-source the selection process, providing you with a far higher percentage of applicable candidates. The problem is that recruitment agencies don’t all work together. Once you have employed your new member of staff, all the other agencies who have a copy of their CV will continue to phone and email them.

Generally in the giddy excitement of having found the job, your staff member will tell them that they’re happily employed and the recruitment agency will put their profile on hold. This hold only lasts for six months and after that the phone calls and job adverts will start pouring through again. If they are already feeling unhappy, this will be the final straw for them. They will see it as a wake-up, an exposure to all the other exciting opportunities (and probably higher wages) that are out there just waiting for them to put on a suit and go charm them in an interview.

The signs

It isn’t necessarily easy to spot that this is happening until it’s too late and you’re left either trying to convince them to stay with higher wages and offerings, or trawling through CVs trying to find a suitable replacement. Know this though: even if you do manage to ‘win them back’, this isn’t a guarantee that they will stay long-term. Unless the other factors within your organisation which stemmed the slump in the first place aren’t addressed, they will be in the same position as before, costing you more money, and will still find an excuse to leave a few months later. Last time it happened to me I did, and last time I tried to buy back a member of staff without noticing what was disrupting them in the first place, they still left a few months later and with more determination.

A few key behaviours changes that may become apparent (although I say ‘may‘ as it’s not always this easy to spot) are:

• A loss of interest and pride in their work.
• A gradual decline in their interaction with the rest of the office, be it drinking after work or joining in jokes around the office.
• An increase in tardiness, argumentative over time-keeping (‘Sure I arrived late but I didn’t take an hour for lunch so I’m leaving on time‘);
• A general disdain for co-workers and figures of authority.

These are generally extreme fringe examples but these behaviours are prevalent in some form of severity in most of the people I’ve seen go through this.

How to counteract

Firstly. this doesn’t occur in every employee you’ll ever manage or work alongside, although all of them will inevitably go through a phase of considering their other options. Only a few will ever get to the point of walking away but as an exercise in keeping a team of happy and long-standing employees, there is no harm in working to the worst case and as a result giving everyone a boost.

The absolute most important thing to ensure is that the work your staff do has to be kept fresh and interesting. Particularity in creative and problem-solving industries like agencies, these are talented minds which can easily become bored of repetitive tasks. Leaving someone on the same task, or a string of similar tasks for more than three or four weeks at a stretch will become stagnant and boring. Break it up with alternate projects, hold hack days once a month to give your staff members a little freedom to do something different and the audience to show it off afterwards.

You lose a day of work but you earn enough money from these people the rest of the time, and a lot of what is produced during these hack days can become talking points, or even profitable products and ideas further down the line. There is nothing confidence inspiring than showing your boss and peers something you’ve worked on and feel proud of to later be given the opportunity to use it in a real-world situation.

Recognise the work that your staff members are doing: congratulate them, show your appreciation, and make sure that they don’t feel taken advantage of. If your team has gone through a heavy patch and people are working long hours and going above and beyond, recognise that this is generally a selfless act where the only people profiting are the people in charge. If your staff are working late, get pizza delivered or put beers in the fridge. When it’s all over and the project is out the door, call an early afternoon and take them to the pub.

Nobody is expecting to be repaid like-for-like where overtime is involved but showing your appreciation and offering reasonable returns on the personal time that they have surrendered to a project is very important. As an example, one project I worked on overran catastrophically. I spent three solid 55+ hour weeks getting it ready and out the door. When it was finished I was tired, ill, and stressed. I realised that I had managed to shoe-horn an additional week and a half’s worth of hours into that three week period and I was eventually given a day back as time off in lieu, a gesture which I appreciate but which didn’t even make a dent in the scheme of things. The reward has to be seen to meet the outlay, at least in part.

A final note on this would be to do with project time management. This is something that in development is incorrect the vast majority of the time, and if you see that your team is working late and frequently to meet deadlines, it’s something that has to be addressed. If there is a four week project coming up, make sure that it is started at least five weeks before the deadline, and have additional people pencilled into the schedule who can join the project during the forth and fifth week if things aren’t going to plan.

In the best case, the project is finished a week early and ships on time and at the worst case the project overruns but still hits the deadline. If more than 20% of your projects are overrunning then you need re-evaluate the quoting mechanism or build more time into each project.

Everybody goes through cycles of highs and lows; in a culture where we spend the majority of our time working to earn money to enjoy what little time we are left with. It is very easy for slums to become projected and amplified by our jobs, so paying attention and ensuring that there isn’t as much to become dissatisfied about inside of the working environment will go a very long way to keeping employees happy, loyal, and productive.

I work for McCann Manchester and they have got it right.

One thing it doesn’t do so well at present is offer content managed pages. I don’t mean management of the site’s media – the Eos admin panel is extremely good at that – or the site assets – WebDAV and the site zip system cover that one albeit a slightly buggy fashion – I mean website pages where the content is editable by the professional user or website owner.

It would be great if Eos did have a CMS type module where professional users could edit the content from the platform’s front end and perhaps make use of the TinyMCE system that’s already an integral part of other areas of the site, but for the moment there’s nothing of that nature available.

The only workaround I’ve found is a little convoluted and assumes that whoever is modifying content on the site is:

• able to access the Eos administrative area of the site;
• knows the basics of HTML markup.

With these two requirements out of the way, under the customisation section of the admin panel is an area for site pages. This lists all of the current pages set up on your project and at the bottom includes a list of custom pages:

If you’ve never ventured into this section before this list will be empty but it uses just the same method as you use to add photograph or video categories. You have to assign the page name, which is the ID you will find it under later in WebDAV, the URL, and the page title.

Having added your new page and assigned the title, all you need to do is go ahead and open the page layout file via WebDAV and add moduleContainers. Once you upload this file again you’ll need to duplicate your site to force Eos to process your page layout changes otherwise it could be quite a while before you see the changes take effect.

Once you’ve added all the general page layout modules you require for your site (in my case this is usually a couple of modules in the sidebar) you can then add a HTML module and style it up. You will most likely want to include styling for that particular module (in your modules.css file) for basic HTML elements such as lists, paragraphs and different headings but that depends on the content the user intends to put in there.

Assuming that your professional users know how to write HTML and how to get around the admin panel, you can then leave it at that – your user can log in at their leisure and add the content they require. See an example of a page set up in this fashion on the Eos platform here.

There are a few drawbacks to this approach however. Aside from the prerequisites that your pro users know their way around the Eos admin panel and know basic HTML, there’s also no easy way of including images in this section. Normal CMS systems will allow you to upload and insert images from the management page but with Eos they will either need to upload the images via the upload form and grab the URL (which requires further technical ability and also still causes the issues I experienced with static URLs and Flash files), or else provide CSS classes that craete block-level elements with background images.

For me all this meant was that in the end I just agreed to receiving emailed Word documents every time they wanted to make changes to these pages for me to mark up, style, and place into the HTML modules. It was a lot less hassle than having my professional users running around unattended in the admin panel, or having to go back into the platform afterwards after they inevitably pasted directly from Word and embedded a bunch of nasty Microsoft proprietary metadata , or where their markup didn’t validate and broke the rest of the page beneath it..