I found a good web site that will help you determine if you are color blind and which will support web designers trying to make their web sites better: WeAreColorBlind.com. They are even providing patterns that show how best to use colors in this context.

If you want more support, I also recommend a visit to Chrometric, a web site where you will be able to freely download a tool to test your web site against various kinds of color blindnesses (you know that not all people have the same kind of insensitivity to colors, don’t you?) and allow you to test various solutions or improvement you may have designed.

For example, my other web site, www.YLovePhoto.com as seen by 6% of the male population:

Sample chart

When you design a web site, it happens that you need to create graphs or technical charts. But this is quite difficult if you don’t spend a life drawing little charts or if you are not satisfied with the charts out of Excel (or OpenOffice Draw). For this, you need to have a good chart/graph package.

I found two of them that I want to share with you:

• amCharts is a set of Flash charts for your websites and Web-based products. AmCharts can extract data from simple CSV or XML files, or they can read dynamic data generated with PHP, .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Perl, ColdFusion, and many other programming languages. I like the final appearance even if they could have more of a designer touch.
• Chartle provides simple and interactive charts, maps, plots and diagrams. It’s still in beta right now (beg of 2010) but the results are quite good.

The program will recognize the shortcut, then automatically replace it with the correct text. Type “win“, see “Windows” appear. Type “HTML” and see a full block of selected HTML code appear (I use such shortcuts to create blocks of HTML code on this site, reducing typing time and avoiding typos).

For this, you need to be supported by a small program. I found two interesting ones :

• AutoHotkey (for Windows) allows to write very simple scripts (examples are provided); I use it everyday (it works perfectly on a Windows 7 installation, by the way).
• Some people would prefer to explore Texter and TextExpander, too.
• If you are on Linux, you will prefer to have a look at AutoKey which is freely inspired by AutoHokey (copying is a form of flattery)

In the beginning was Google which installed its servers in China in 2006. The “do no evil” company accepted the conditions of the government of the PRC and included heavy filtering and censoring of its search results (looking for Tienanmen will produce wildly different results in and out of China). But in January 2009, Google discovered that some hackers obtained some detailed information out of its own servers at this was targeting both American companies and Chinese political opponents or partisans of free speech in China. Subsequently, Google announced its intention of both lifting the censorship and leaving China.

What is still very unclear:

• Is Google really serious about these two options?
• Is the main reason for its ire, the political chase or the technological spying? (the US government including Hilary Clinton pushed hard with Google)

What is clear:

• The breach of information seems limited (only email subject lines have been breached, not contents).
• The hackers were affiliated to Chinese official bodies and did not only target Google.
• The hackers used some social engineering and security issues present in Internet Explorer and Adobe PDF, which were probably known but not closed by Microsoft and Adobe.

So, when such information appears in wide open channels of the world press, what happens? Most experts started commenting on the security loopholes in Internet Explorer 6 (and about Adobe PDF reader, too). Many people observed that Internet Explorer 6 is rather old and it is unfortunate that so many people still use it despite the known fact that it is a security liability when browsing the Internet. With such a rush, some very official people also asked for replacement of Internet Explorer (mainly v6) to be replaced with more modern browsers. Even representatives of the German, French and Australian governments asked their countries to replace Internet Explorer with something else.

3x Firefox

The competition has seen this as a godsend since it created a rush for the other available browsers. For example (see the graph on the side), Firefox saw a brutal explosion of its downloads in Germany (nearly 300,000 Germans have downloaded Firefox in four days): about three times more than usual. It has been true in other countries even if it was not measured as precisely, and it has been observed by the other browsers Opera, Safari, Chrome (currently profiting from heavy advertising in some European countries like France).

This was definitely a good thing since it was bringing better browsers to many computers. It could have stayed there but there were several reaction and parallel events happening at the same time. The first one was that Firefox was preparing a major upgrade to the successful browser (in many parts of the world Firefox is now used by more Internet users than Internet Explorer). Named v3.6, this new version is bigger than what could have been expected from its small number increase (from 3.5 to 3.6 should have been a minor upgrade). This major event accelerated the rush, with people looking for features like:

• Built-in skins, to make it more personalized
• Faster, more stable
• More security conscious with the addition of user-level messages about risks, including reminders about what plug-ins are outdated and must be upgraded.
• Visual tab previews, which show you the tabs when you press Ctrl-Tab
• Aptitude to browse without leaving too many footsteps and traces in your PC (good for clean browsing like when you visit Adult sites)

This version is also appreciated by developers who will find a bunch of little improvements (like CSS gradients).

This is not only a great story to read. This is a great browser and you should consider downloading Firefox 3.6 now!

If you are not completely convinced, you should also consider downloading the newest Opera browser. Opera v10.10 has been available for a few months now and it also offering these advantages, plus some neat features like:

• Opera Unite: to easily share information between Opera users and browsers, without using a web site or a share folder on some social network.
• Opera Turbo: to adapt Opera to very slow Internet connections.
• Speed dial: to get a faster access to some web sites you choose (bookmarks on steroids).
• Mouse moves for faster commands.
• Opera link: to share bookmarks, speed dial configurations between several machines where you use Opera.

Opera is clearly my preferred browsing solution (even if I need to test my web sites on everything I can find, Opera is the central hub of my Internet browsing). Go and download Opera v10.10 now.

And, if you are not sure yet, I can also offer the small and fast browser from Google: Chrome. Since it all started around Google and China, it was worth mentioning, of course.

All this has been going so fast that Microsoft needed to do something. Of course, they have a newer version of Internet Explorer (IE8 is included in Windows 7 and can be downloaded freely. But this was not enough, too many people were starting to complain that Microsoft may wait about a month before updating IE6 in the normal update cycle. Even worse, some experts started telling the world that Microsoft actually was aware of this flaw in IE6 for many months. In such conditions, not doing anything usually turns out to produce a public relations nightmare and prepares for bad wind.

So, Microsoft rushed an out-of-band update to IE6 and Windows Update is now offering the correction to all Windows users still using IE6 (of course, you still have to use Windows Update and it is well known that too many people do not have this configured or do not accept the proposed updates – this is wrong and one the reasons so many PCs are infected with Trojan horses, virus and adwares). Now, if you did not move to a later Windows version and if you did not take advantage of the much better IE7 or IE8, it’s time to upgrade your old hag.

We can expect to see a few more updates to this story in the future, but there is a lesson to be learned (by Google, and most Internet users):

Always keep your browser up-to-date and refrain from clicking on any link in a mail message you did not expect.

Additionally, there is a lesson for Microsoft:

Sorry! but even the older software has to be kept alive when you are or have been the near-monopoly on this technology. This comes with responsibilities.

From GraphJam.

This is time to start your own blog in order to earn some revenue protecting you against the current recession.

• YLovePhoto.com (site specializing in digital photography)
• YLoveBigCats.com (about felines and other big cats)
• YLoveIllusions.com (optical illusions)
• YWantVisits.com (SEO, traffic optimisation and web site revenue maximization)

Your opinion will be welcome, but -remember- this is beta-test. So, it is full of bugs, problems, issues and don’t come back and complain if your significant other dumps you because of it.

Note: Most (if not all) of the photo-related news here will be applied to YLovePhoto.com as soon as I feel free with this new web site.

I had a few difficulties to ensure that images where correctly aligned and displayed after the improvements in their presentation in WP2.6. For those really interested, I ended up adding the following to my CSS file:

Thanks to the support of the WordPress.org forum.

Don’t worry, I may post something on Roumazeilles.net every day, but it does not mean that I am in front of the keyboard every day. Far from it. I am using one small advantage of WordPress (the software package supporting my web site). I can write posts and schedule them for future publication.

That way, I have no limit to my inspiration. For example, I have currently scheduled weekly posts about optical illusions for the coming 6 months, a full week of feline-related news (daily posts next week), a full week of daily videos titled “when XXXXX get bored” in a couple of months.

Aim

The first objective was to install two sets of forums (in French and in English, as for the news blogs) in their respective URLs.

• English forums
• French forums

The locations have an influence on the rest since I still wanted to have a good integration with the wordpress blogs. You are expected to install the forums inside the blog.

So, here is how I did it.

Configuration

The main issue is to install the software on the web site in the right location. The package is prepared to be downloaded into a bbpress sub-directory inside the wordpress directory, so I had to change the directory name just after decompression (And I did it twice: Once for each language).

The config.php file is set according to the following:

In order to get a more direct access to the forums I also corrected slightly the web site .htaccess file to add the following redirecting lines that lead to more user-friendly addresses used here.

redirect 301 /forum/en http://www.roumazeilles.net/news/en/wordpress/forum/
redirect 301 /forum/fr http://www.roumazeilles.net/news/fr/wordpress/forum/

Additional steps

Directory access rights

I also directly had to modify the directory access rights on the web server.

chmod 644 ./forum/ (this may not be critical)
mkdir ./forum/bb-cache/
chmod 644 ./forum/bb-cache/ (this is needed to update the site-management options)

Theme

bbPress is using themes very similar to WordPress. This is helpful to reduce the amount of work involved in preparing the forums for a nicer presentation when you already have a WordPress theme.

However, it is clearly painful to create the many files expected by bbPress (I hope that this will be simplified in the future). Anyway, thanks to DreamWeaver 3.x and its very good support of HTML templates, thanks to the organization of my pages with a significant part located in the CSS file, it has been relatively easy to do this task. But it still is too much pain for a good software package. At least, if you don’t do anything, the Kakumei theme is used by default ensuring that your forums are displayed conveniently.

Internationalization

Now, since my web site is set both in English and in French, there is no reason for the forums to be set differently. The installation in English is standard, but the French bit is a little different. You need to update a separate file (named bbpress.pot) that will provide all of the needed text transalations.

I installed one in the language directory. That’s all. It’s unofficial translation, but that’s good for me.

Last comments

In the end, after a rather long testing phase on a hidden web site, I have been able to set the forums up rather easily (it could be better, but bbPress is still in development stages, so the issues were understandable -and they were not overwhelming). The documentation is very terse, but the community is active and supportive.

One thing I had difficulties with is that bbPress does a heavy use of page caching. When changing something in the configuration, you have to remember to reload from the site (not from the cache) or you get the feeling that nothing is ever happenning whatever your moves. Annoying if understandable for performance reasons.

Some are said to have lost 20% compared to last year.

• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found

So I decided to add a spell checker to Opera (a plug-in to limit the risks of my own typos). I found a pretty simple one: Aspell for Windows that Opera will automatically recognize when it is installed. It has dictionaries for many languages (it is easy to create one from a mere word list in your own language if you need to). It supports several languages at the same time.

The only drawback is that it is not working in real-time, but you have to call it from a right-click on the mouse into the post box. I would have preferred an active underlining of wrongly-spelled words (like in Word or OpenOffice-Write).

May be you know a better one that you would like to share…

Note for new bloggers: Even if I have been waiting long for this, typos in your posts just pushes forward a bad image for your own web site. Go and correct this now.

Source: http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/opera/spell check/.

Install multiple versions of IE on your PC

If the number of visits is the judge, there are only very slim chances that you know about the mere existence of the RSS thread . This is why, I’ll try to speak a little about it and give you some tips about it.

The central idea is to ease the reading og articles from a web site by grouping them in a simpler form. You need a separated reader but, you may not know it, you already have one included in most modern web browsers. Instead of going to the site to check if there are news, your browser will receive updates any time there is something new. You’ll know if it is worth coming to the original web site.

Here are some informations as they were grouped by Codesqueeze.

Beginners

Veterans

Advice to bloggers

Now, if you blog or if you have a web site, it is strongly advised to include your own RSS version of the news and posts that you produce. It is favoring the most experienced readers who happen to also be the ones most able to extend the buzz around your activity or web site.

For the users of WordPress blogging software and WordPress.com sites, it’s just a matter of using the feature already included in your web site. You just have to make sure that the template you use is properly showing the existence of the RSS thread.

Instructibles (via Download Squad).

We should see the final 2.3 version on September 20th.