johnmccollum.co.uk

I was recently working on a Joomla! site which required a fairly unusual banner management system. The spec was that the user would be able to enter a list of banners, links, start dates and expiry dates, and that these banners would be displayed in a random order in the main content area. The component will accept all major image formats, and flash movie files. (.swf)

I wasted quite a bit of time trying to mold other components to my needs, but I could have saved myself some time if I had just written my own!

Here we are, then; the result of my labour.

This component requires Joomla 1.5 or later.

LICENSE + DISCLAIMER:Copyright 2008 John McCollum. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

By downloading this component, you are indicating your acceptance of the terms above. Please make sure you back up your files and database before installing this component.

Click here to download the component!

EDIT - by popular demand, I’ve written a simple module to interact with this component. It simply loads a random image or .swf into a module position, based on dates supplied by the user. Note - you must download the component to use the module, although you can use the component on its own!

Click here to download the module!

While it will take a long time for the full implications of the Viacom vs. Youtube battle to be known, one thing has already become clear - user privacy is an extremely low priority.

The great fear, of course, is that users are held responsible for having viewed copyrighted content, wittingly or unwittingly.

Yes, I said unwittingly!

You may or may not know this, but many modern applications prefetch links. They’re smart enough to know what link you’re likely to follow next, and they queue it up for you, in advance. This speeds up your browsing experience quite dramatically!

It affects your privacy too though, since the act of prefetching registers that you’ve loaded a particular page, even with no action on your behalf. From Mozilla:

“Privacy implications

Along with the referral and URL-following implications already mentioned above, prefetching will generally cause the cookies of the prefetched site to be accessed. (For example, if you google amazon, the google results page will prefetch www.amazon.com, causing amazon cookies to be sent back and forth.”

(http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Link_prefetching_FAQ)

I know of at least two applications that prefetch links - Firefox and Stumbleupon. You can check your settings quite easily.

• Open a new browser window
• Type about:config in the address bar
• In the ‘Filter’ box, type ‘prefetch’. You might see several settings.

Network.prefetch-next is Firefox’s setting for prefetching links; double-click this to toggle it from on to off, if you like.

If you want to adjust Stumbleupon’s settings for prefetching links, it is easiest to do this through the SU toolbar thusly:

Tools->Toolbar Options->Configuration->Prefetch Stumbles (makes stumbling faster)

So will I be changing my settings? Probably not. I don’t honestly believe that my youtube viewing habits will get me into trouble. However, knowledge is good; and you should know that the prefetching options that speed up your browsing comes with a cost to your privacy.

Along with roughly 7,999,999 others, I eagerly downloaded Firefox 3 on release day. Not long after, my stumbleupon toolbar was upgraded to 3.23. Let’s have a look at the changelog:

• Adds tag search via the Firefox 3 url bar.
• Adds bookmark integration in Firefox 3.
• Delivers Send-to pages more swiftly.
• Notifies of waiting sent pages via a more easily noticeable button
• Improves browser responsiveness upon login for users with many Friends.
• Adds tutorial information bubbles for novice users.
• Fixes a bug that could cause the sent page counts on the Send-to menu to stop incrementing if you send several pages in succession.

Cool, seems like it’s all good. Wait, what’s that second one again?

• Adds bookmark integration in Firefox 3.

OK, seems innocuous enough. So I’m stumbling happily along, when I suddenly notice that my bookmarks folder looks like this:

Yep, Stumbleupon is now bookmarking every time I hit the thumbs up! This seems a bit superfluous to me; just because I like a page or want to add a pic to my SU blog, it doesn’t mean I want to bookmark it!

Turns out it’s easy to turn off - Tools -> Toolbar Options -> Search and Tagging -> Save Favorites To Firefox Bookmarks Folder.

OK, I know that this is supposed to be a social bookmaring app, but I can’t help but be a little surprised that this is the default behaviour now!

Does anyone out there appreciate this new feature? Am I just being cantankerous again?

As I mentioned before, I made the switch to GNU/Linux at home some time ago. I talked about the benefits it brought me in terms of PC performance and productivity.

But at work, I’m still firmly rooted in the Windows camp. Why? Primarily because my job involves developing web sites and apps.

Tracking browser usage is a notoriously haphazard affair. According to the much-quoted W3C schools statistics, roughly 53% of users are using Internet Explorer. According to wikipedia, that number is nearly 75%.

Given internet explorer’s ‘unusual’ implementation of web standards - not to mention its market share - it is a necessity to test on these browsers. This is where things get a bit tricky for users of minority operating systems such as Linux, or OSX.

Sure, there are services such as Browsershots which take snapshots of sites using particular browsers, but if you’re anything like me, developing for IE is an iterative process. Make a change, hit refresh. Make a change, hit refresh. Waiting 3-30 minutes to see an update isn’t an option!

I’d be interested to hear comments from anyone who has found a way round this issue.

In days gone by, the five-pager was the mainstay of the web design business - Home, About us, Services, Testimonials, and Contact us. Like an online brochure, it provided small businesses with an online presence, and it provided their customers with the bare minimum of interaction.

At work, we recently took the decision that we weren’t going to do them any more. Just about every customer wants to manage their own content - which is their right - as a bare minimum. Many want blogs, feeds, fora, interactive maps, and other widgets.

The good news is that there are many pieces of open source software that make such requests simple, even trivial. Wordpress divides opinion as a CMS, but I’ve found that with plugins like cforms and this sitemap generator make development speedy and simple.

Most CMS worth their salt produce valid (x)html, so there’s really no reason not to offer the customer these functionalities any more - join me in ditching the five pager as a dinosaur from the past!