Webmasters Gallery

About a month ago, we covered an announcement about Mozilla’s plans to basically put OpenGL ES in the browser and call it Canvas 3D and to do so working with a new working group over at the OpenGL standards body, Khronos.

This week, we covered Google’s own 3D announcement, a plug-in offering a high-level scene graph API and embedded V8 run-time.

And of course, don’t forget about Opera’s 3D work, which we covered back in November 2007.

So now there are three approaches to 3D:

• Mozilla: Low-level, OpenGL wrapper
• Opera: Mid-level proprietary scene-graph-ish API
• Google: The full COLLADA monty

Where should the web go? Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard compares the debate to Canvas vs. SVG:

Canvas is a very simple API, much like what we’ve proposed to Khronos for 3D support. It’s well-scoped, well understood and integrates very well with other web technologies. And it’s been getting a huge amount of traction on the web. People are writing all kinds of really neat technology on top of it, including useful re-usable libraries for visualization. Have a look through Google’s own promotional site for Chrome – a huge number of them use canvas. It has traction. And we’ve gone through a couple of iterations – we’ve added support for text and a couple of other odds and ends once we understood what people were trying to do with it.

Now compare this to SVG and SMIL. Each of those specs are multi-hundred page documents with very large APIs and descriptions of how to translate their retained-mode graphics into something that’s usable on the web. (SVG 1.1 is a 719 page PDF. SVG 1.2 Tiny is 449 pages. The spec for SMIL is a 2.7MB HTML file.) We’ve seen some implementation of SVG and SMIL in browsers, but it’s been slow in coming and hasn’t seen full interoperability testing nor any real pick up on the web. The model for these specs was wrong, and I think it shows.

Chris doesn’t directly say that Google’s approach is “wrong”, but he wonders if the Google proposal of a bigger and more ambitious API would represent too great a compatibility burden for browser vendors and developers.

In the comments of his post, Henry Bridge of the Google O3D team replied; here’s a lightly edited excerpt:

We agree that to keep a standards process focused, APIs should be as minimal as possible while remaining useful, and so we would likely keep things like that out of any first attempt at a standard and, as you say, let it evolve over time. But the usefulness question brings up an important, and we think, unresolved point. We’d love to build the animation and skinning system in JS, but we just couldn’t get a JS-based animation system fast enough — even on our retained-mode API. Javascript is getting faster all the time and we love that, but until someone builds some apps it’ll be hard to know what’s fast enough.

Standardizing [an Open GL-like] immediate mode API for JS makes total sense. It’s a well defined problem, lots of people know GL, and we think it will be useful. But some of the demos we wrote _already_ don’t run well without a modern JS implementation, and moving to [Open GL] won’t help that (but we’d love to be proven wrong). That’s why we think it makes sense to explore both an immediate and a retained mode 3D, and make sure they work well together.

Its imperative that you feel good about people and things you work with. Since you can’t really pick on your office colleagues, you can surely innovate by using pepped up cases for your laptop. The Notebook Case Carpet Tile Design could be the first one you consider. The name seems pretty obvious to know from what it is made. I love the vertical flap that features dedicated handle-type space.

I am just wondering the notebook shouldn’t horizontally slip when making use of this. Russell Dow designed it and calls this notebook case as LAPPYGlove.

Do check out the Cardboard Laptop Case we featured earlier which looks super-trendy and can offer substantially good levels of protection too.

Via Core??

Last week, FlashOtaku and Six Revisions asked you what you thought the best image editing software was. There were over 150 participants, and today, we’re glad to announce the winners of the five FlashOtaku Slideshow Flash Deluxe component licenses worth $79.00 each.

The Winners

The winners were selected by using the same methodology as in previous contests, via a SQL query.

1. jack (comment #31621) | Website: typesett

2. carlos (comment #31624) | Website: OWN INDUSTRIES

3. Rick (comment #31640)

4. Benjamin M. Strozykowski (comment #31574) | Website: Worthless Genius

5. Christian Schenk (comment #31540) | Website: Christian Schenk

Selection

Here’s the screenshot from the MySQL query.

Thank you FlashOtaku and participants

Let me take a moment to thank our contest sponsor: FlashOtaku, provider of high-quality Flash components. I’d also like to thank the awesome people who participated in last week’s polling. I hope to summarize the votes into another post coming soon.

I recently ran into some problems with our Linux mail cluster after a bad power bump. (Electricity. Hmph! Sooo 20th Century.) Apparently servers don’t enjoy it when you tell them it’s not working out and proceed to find more servers to fulfill your needs. After three cases of Dr. Pepper and several hours of interweb searching, here’s what I found out about the NFS implementation in Debian. It’s actually quite simple… honest.

I consult for a small-to-medium-sized ISP in Nevada, and recently set up a mail cluster using NFS to mount the vpopmail and qmail directories. Well, we recently had a power bump in which the UPS’s didn’t hold through. (Invest is good power, please, for the sake of your System Administrator!) After powering on the servers, we noticed that the NFS clients weren’t mounting the shared NFS directories automatically, despite them being in the /etc/fstab file.

I could login and run:

mount -a

All of the NFS mounts would come up, no problem. But for some reason they still wouldn’t after a reboot. Well that was no good! I’m a SysAdmin, and we like to automate as much as possible, while still being in control. I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, be on standby for the next time the machine rebooted, just to run one measly command. So I called upon my friend’s Google, Dr. Pepper and He-Man to help me out…

So after several hours of googling (LOL, gross) and digging through old mailing list archives I found that on Debian Etch/Testing, you need to remove this file because sometimes the startup/stop scripts don’t properly remove it – part of it’s locking system.

rm -rf /var/run/network/mountnfs

I honestly don’t remember where I finally found the solution, otherwise I’d gladly credit & link them here.

This has only happened twice, both times as a result of the server rebooting or powering down without properly killing NFS (with O.J.’s knife). Fortunately I’ve convinced the Higher-Ups to invest in some heavier-duty power backup systems… sort of.

I’ll be making a post soon outlining my ideas for an ideal mail cluster… trust me, you’ll want to read it. You’ll also want to compliment me on my genius.

Devon Govett is a fan of the new CSS3 property text-overflow:

There are a few CSS features that Microsoft pioneered and has had available to developers in Internet Explorer for a long time now. One of those features is the text-overflow property, which is now in CSS3 and has implementations in Safari, and Opera. Firefox still does not support this feature, but I have heard that it will in Firefox 3.1.

Here is a rundown of what the property does. When text overflows an element’s box, the text-overflow property helps leave a visual hint to the user that there is more text. When a value of ellipsis is used, three dots will be shown before the text is clipped by overflow: hidden.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, c…

I wanted to be able to use this feature in all browsers, so I wrote a small jQuery plugin in order to support Firefox. To use, just call ellipsis() on a jQuery object. For example:

$("span").ellipsis();

The Qooxdoo gang have created tests for Taskspeed with some surprising results:

On IE qooxdoo is by far the fastest framework.

Across browsers and frameworks, qooxdoo gained the highest ranks on all versions of IE (i.e. 6, 7 and 8), and made its lowest mark coming out third on Firefox 3.0. This exceptional IE performance also leads to the best overall score. The IE results are a big surprise and we’ll try to investigate, what we do different (better) than all the other JavaScript libraries.

As always performance tests should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s hard to judge whether all implementations are really equivalent. For example in the jQuery tests John Resig implemented all tests in a pure jQuery way. There are obvious optimizations he consciously omited, but it apparently reflects the genuine jQuery coding style. There is no official qooxdoo way to work with the DOM yet, so we modeled our tests closely after the Dojo and jQuery tests.

Fabian Jakobs analyzes why they’ve performed so well, speculating that because they built a GUI toolkit they’ve been optimizing DOM operations since the beginning to keep it fast–and because they use Sizzle, their lack of attention to CSS optimizations didn’t kill them.

Fabian also mentions that these results encourage their intention to make qooxdoo’s DOM API available stand-alone:

These results show that we have a good base and encourage us to move forward in this direction.

You can check out the tests for yourself, though as Fabian mentions in his post, they require a trunk build of qooxdoo.

Sometimes I get an inspiration to improve my blog with new element or plugin and that’s where problem starts. Sure I can hard code new snippet directly into template file or spend couple of hours trying to find suitable solution on WordPress website.

There is a very good chance that feature I want to include on my blog has been already implemented by someone but I have no idea how he named this plugin or which section he posted it in.

Last time I got lucky thanks to the Pixel Shoppe with his recommendations on plugins that I can use with WordPress blog.

They were describing AdSense Manager plugin which supports multiple ad networks and that’s exactly what I was looking for. In addition this plugin gives you full control over ad placements without need to modify styles or source files.

I found more good recommendations on other WordPress plugins, tweaks and template modifications. General tips for bloggers section they have is also interesting read…

I can’t write about all the good stuff I saw on Pixel Shoppe blog but you can find articles about web design, SEO and marketing, wordpress and blogging, money making tips.

For bloggers, internet marketers and especially for newbies who is just starting out on the internet it’s definitely worth few minutes of your time to read Pixel Shoppe articles or watch some of wordpress video tutorials.

Have something to say regarding the subject in my post? Post your comment and I will be happy to thank thank most active commentators with direct link!
Did you learn something new today or like my point of view? Subscribe to my full RSS feed in the your favorite reader or get new posts delivered by Email directly to your inbox.

You probably noticed “Live Traffic Feed” widget that I have in the right sidebar and today I took a deeper look what else I can get from it… Turned out this little widget is quite more powerful than it looks from outside.

In the basic view FeedJit display visitors in real time with the link to the referring page so you can check who sending you traffic right from your front page. If you click on “Watch in real time” link on the bottom of the widget it will forward to the FeedJit website where you can see more extended results.

For example if visitor was referred by the search engine – there will be exact search term he used to find your site. Also it shows browser and operating system visitors are using and if they left your site by clicking on one of the links – you’ll see which link it was. Two more options – visitors map and statistics for most popular pages.

This little widget could be a very nice analytical tool but the drawback is – it does not provide any historical data. All you can get is real time 20 or so results. If at some point developers decide to add some historical traffic results it can be very useful tool, probably even better than Google analytics which is far from being accurate.

Good thing I noticed – this widget loads very fast (much faster than Digg of Feedburner) and does not affect speed of your pages. Everything is external – all you do is insert small code snippet (can use sidebar text widget).

So if you want to have some fun watching who is knocking in the door and how they found you – go check out FeedJit.com and let me know what you think of it. Widget is free to use and does not require registration.

Have something to say regarding the subject in my post? Post your comment and I will be happy to thank thank most active commentators with direct link!
Did you learn something new today or like my point of view? Subscribe to my full RSS feed in the your favorite reader or get new posts delivered by Email directly to your inbox.

Google Ventures seeks to discover and grow great companies, they believe in the power of entrepreneurs to do amazing things. Google Ventures is broadly interested in startups in industries including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others.

They invest anywhere from seed funding to tens of millions of dollars and embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the garage to global relevance. They’re looking for entrepreneurs who are tackling problems in creative and innovative ways. Are you one of them?

While many bloggers maintain a blog for personal or social reasons or to generate an income, there are other bloggers who utilize their blogs to promote a cause. These blogs may be aimed at targeting a specific political or social cause depending on the interests of the blogger as well as blogger’s opinion that the blog can produce the political or social changes they are seeking. Blogs which are committed to promoting a particular cause may face more adversity than blogs with a lighter theme but they can also be very effective. However, blog owners who opt to maintain this type of blog should be aware of the ramifications of this type of blog. For example blog owners may receive negative comments from readers of the blog who disagree with the cause. This article will offer a few tips for choosing a cause for a blog and for promoting the blog to interested visitors.

Choosing a Cause for a Blog

Choosing a cause for a blog can vary in difficulty from extremely easy to incredibly difficult. The difficulty in making this decision will depend largely on the personal beliefs of the blog owner. A blog owner who is already committed to a particular cause will likely find this decision to be rather simple while blog owners who either have no strong social or political convictions or who have a wide variety of causes they wish to promote can find making this decision to be rather difficult. There are, however, a few factors the blog owner should carefully consider before selecting a cause to promote in a blog.

First and foremost a blog owner should select an issue for which they are either already quite knowledgeable or for which they are willing to do a great deal of research. This is important because the blog owner should post blog entries on a regular basis. These blog entries should be accurate and informative to the reader. Therefore, the blog owner should be well versed in the subject matter or at least interested in learning more about the subject matter.

Blog owners should also carefully consider the potential for influencing blog visitors regarding the topic of the blog. Although it will not be possible to convince all visitors to the blog to believe in the cause promoted by the blog, the blog owner should select a subject with which he is confident visitors to the blog will be influenced to agree with the viewpoints he presents in the blog.

Promoting the Blog to Interested Visitors

Once a blog owner decides on a subject for the blog, it is time to figure out how to promote the blog to the target audience. This can be accomplished in a number of different ways. For the sake of brevity, this article will discuss promoting a blog through search engine optimization and promoting a blog through participation in relevant forums.

Search engine optimization is a very effective way for promoting a blog. This practice involves making efforts to increase the search engine rankings to ensure interested Internet users are directed to the blog. This can be done in a number of different ways including careful use of appropriate keywords, appropriate use of tags such as title tags and image tags and generating back links to the blog. All of these efforts can help to improve search engine rankings which should also improve blog traffic.

Blog owners can also promote their blog by participating in relevant forums and message boards. The blog owner may simply participate in these forums and offer relevant input while including a link to the blog in his signature. Other forum users are likely to click on the link if the blog owner is well respected within the forum. The blog owner may even be able to incorporate a link to his blog in the message body of forum posts if it appropriate and acceptable according toe the message board guidelines.