Sankho Mallik's Web Log.

I thought I had beat him; but again with christ like abilities Sankho Chaudhuri has risen from the dead to take over the #1 spot for google searches under my first name.

Wanna know who he is? Well I’m damn sure not gonna give him any more link juice. I’m pretty sure the only reason he got his #1 status back was because I gave his wikipedia page another link in the first place! Terrible.

Not sure what I’m talking about? Strangely; still wondering? Check out what happened a few posts ago.

Wondering why I haven’t written anything remotely close to web development in months? Well that’s because it’s my blog – and I can.

Seriously? I’ve been insanely busy and promise I will get some new tutorials and thoughts on relevant subjects, other than my personal crusade for a better google page rank. I also will round out the design here shortly – for those unafraid of my ugly, un-styled comment form, please leave me some suggestions as to what I should do.

Not a serious post, but, I am kind of a big deal.

Just wanted to let you know that I’m now the #1 result in google when you search “Sankho.”

Given the number of people I’ve ran into who share my name (1), along with the number of people I know in web development who share my name (0), this may seem like an easy task.

If it weren’t for wikipedia.

For weeks, which felt like decades, I’ve been wondering about this Sankho Chaudhuri fellow. How can a dead Indian sculptor’s wikipedia page be deemed as more important or relevant in the eyes of google than me?

Google, has though forsaken me? Even after I stopped using because I was too lazy to download a cracked copy gave up on Microsoft office for Google documents?

No longer! I now top the charts! Though I must admit that I pray that my link won’t positively affect the sculptor’s wikipedia page’s page rank, and thus invalidate this whole post by bumping his dead ass back to the top. That’d be ironic.

Front end development is all about the end user, and their experience with the website. Usability is judged upon the quality of a user’s experience while interacting with the object in question; in this question, a website.

Recently, six revisions put out a great article on usability. It took a very general view; taking concern over a site’s feature set and general design. Most articles I’ve read on the web focus on usability from a pure designer’s perspective; I’m here to drop some knowledge about how to enhance the usability of your site from a developer’s perspective: using HTML, CSS, and equality for all. Sort of a joke.

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But you may have not been able to reach me for the past few days.

Sorry about that – just had a few hiccups while moving my domain + hosting onto the rackspace cloud.

I was attracted to cloud hosting by it’s price and a previous positive interaction with Rackspace through a client. Naively, without much reading and a quick trigger finger, I purchased some cloud hosting.

Little did I know I was escaping my safe world of Panels and easy DNS administration – this was a little more complicated than moving some files around.

When you sign up onto the rackspace cloud, you’re literally portioned off a bare bones linux machine. You choose the distro; and that’s it. Everything else you have to setup yourself. A little daunting for those of us not totally comfortable setting up our own servers; not all developers are necessarily IT guys, and I certainly am not.

But as you can see, I made it out alive and am posting again! Will provide further details in a “5 minute” tutorial of how to get your website up and running on the rackspace cloud servers in no time!

Yeah, sure, I’d love to see all IE6 users stop using their browsers too, but that’s not what I’m proposing here for IE8 users.

IE8 is a huge improvement in comparison to browsers of the past. Unfortunately, it’s still another browser that we web developers have to perform a cross browser check.

What’s even more frustrating is that IE8 comes with a “compatibility mode,” where users can force IE8 to render code as if it were IE7. This is of course to “make up” for developers who didn’t check their code in IE8.

WTF would Microsoft ship a new browser, with the option to have it act like an older browser? Makes no sense to me; however, I WILL take advantage of this fact to save me time in producing a web site.

Just stick this meta tag RIGHT BELOW the opening head tag. Anywhere else and it’s libel not to work.

And that’s it! If you were having issues in IE8 but NOT IE7 – have issues no more. This meta tag forces compatibility mode to be “on” for whoever browses this site using IE8, and renders the code as if it were IE7. If it’s working, you should not be able to click on the torn page icon for compatibility mode on the right of the url bar.

Correct:

Incorrect:

So now, all you gotta do is make sure your code is Kosher with IE7 – if that’s true, then just stick this meta tag in and not worry about IE8!

Note to Microsoft: Just adopt webkit already! Let me use my rounded corners in your market share majority browser damnit! I’m sick of all this alpha filter crap! If you can do that for IE9, I’ll stop ignoring IE8 developments completely.

Honestly, it’s not that Microsoft makes IE. It’s just a shitty browser. Every rendition.

IE8 makes the furthest step away from mediocrity, but here are my major two gripes: No webkit support, meaning I still have to use a rounded corners plugin to get things done. And really – why have a compatibility mode? I don’t even test for IE8, I simple include a meta tag, which I’ll probably write about in a later post.

Anyways! It appears IE is dying, in small margins, but death is a slow process. Check out the article at CNet for more.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10388289-264.html

Honestly, it’s pretty easy to do. But when searching for documentation, it wasn’t easy to find exactly what I wanted to do, so I figured I should blog about it.

What I needed was a way to easily connect my existing web application with facebook connect. What’s Facebook Connect? In a nutshell, it allows users to log in and register to your site via their facebook credentials. Here’s some more in – depth detail if you’re looking for more information; this tutorial assumes you know what the deal is with Facebook Connect and want to get it onto your application soon.

I added facebook connect to a site running PHP and using MySQL for the database; this tutorial assumes you will be doing so as well. I used Facebook’s PHP API to connect my site, and the same goes with that. If you’ve ever build a facebook application before, you’re familiar with Facebook’s API.

The last assumption I make is that you have already built a site with a full user login system, your site allows cookies, and caters to javascript enabled browsers. Basically, you built this site of yours after 2002 or so.

After the break we’ll get to it.

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If you’re an iPhone snob like me, you find yourself talking to anyone you can about the latest apps from the store, that new case you saw on the iPhone Blog, the funny / jealous looks people give you on the street thumbing your iPod app around, etc etc.

After glorifying in it’s awesomeness enough, someone will eventually say to me “yeah, but it has shit for battery life.”

And here’s the shocker: I disagree. I’m fairly satisfied with my iPhone’s battery life. And for that matter, I’ve always been satisfied with my cell phone batteries for as long as I’ve had cell phones in my life. Same with laptop batteries. What do these rechargeable batteries (usually) have in common? They’re Lithium Ion batteries.

Bottom line: Lithium Ion batteries DO NOT have to degrade in battery life. All you have to do is take better care of them. And all THAT requires is 3 easy changes in your life, and the habits you develop in charging your batteries.

Check past the jump for these 3 steps and a quick explanation.

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