Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Good kitty…nice kitty…

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Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar)Long story short — after two weeks of waiting, and a good few hours of ‘puter work, I’ve just upgraded my main mac (and webserver) to the newest version of Mac OS X, ‘Jaguar’ (v10.2).

What does this mean for you, the end-user? Um…nothing.

For me, though, it’s definitely a good thing. Even on my rapidly aging 350 MHz G3, the system is noticeably faster than prior versions of OS X were. Man, do I wish I could afford a newer machine that can actually take advantage of some of the optimizations built into this! Ah, well. Someday.

(Also, many thanks to two articles that helped me make sure I had everything up and running correctly under the new system: Apache Web Serving with Mac OS X and Setting up a site server with Jaguar, both from the MacDevCenter.)

Accessibility statement

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I’d done this once before, but as it got lost in my site crash, I took a few minutes to go through Dive Into Accessibility and make sure that my site was up to spec. I’m good to go, so here’s the official babble:

Note: This accessibility statement was written for my old site at djwudi.com. While the majority of it will still correspond to michaelhanscom.com, I’ve yet to go through and double-check everything. Please bear that in mind. Thanks!

Accessibility statement

This is the official accessibility statement for www.michaelhanscom.com. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at djwudi@myrealbox.com.

Access keys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key.

All pages on this site define the following access keys:

  • Access key 1 – Home page
  • Access key 4 – Search
  • Access key 9 – Feedback
  • Access key 0 – Accessibility statement

Standards compliance

  1. All pages on this site are at least Bobby and WCAG A approved, AA and AAA when possible. This is always a judgement call; many accessibility features can be measured, but many can not.

  2. All pages on this site are Section 508 approved, complying with all of the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines. Again, a judgement call.

  3. All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. This is not a judgement call; a program can determine with 100% accuracy whether a page is valid XHTML. For example, check this page for XHTML validity.

  4. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for the header, H2 tags are used for main titles, H3 tags for subtitles, etc. For example, on this page, JAWS users can skip to the next section within the accessibility statement by pressing ALT+INSERT+4.

Navigation aids

  1. All pages have rel=previous, next, up, and home links to aid navigation in text-only browsers. Netscape 6 and Mozilla users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always).

  2. The home page and all archive pages include a search box (access key 4). Advanced search options are available at the advanced search page.

Links

  1. Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).

  2. Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

  1. All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes.

Visual design

  1. This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.

  2. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified “text size” option in visual browsers.

  3. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility references

  1. W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.

  2. W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.

  3. W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer’s guide to accessibility.

  4. U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.

  5. Dive Into Accessibility, a comprehensive guide to implementing these guidelines in websites, with a focus on the most popular blogging software.

Accessibility software

  1. JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.

  2. Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.

  3. Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.

  4. Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.

  5. Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.

Accessibility services

  1. Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines. A full-featured commercial version is also available.

  2. HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.

  3. Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.

  4. Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.

Related resources

  1. WebAIM, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.

  2. Designing More Usable Web Sites, a large list of additional resources.

Recommended reading

  1. Joe Clark: Building Accessible Websites. Comprehensive but not overwhelming.

  2. Jim Thatcher and others: Constructing Accessible Web Sites. Less comprehensive than Joe’s book, but goes into greater depth in the topics it covers. Gives screenshots of how various screen readers and alternative browsers interpret various tags and markup. Also has an amazing chapter on the current state of legal accessibility requirements.

Thanks to Dive Into Accessibility for the template for this Accessibility statment.

Search re-enabled

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I know that the majority of my posts lately have been site-oriented, and are probably insanely boring, but…well…from time to time, I fall into full-on-‘geek mode’. Just bear with me, I’m sure things will be back to the normal boring drivel (rather than the current technical boring drivel) soon enough.

The site search function has been re-enabled. I’m currently using the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine, which has the dual benefits of being very easy to set up and configure (I’ve even got it matching the look and feel of the rest of my site, something I hadn’t bothered to do before), and is extremely powerful. Since I’m still in the process of re-entering all my old posts after the recent crash, it’s only got so much to draw on, but by the time I finish putting two and a half years worth of babble back online, it could be quite useful for finding specific posts.

Font tweaks and hiding links

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Just on the off chance that anyone visits my site tonight (the evening of Sep. 9th, possibly into the morning of Sep. 10th), no, the site normally doesn’t look quite this wonky. I’m working on adjusting my font stylesheet to be a bit more what I’ve got in mind — but things may be a bit odd in the meantime.

Deal with it.

;)

Update: All done now — now things look the way I wanted them to. And, of course, I’m playing with a few more tricks…

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So long, Webloggers

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Well, it’s official — the Webloggers Webring is dead. Not a big surprise, really (some sort of crash had wiped out the linking system a few months ago, and it had been in limbo as to whether or not it could be recovered), but still something of a shame. Better remove those links from the sidebar….

Kung-tunes is back!

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I took a little time last night to get Kung-Tunes back up and running again — as before, there’s now a ‘Music of the Moment’ box displaying whatever .mp3 I’m listening to, updated every 30 seconds so that it’s always current.

Technical details follow…

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Validation fixed (kinda)

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One of the stumbling blocks I discovered today about enabling Trackback is that it breaks the W3C Validator — even though I make sure to use valid XHTML 1.0 in my pages, the validator chokes on the RDF code needed for Trackback to work correctly.

Luckily enough, this evening I stumbled across a discussion of this very problem on philringnalda.com. Brad was kind enough to post a (theoretically) simple PHP trick to hide the RDF code from the validator — unfortunately, for some reason it’s just not working for me. Harrumph. Guess I’ll just go with hiding the RDF data inside HTML comment tags for the moment — it’s a little kludgy, but it should work until something better comes along.

End result — the validator likes me again.

Yet another trick in place

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Alrighty then — more goodies are in place!

To go with the (re-)addition of the smiley hack, I’ve combined a couple other ideas to really enhance the comment postings here. Now, when you leave a comment, in addition to the live comment preview, just above the ‘Name’ field you’ll see a ‘Show smileys »’ link. Clicking on that will reveal a row of smileys — click on any one of them, and the correct code for that smiley will be automatically added to your comment post. Not enough smileys? Click on the ‘More smileys »’ link for a second set. If you don’t want all those faces staring at you while you type, just choose ‘« Hide smileys’ or ‘« Hide more smileys’ and they’ll go back into hiding.

A close examination (well…okay, it wouldn’t have to be that close) of the multitudes of smileys that I originally posted will reveal that there are a lot more smileys available here than I’ve included as clickable in the comments area — I’m still deciding whether or not to add a third set to the comment forms. For now, however, should anyone want to use one of the other smileys…well, I’ll leave that as an exercise for you to figure out. :D

Thanks to ScriptyGoddess Jenn for the clickable-smiley code — the hide/show code I actually managed to figure out on my own after checking out quite a few examples, including Scripty Goddess Jenn’s, Aarondot’s, and an article from O’Reilly.

Smileys are back!

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I had this hack installed a while ago, and had managed to kill it — well, it’s back! Now, when I or anyone posting a comment types in a ‘smiley’ code (for instance, ‘:)’) it will be replaced by the corresponding ‘smiley’ (in this case, ‘:)’).

Below is a list of all the smileys available – just hold your mouse over each one to see the code that produces it.

Thanks to Yahoo! Messenger for the smileys, Sector 101 for the list of codes that mine are based on (though not identical to), and So Very Posh for the hack.