Alexa vs Reality I’d always wondered how closely Alexa’s traffic graphs mirror reality. In a recent article on how the Sun’s traffic was diving uncontrollably, I used an Alexa comparison graph to illustrate my point but I’d never really put the time in to measure its statistics. I think it’s about time that I did. […]
“I want that tested on every browser” What, all 4.5k of them?
I was looking through Google Analytics stats recently to see how many poor old sods there are who still use IE8 and it surprised me that the audience share of the Internet Explorer suite of browsers was less than 11%. The reason that surprised me was that IE was still in the top 3 browsers […]
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but please don’t forget about IE8 this winter
When OK! Magazine relaunched its website recently, I wasn’t expecting much. Another (somewhat) high profile responsive site that completely disintegrates in IE6, IE7 & IE8. Remember that for users of windows XP, IE8 is the latest Internet Explorer browser that they can access and is still the 2nd most popular IE browser, with 25% of […]
Problem with New Relic and Content-Length Workaround Solution
We had a problem today with a 3rd party aggregator, News Now, who have been using wget to scrape the Daily Express site to gather content. All of a sudden their files were ending prematurely by around 100 characters. I tried it myself with curl and reproduced the same problem, but there were a […]
Problem Solved: iPad / iPhone not allowing playback of YouTube videos
The latest in a series of Eureka moments concerning deviously tricky problems, this one drove me nuts. But it’s over now. Monster’s gone. Think of this as therapy. The Problem One of our clients (The Daily Express) had an issue affecting YouTube videos on their site. When they embedded the new(-ish) iFrame code on […]
iOS7 / onBlur, onChange and alerts will bring your site down
Seems that iOS 7 has had a bit of a mixed review since its launch less than a week ago, but today I came across an issue which will bring your site down for iOS 7 users in certain circumstances. Select Boxes now ignore onBlur The site we had the problem with is a car warranty […]
solution to invalid-request-cookie reCaptcha problem
I’m posting this merely as an aide memoire to myself and also in case it helps anyone tearing their hair out regarding a reCaptcha form that was refusing to pass variables over. I had a form on an old site using tables. On one page the recaptcha form worked well. On another, the reCaptcha was […]
An apple a day keeps the developer away
Why are Apple making developing websites with Safari a pain? It used to be my favourite tool, but recent changes in Mountain Lion will make Safari my least-favoured browser. No RSS You can see the argument for deprecating RSS feeds. They’re a bit like cassette tapes: cherished by a dwindling minority and ignored by the […]
Branch completely bypasses IE
Ev Williams and Biz Stone launched Branch this week and as you might expect, not much attention has been paid to older browsers, but exactly how little is a surprise to me. Last year I took a look at how the shop window of the web was changing so that not every user gets the […]
Resource Fork Files, SVN and Versions App: A Cautionary Tale
Every now and again, you come across an unGoogleable problem. This particular one drove me nuts… The Problem I have a new SVN project on an Ubuntu box. I copy files from my Mac desktop to this project via AFP (dragging and dropping with the Ubuntu box mounted as a /Volume) and clean up any […]