White noise resignation

This is the sort of pish that gives SEO a bad name. Clutters up inboxes as well.

Also have been getting variations of attempted blog posts on client site. Tedious.

Google is meant to be penalising content farms that produce low quality crap, maybe this will change the course of spam river. For a while.

Must be practising - trying out a typo pattern generator using stock phrase, search engine URL (email addresses suppressed for this blog post)

Maybe these are some of the stumbling steps that will lead to true AI :)

Web Site (if any entered):
http://www.google.com/ [Valid URL: True]
Comments:
Cool! That's a clever way of loonkig at it!

Web Site (if any entered):
http://www.bing.com/ [Valid URL: True]
Comments:
Home run! Great slugging with that aswner!

Web Site (if any entered):
http://www.yahoo.com/ [Valid URL: True]
Comments:
AFAIC that's the best aneswr so far!

Facebook frustration

Gah. Nothing is free with Facebook. Money doesn't always change hands but information does.

Dependencies also are affected so anyone using WP-FB AutoConnect will be getting an email something like this: (Justin Klein developer of WP-FB AutoConnect is aware of this recent Facebook issue as of 15th May 2011!)

Dear Developer of Dumfries And Galloway - For Sale Free And Wanted,

Our automated systems have detected that you may be inadvertently allowing authentication data to be passed to 3rd parties. Allowing user ids and access tokens to be passed to 3rd parties, even inadvertently, could allow these 3rd parties to access the data the user made available to your site. This violates our policies and undermines user trust in your site and Facebook Platform.

In every case that we have examined, this information is passed via the HTTP Referer Header by the user's browser. This can happen when using our legacy authentication system and including < iframe >, < img > or < script > content from 3rd parties in the page that receives authentication data from Facebook. Our legacy mechanism passes authentication information in the URL query string which, if handled incorrectly, can be passed to 3rd parties by the browser. Our current OAuth 2.0 authentication system, released over a year ago, passes this information in the URL fragment, which is not passed to 3rd parties by the browser.

Please ensure that you are not allowing this data to be passed immediately. Accessing your site as a test user while running a HTTP proxy/monitor like Charles or Fiddler is the best way to determine if you are allowing this information to be passed. If you discover the issue, you can do one of two things:

1. Migrate your site to use our OAuth 2.0 authentication system. We are requiring all apps and sites to update to this mechanism by Sept. 1, 2011. Migrating now will address this issue and ensure that you are one of the first to meet the deadline. For more details, please see our Authentication Guide.

2. Create and use an interstitial page to remove the authentication data before redirecting to your page with 3rd party content. This approach is used by many of our largest developers today (although they are all migrating to OAuth 2.0 shortly). This is a simple and straightforward change that should have minimal impact on your site. For more details on this approach, see our Legacy Connect Auth doc.

Because of the importance of ensuring user trust and privacy, we are asking you to complete one of the above steps in the next 48 hours. If you fail to do so, your site may be subject to one of the enforcement actions outlined in our policies.

If you have any questions or believe you have received this message in error, please contact us.
Facebook Developer Relations

Print CSS for Internet Explorer 7

Well. What better way to spend time on a bank holiday weekend after the recent "Royal Wedding".

An Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) feature was preventing the page content beyond the first page from printing properly for Albany UK property projects. In the browser's print preview option, the first page was displaying but with content truncated at the foot of the page. The second page onwards showed only the css background color/image but no page content.

Interestingly, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer 8 printed out the pages correctly, although some of the property listings were getting cut in half at the end of the page. Not pretty.

The fix was to invoke the less well known CSS feature "display:inline-block;" for the outer box (div) containing the property listing divs, the property listing divs themselves, and (because of the WordPress structure) the .article class (each property listing is technically a post.)

Sounds straightforward? Well, no. The other part of the fix was to use a CSS hack, or IE7 selector, so that the styles would only be applied in IE7 browsers.

e.g.
#main {position:relative; *position:static; *display:inline-block;}
.article {*display:inline-block;}

Applying the changes to affect all browsers broke the print layout in IE8 and Firefox.

There are some general guides for avoiding CSS print issues:

Beware floats
Stay mindful of absolute or relative positioning
Watch the use of height and width defined in px
Keep an eye on overflow

Ideally the print layout should display all content inline and with auto properties (width, height, position, overflow, etc.) and the browser rendering engine should never be confused by boxes within boxes (nesting of block level elements) but when does that happen, eh?

Some google results that helped...
The Blog of Ben Nadel
ServerFault

Eventful Galloway

Right, that's the DG Arts Festival events now live for booking using the patronbase system on dgArts events system. The festival starts on the 20th May, the day before the 'Streets of Dumfries' event which is a big bag of fun...

A lot of the visual arts exhibitions and children's events are free which is a bonus.

The dgArts website provides a central hub for events in the region so that the geographically widespread arts related groups can have a central marketing point (Bureaucratic Centralism anyone?)

Also listed there is the Thornhill Blues festival (see below), taking place further up the A76 from Dumfries at the end of April. No, it's not sold out yet but the accommodation in the town is pretty booked up so unless you get in quick you may have to use the campsite or stay nearer Dumfries on the Friday night.

Inaugural blues festival in Thornhill

The end of April heralds the first Blues Festival in Thornhill, Dumfries and Galloway. Organised by local enthusiasts from its inception last year, the blues band itinerary is now online and you can get tickets using paypal.

If you live in the Thornhill area there are a few outlets selling tickets for the main event in Thornhill Community Centre on the night of Saturday 30th April.

The initial website was a simple wordpress install, slightly customised, to get the Thornhill Blues online. It uses google documents as the source of the embedded spreadsheets. After the festival Callisti would like to improve the website usability and functionality.

Event Decor Hire - Redecorated

More customised Wordpress theming using child themes here: background static image for the body with CSS3 box shadow and IE8 fallback - CSS3 gradient works in firefox but not safari or ie8 just now but maybe one day...

The revision concentrates on the silver and blue colours of the logo, dispensing with the heavier burgundy so there's an altogether lighter feel to the website. Use was made of the custom menu feature in wordpress 3 to rationalise the content (and make it more user-friendly for the client to update content and images.)

Excalibur Wedding Cars - Mk2

This was fun! A complete revamp of the wedding limousine website using some CSS3 stuff, background image shenanigans, a touch of wordpress plugin-ery and some more experience of using custom themes and menus the way wordpress 3 suggests.

Playing with the custom header images using the set thumbnail function is rewarding but unless you re-define the dimensions of the header image in the wordpress settings, you need to think letterbox or panoramic landscape when selecting images that are going to look right.

Naturally :) there were some editions to functions.php as it still uses the parent theme for this file. The nod to social networking includes facebook like buttons and a recent activity widget.

To ease migration from the previous website, 301 redirects were employed - the xml sitemaps were updated with Yahoo and Google once the SEO-friendly URLs were set.