opinios

Cockatoo Island Festival

The Cockatoo Island festival this Easter looks like a helluva good time. A huge lineup of excellent bands over three days, on the most amazing of locations - an island right in Sydney Harbour! Friends of mine are making a road trip of it and I'm very jealous as we won't be able to join them due to a wedding we will be attending in Melbourne that weekend. It better be a bloody good wedding (just kidding Jodes!!)

Equally as impressive, and the reason I mention the festival, is their promotional web site. The design is by an outfit called Mixed Industry, who clearly have more clients than time to put up a site of their own. The colours and swirls clearly show influence from those famous psychadelic creators the Love Police, but the style is all their own.

And unlike most Flash-o-rama web sites done by those with an artsy background, the Cockatoo Island site has been built with web standards. Well, mostly. While I haven't developed any band or festival sites, I can imagine it would be a hard sell for clients in the music industry to be convinced to let go of their pretty Flash animations completely. However, the majority of the site's content has been written in clean, valid markup that is both accessible and looks pretty when styled, with the Flash header integrated into the top of the page.

Unfortunately the header contains the navigation for the whole site, so the content is not truly accessible as per W3C guidelines. The navigation menu they have in place is something that could have been done easily using HTML and CSS, so I'm not sure why they chose to put it in Flash and restrict their user base to people with Flash plugins installed.

Still, it's pretty darn impressive and a step in the right direction. And so is the festival.

Movable Spam

It appears that any web site running Movable Type, the online publishing software by Six Apart used not only by this humble site, but by countless other reputable blogs and online magazines large and small, have suddenly become incredibly vulnerable to spam.

No no no, not receiving comment spam. I know you already knew that. I'm referring to sending spam.

That's right. Spammers with the know-how (or the initiative to go and read how to do it) can hiijack the mt-comments.cgi script on a Movable Type installation and use it to send out spam to hundreds of email addresses at a time. Using your address.

This isn't spoofing (faking the return address), this is using your address and your mail server. Yes, that's right - this is extremely bad.

This is hot on the tail of news that this same script was responsible for bringing down expensive servers all over the place because of the load it places on the host when a spammer hammers it with an automated process that tries to leave comment spam on an MT blog.

So what can you do about it?

If you host on TypePad, you shouldn't have to do anything as no doubt Six Apart will upgrade you automatically. MT users who have bought a recent version of the software can upgrade to version 3.15 for free. And for those of us who are still running an earlier version, a patch is available, and should be good for most older versions (I think the most recent version before Six Apart began charging for MT was v 2.661).

Or you could just upgrade to TextPattern or WordPress, both fine personal publishing systems that are really evolving into mature and intelligent products. And so far, immune to such attacks. Whether these products are less susceptible because they are designed better, or just less popular, is a call I'm not qualified to make. It's probably a bit of both.

I have been using TextPattern for a few projects recently and have been impressed enough to decide to upgrade 35 Degrees and opinios to use it soon. Unfortunately it takes time and effort, so it won't happen overnight. But it will happen!

Accessible Flash: Inaccessible!

Here's some irony for you: a whitepaper about accessibility in Macromedia Flash... and I can't access the damn thing!

I am running Firefox, the best Windows-based browser out there, and the Flash plugin I have installed has worked fine for me up in all other situations that I can remember.

But not this time.

The "document" (I use that term loosely) is published in a technology called FlashPaper, and loads into a narrow band in the top third of my browser window about 5cm tall. Not tall enough to read anything for more than about, oh 10 seconds, before giving up on the damn thing.

Ok, maybe I shouldn't get too fired up. If I launch that old dinosaur of a web browser that the rest of the world insists on persisting with - you know the one - then the FlashPaper plug-in loads ok. And I'm not going to go pointing the finger of blame too harshly, as I don't know whether the problem lies with the Mozilla plug-in or with the FlashPaper technology (anyone?)

But this is a document, for crying out loud! This isn't some interactive flying simulation with exploding kittens and backtalking frogs being minced in a blender. Good, old-fashioned text. Why not publish it as text? There are plenty of reasons to, but not many I can think of for why not. At the very least, use PDF format if you must. That P is for Portable.

This FlashPaper technology looks like a lame attempt by Macromedia to turn the web into one big Flash movie. Yes folks, that's a bad thing.

At any rate, this example blatantly breaks the golden rule of accessibility: that if you can't make it accessible, you should provide an alternative text version for your content. Just in case your users have trouble, you know, accessing the damn thing.

And the fact that he hasn't done that brings the author's credentials into question in my mind, regardless of how good his whitepaper is.

Inspiration

Keith Robinson once penned an article about inspiration. His aim was to try and capture what inspired people, to make a "repository of inspiration", and the feedback was pretty good.

But I have to say, recommended inspiration is always a bit of a paradox. If someone tells you "this is inspiring", then sometimes it loses a bit of its shine because it has been hyped. You have big expectations, so the gap between what you are expecting and reality isn't quite as big. The bigger that gap is, the bigger the inspiration. The less you know about something, the more pleasantly surprised you are if it's great.

And so I come to the point of my article. I was stumbling around the web, link to link, when I saw that a buddy of mine in Tokyo, Darin Bendall, had spent a week as guest columnist at fecalface.com. And goddamn if I wasn't inspired just to go write again. And draw. And observe. And drink. And enjoy myself.

Darin has captured a snapshot of his hectic life in that city I miss so much (well, every now and then) and it's fan-fucking-tastic. A stream-of-consciousness that one might normally think would sound like a billion other blogs instead comes out as hilarious.

Yes, from a purist's perspective the site design uses tables and frames and is hard to navigate because his articles are listed in reverse-chronological order meaning you either scroll through a long page to find each one or read them in the opposite order they happened. And the formatting gets screwed up and the links don't work. But who cares. It's raw creativity and it's worth persisting with.

I know part of the problem I have writing for the web is that I am a bit of a perfectionist. I probably stifle a lot of creativity because I am too worried about getting the grammar right when I express it. Darin's daily brain dump is a prime example of why it's important to just say it.

And so, six months after he penned this crazy monologue, here I am recommending his week in words and pictures as a source of inspiration. Which means it'll probably be a let-down.

But fuck it, go read it anyway. Cos I loved it.

And go wish him congratulations on getting hitched while you're at it. Everybody's doin' it.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone! Just got back tonight from a wonderful five days in Hobart where we attended Andrew and Kathleen's wedding, a truly beautiful and moving ceremony that we were honoured to be invited to. The setting was idyllic, Kathleen looked lovely and Andrew gave one of the most heart-wrenching speeches I have ever heard, ever. I must confess the tears not only welled up but were streaming down the cheeks.

Congratulations guys, it is fantastic to see two terrific people make each other happy - good vibes like that are infectious.

We made a holiday of it of course: saw the NYE fireworks from the harbour in Hobart, did a few day trips and some walks in the forest. And the drive to Adelaide to see family at Christmas was excellent too, a couple of days on the beautiful beaches of idyllic Kangaroo Island didn't hurt. Kinki will post all the pics soon. Stay tuned.

Update: I closed comments on this site while it was temporarily being neglected, to prevent spammers from cluttering things up. Unfortunately it seems I forgot to turn them on for the last couple of posts. This has been fixed now (thanks gleek!) so if you wanted to respond before but couldn't - well you can now!