Crazy Opera and IE Display Quirks

Someone checking out my last entry about CDN performance helpfully let me know that my site was displaying horribly in Opera. I’d checked in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome and hadn’t noticed a problem and just assumed I was pretty safe in other browsers since I wasn’t doing anything especially amazing.

A few minutes with Browser Shots later and I found out that it was broken in at least Opera 10 (8 and 9 seemed to work fine, oddly) and IE – all versions, including 8. I confirmed the IE8 problems in a virtual machine (compatibility view didn’t help) and dug in with the Opera developer tool Dragonfly.

Curiously, Dragonfly’s DOM view only showed the first div in the HTML that contained the header. It took a few minutes of head scratching before I started toggling options and idly hit the button to expand the HTML tree… Suddenly everything was there. I ran the W3C Validator again, just to be sure it wasn’t my imagination, and it checked out fine.

It didn’t take long backtracking up the tree to find out where I’d gone “wrong”:

<button />

Apparently Opera 10 and IE wanted the full closing tag:

<button></button>

I’m not surprised IE choked on the short tag, but I’m really disappointed in Opera… I’ve never been happy using it, but I always respected their rendering engine.

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10-23-2009
Date
11:06 pm
Time
2100
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218
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2 Comments
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Amazon CloudFront vs. Rackspace Cloud Files CDN Performance

I’ve been playing with both the Amazon CloudFront and Rackspace Cloud Files CDNs over the past week with the eventual aim of offloading all the static files that make up this site (all like 4 of them) to a CDN, mainly for the fun of it.

Having used Amazon’s S3 storage service for quite a while now they were my first choice, but I didn’t want to totally discount the Rackspace offering – they’ve done some seriously cool things in a very short period of time and I swear by their Cloud Servers.

From casually playing around there have only been minor differences. First of all Cloud Files doesn’t seem to support “folders”, so you end up with a much flatter storage pool. For my 4 files that’s really only an issue for my OCD, but Amazon does support hierarchical directory structures, so that’s something to keep in mind.

Otherwise I found Amazon’s system only slightly more annoying in the way you ‘deploy’ an S3 bucket to the CloudFront CDN. It seemed to take slightly longer and emphasize the idea that there were two distinct systems and products being used, whereas Cloud Files seems much more unified – click a check box and you’ve got a CDN URL.

So with one minor annoyance on each side of the aisle I turned to hard quantifiable data, something every programmer loves. I loaded up my stylesheet on both CDNs and pointed a Pingdom check at each. The results were surprising.

Read the rest of this entry »

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10-22-2009
Date
10:47 am
Time
6939
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247
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Update to WordPress Migration Script

I’ve updated the Habari to WordPress migration script from my last post. As special thanks to someone who pointed out that comments weren’t being associated with the right posts, they were totally off because I forgot to translate the old Habari post ID to the new Wordpress ID… Whoops.

The script can be found via my original post, it’s just been silently updated in place.

Again, best of luck to anyone using it…

Update 10/11/09: One more update related to post comment counts – we only want to ‘count’ ones that have been approved. Again, the original link has been updated.

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9-19-2009
Date
11:01 pm
Time
799
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100
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Migrating Habari to WordPress

While of course we never like to see anyone give up on Habari, it’s obviously not going to be the perfect platform for everyone. Hopefully most people will test it out before they make a final switch, but for those who get stuck and wish to switch back to WordPress (and we know you’re out there), I’ve finally throw together a quick script that should help.

Things this migrates:

  • Posts – published or draft
  • Pages – published or draft
  • Comments – approved only
  • Tags

A few caveats: this is MySQL-only, if you’re using Habari on Postgres or SQLite I’m sorry. It wouldn’t be especially difficult to change, I just have no interest in doing so – it suites my purposes. It’s also quite hacky. There’s very little error checking (make that practically none) and it prints output in plain text. It’s also not a plugin, I wrote it as a one-off script that you use and immediately trash because that’s exactly what you should do with it.

Also note that it writes directly to the WordPress database tables, it uses none of their API functions. That means the slightest schema change could (and probably will) break the whole thing and that things like filtering and other plugin actions aren’t performed. I was using the trunk build of 2.9-rare, so roll back to about r11867 if you have problems.

Finally, it will set the owner of a post to an existing WordPress user with the same username if one exists – if not it will create a new user account that you can then manage any way you like.

So how do you actually use it? Well, you dump it in your Habari root directory, edit the array at the top so it can connect to the MySQL database your WordPress instance is installed in, and you load it up in your browser. You should see a bunch of junk about things it finds – and hopefully no MySQL errors along the way. If you see any errors, you’re on your own.

On my VPS I was able to import my blog back into WordPress in a matter of about 2 seconds. For those who want or need to switch back, best of luck to you, hope this helps.

Snag the script over here: wp_migrate_script.php

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8-22-2009
Date
12:59 am
Time
1036
Views
386
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6 Comments
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Developing a New Theme: The Sidebar

I’ve been idly working on a new theme for this site for quite a long time now. It’s now been pretty much completed, I just can’t decide what to do with the sidebar area. There’s so much somewhat random information that I think should go in the sidebar area that it invariably ends up looking cluttered and becomes a useless mass of text.

I’ve been considering a change in logic. Perhaps instead of placing random things like Flickr photos and Twitter feeds in the sidebar I should take a “gateway” approach (or something similar), in which the first page you see is a list of all the sites I use where you can find their individual feeds. Not only can you get to Flickr or Twitter and find me directly, but you can also click through to continue to my blog.

The only real downside here is that the best URL for such a gateway would seem to be chrismeller.com, which would mean my blog would need to move (either to an entirely new domain, a subdomain, or a ho-hum subdirectory). None of these are really desirable, I like my URL exactly the way it is now.

So the consideration goes on… Eventually I’ll probably just make an impulse decision and throw something up, just to get it out there and get over the decision-making hump.

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6-23-2009
Date
4:31 pm
Time
523
Views
227
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