Internationalisation! ( -zation?)

Like almost all of my software, I wrote Organise to fill my own needs and still use it heavily myself.

Occasionally someone has contacted me about problems with calculations if their system preferences are set to format numbers differently from here in the UK (for example, if they're in a country using a comma as a decimal separator and dot '.' as a thousand separator).

But I've never gone through the app and made sure that Organise works perfectly regardless of user number formats. The same thing applies to the sales tax rate (for example, Canada apparently has three different taxes, which Organise hasn't been able to handle).

I had a wake-up call when Organise was put on offer on a popular download site recently. Why people buy software without taking advantage of a free trial I don't know, but they apparently do, and it's very awkward when they find that it doesn't work for them.

It has been a tough task. The code behind Organise is vast now and there are many places where it makes calculations and needs to take account of the user's choice of number format. But I'm just about there.

And to complete a truly international version (version 6!), I've also tried to add the flexibility that's needed for folks to calculate their sales tax wherever they are. Defaults are in line with the UK rules, but as you can see here it's now as customisable as I think it needs to be.

I hope to have a release candidate ready for download in the new year.

disappointment with iTunes 11

I'd like to give some link love to Joe of eMac Consulting.

His procedure for 'upgrading' iTunes 11 back to 10 worked perfectly for me

I've been open about the fact that I enjoy using Snow Leopard for my day-to-day work. I do think it is the height of Apple's powers and I don't like the general direction since Lion.

After reading about iTunes 11 I couldn't resist getting hold of the shiny new interface.

I think the lack of coverflow was the last straw, but before I realised that I'd started to feel disappointed with the interface.

I'm prepared to accept that this may be a reluctance to adopt change, but for the record here are a few things that baffled me:

• Your music list is data - why not be able to change the way you view that data (list, album list, grid or coverflow) easily with buttons at the top of the window, consistent with Finder?
• The box at the top was a good analogy for an LCD display. OK, it no longer has the LCD look (what is it meant to look like now?) but it just doesn't seem right to have controls in there (eg the shuffle button)
• The play, next and previous buttons no longer look like physical buttons - there's nothing to tell you that they're 'pressable'. I can't see any reason for this change other than 'for the sake of it' but whatever the reason, why still have the volume slider looking 3D physical thing?

I've fallen back in love with iT10 and that's a lesson learned about trying these new things out on my Mountain Lion machine (or rather partition) before making 'difficult-to-reverse' changes here on my lovely Snow Leopard.

sniffing out difficult-to-find broken links

I thought it might be good to document one of the more obscure features of Scrutiny.

The Microsoft Content Management System (or at least the system that I've had the misfortune to be on the editorial end of) had an odd way of dealing with broken links.

If it detected a bad link when generating the page, it would replace the expected 'href' within the link with 'zref'. <a zref = "foo.com">foo.com</a>

This would prevent the user from experiencing a broken page, but they had a link that they could click with nothing happening, and made it impossible to track down broken links.

I don't know whether this thinking is a part of MCMS or part of the system that our providers had built on top of it (and may still be providing to others).

But Scrutiny will find and flag such links.

Do you use a system that makes broken links hard to find?

Server returning 400 for url with no referer

I've had an interesting support problem this morning and thought that it might be useful to log the answer here.

The problem was Scrutiny not being able to get past the starting url - reporting '400 bad request'. But the same url would return the expected page in a browser.

It seems that this particular server doesn't like not being sent a 'referer' field. Scrutiny does send a referer for all other pages it crawls, filled in with the url of the page that the link appears on. But by definition there is no referer for the starting url and at present it doesn't send one.

Going to Advanced settings and entering 'referer' as the name of the first custom header field, with any valid url (including 'http://') as the value then the crawl worked.

Sending an empty string or a space for the value doesn't seem to work, so I'm not sure what the browsers do (If anyone knows the answer to this I'd be grateful)

Testing page weight where gzip is being used

Webmasters using Scrutiny and Reactivity can now see uncompressed and compressed size of files and  therefore easily see the benefit of their servers' gzip service

Following a support request, I've been looking at the way that these apps show file size and page weight where gzip compression is being used.

The idea is simple and effective - the server sends the file compressed and it's re-inflated at the client side. The transfer time is thus reduced.

Scrutiny and Reactivity were giving file size as the uncompressed size.

It was easy to enhance these apps to take this into consideration. They now show both the compressed and uncompressed size of files, and both totals.

The enhancement is now available in Scrutiny 3.1 and ReActivity 1.1

Making best use of Scrutiny's SEO and keyword analysis

I've always tried to write for the human reading the page.

Happily this approach seems to be the Panda- and Penguin-proof one. And of course it makes good long-term sense. It's Google's job to give the searcher the best page, rather than a crap one that's used some clever tricks to get a good rank. Google doesn't want to promote that page and the user doesn't want to see it. Going forward they'll get better at their job and good content will be king.

With this in mind, is a keyword strategy the right way to go?

Brian Clark says yes.

In The Business Case for Agile Content Marketing, he says that Google is getting smarter but still needs help. And that it’s still important to gently tweak your content so that Google knows exactly who are the right people to deliver it to. If you don't use the words "green widgets" in the right locations and frequency, then the search engine won't know that's what your page is about.

I'm not going to try to fine-tune Scrutiny to analyse your content in line with Google's latest update, because they don't tell us anyway, it's constantly changing and different search engines will weight things differently. Instead it will help you get the basics in place, get you thinking about the right keywords and synonyms and show you how well (or not) you're using those words.

After crawling your site, Scrutiny's SEO window will show you a list of your pages. See those with missing title, description or headings can be seen by choosing the appropriate option from the 'Filter' button.

Simply type a keyword or phrase into the search box and the list will be filtered to show only pages containing that phrase. You'll also see a count in various columns to show you the occurrences of the phrase in the url, title, description, headings.

It will also count occurrences in the content, but this is a feature that you have to turn on in Preferences. (switched off by default, only because it slows the crawl and uses disc space).

Scrutiny is free to use unrestricted for 7 scans, and then only 55 GBP for a lifetime licence. More information and download at Scrutiny's home page.

Tutorial - making a custom Bin-it theme

When OSX was first released, Apple moved the trash from the desktop to the dock, which upset a lot of people who found the earlier desktop trash more convenient*.

I first made Bin-it in 2006 to add a desktop trash to OSX, and shortly afterwards collaborated with Chris Knight to add a very quick and easy progressive indication of the trash level with a changing icon.

Built-in themes include the standard OSX trash (with added levels of trash) and for the retro look, pixellated OS7 and OS9 cans.

Here's how to add your own:


1. Prepare between two to six images, 128 pixels x 128 pixels with transparent background. Save in a format that preserves the transparency such as .png or .tiff

2. Go to Preferences > Themes and click the [+] button

 3. Drag-and-drop your images into the image wells. You can also add sound files if you like, again by drag-and-drop

 4. Give your new theme a name and OK

 5. If you have only two images (as I have here) you can just fill in the first and last wells. Although if you drop the empty / full images into wells 2 -> 5 you can control the point at which the bin appears full. OK that sheet and use the Threshold slider to further control the point at which the bin appears full.

More information and the latest version of Bin-it is available at http://peacockmedia.co.uk/bin-it, free for existing licence holders, or £4.95 if not.

* The big inconvenience of the desktop trash was that it was often covered with a window. Note that Bin-it allows you to choose its level: desktop, floating or 'keep on top'.