PeacockMedia

Saturday, 28 August 2021

Problems with Shell UK website show up 'enhancement opportunity' for Scrutiny

I'm used to seeing a lot of 'image without alt text' warnings. It now seems almost normal, despite the fact that it's a HTML validation error as well as an SEO black mark. It's a quick win, why are we so lax?

In this case there are many other html warnings; missing closing divs, p within h3, closing p with open span. (There are a lot of warnings, just a small section is shown in the screenshot below.)

Multi-headed monster

The SEO results showed up 'missing title' on many important pages. This was hard to believe and indeed it shouldn't be believed - the title tags are present. However (I might call this a bug in Scrutiny) some pages seem to have multiple <head> sections, some even nested!

This unexpected issue tricks Scrutiny into 'body' mode rather than 'head' mode, and it's likely to miss other meta data and <link> tags. I will see that Scrutiny gets an update so that it handles this situation properly - correctly reports the multiple <head> tags and doesn't miss the titles.

Another important issue is links to insecure http:// pages from secure https:// pages - including an http version of the contact form.

The bad links report is juicy. Some are deceptive; it's not unusual for a redirect to a login page to give a 4xx status, we could find out the reason for that and adjust settings. But there are many links here that really are 404. Again, this is a quick win.

This all adds up to very poor quality. It surprises me that one of the top brands is putting so little into its website upkeep. (site: https://www.shellenergy.co.uk crawled using Scrutiny 28 Aug 2021).

Friday, 27 August 2021

The future for Integrity and Scrutiny

[update Feb 22 2022]: Integrity, Integrity Plus and Pro v12 are out of beta and available here.

[post originally written August 2021, updated in the mean time.]

It feels that the various flavours of Integrity and Scrutiny have reached a plateau, they do what they do and judging by their popularity, they're doing it well (all comments welcome).

That's not to say that they're dormant. Far from it. You can see from the release notes that they've all received frequent updates. But these now tend to be improvements and updates rather than new features.

The biggest news recently has been the HTML validation, and work on that will continue.

Work has already begun on v11 of Integrity and Scrutiny, and it'll necessarily be a deep rewrite of the engine. Which will of course be called the v12 engine, because who's heard of a v11 engine?!

Futureproofing is needed. Partly to keep up with changes in the MacOS system, partly to revise the internal structure of the data and partly to replace some tired stuff with newer stuff, for example our current 'sitesucker-like' archiving system.

One feature of Integrity and Scrutiny that has been a bit slack is the archiving. Originally this was simply a dump of the html files during the crawl. It developed a bit, but the archiving and processing in Webarch and Website Watchman have left Integrity and Scrutiny behind, so Integrity and Scrutiny will be brought up to scratch with Webarch-style archiving.

There are long-standing issues that need deeper rewrites in order to fix properly. And parts of the interface that could do with a facelift, particular Scrutiny's website / config management screen.

On the business front, it's more than likely that there will be a price increase, but as usual, no upgrade fee for licence holders of v7 or above. (hint: now is a very good time to buy!)

[Update 28 Nov 2021]

I've just posted a video showing the new Integrity Pro in action.If you use Integrity Pro, this won't *look* tremendously different. The changes are as outlined above; much is under-the-hood, for efficiency or just to keep up-to-date with the changing system and web standards. There are one or two important features missing from the interface in this video.

Friday, 20 August 2021

Many 'soft 404s' found on the KFC website

One way to 'fix' your bad links is to make your server send a 200 code with your custom error page.

Google frowns upon it as "bad practice" and so do I. It makes bad links difficult to find using a link checker. Even if a page says "File not found", no crawling tool will understand that, will see the 200 and move on. Maybe this is why the KFC UK website has so many of them.

The way that Integrity and Scrutiny handle this is to look for specified text on the page and in the title. Obviously it can't be pre-filled with all of the possible terms which might appear on anyone's custom error page, so if you know that you use soft 404s on your site, you must give Integrity / Scrutiny a term that's likely to appear on the error page and that's unlikely to appear anywhere else. Fortunately with this site, WHOOPS! fits the bill. The switch for the soft 404 search and the list of search terms is in Preferences (above).

And here we see them being reported with the status 'soft 404' in place of the actual (incorrect) 200 status returned by the server.

[update 29 Nov 2021] To be fair to KFC, that long list of bad links is now mostly cleared up, although the soft 404 problem still exists, which isn't going to make it easy to find bad links:

If anyone from KFC reads this, we offer a subscription-based monthly website report and would be very happy to include the 'soft 404' check at no extra charge.

Monday, 21 June 2021

If ScreenSleeves doesn't appear to work

If ScreenSleeves Standalone doesn't appear to realise that there's music playing, then the answer is almost certainly linked to permissions.

With each release, MacOS has become more secure. As a general rule it won't do anything unless you've given permission.

Since Catalina, ScreenSleeves won't be able to find out what music is playing without you allowing it to access 'System Events' as well as whatever app(s) you use to play music. When you first run SS, you should see a dialog, and it's important to agree to these things.

Regardless of whether you remember the dialog(s) and what your answer was, you can always grant the necessary permission with a checkbox or two.

You need to go to System Preferences > Security and Privacy > Privacy > Automation

Thursday, 10 June 2021

First Apple Silicon (ARM / M1) builds of our apps

Late to the party, I know. Being at the cutting edge has never been in our mission statement, and no problems have been reported with our apps running on Big Sur under Rosetta (Good job Apple).

This was the first attempt at building Integrity as a UB (which contains native binaries for ARM and Intel based Macs). Of course it was going to be more efficient but I didn't realise just how much faster this would run as a native app on one of the new machines.

The UB versions of Integrity, Integrity Plus, Integrity Pro and Scrutiny are all available on their home pages. They are still in testing and the previous known-stable versions are there too, but all seems fine so far.

Tuesday, 1 June 2021

What's happened to Hue-topia?

The Hue-topia Mac app goes back to November 2013. To be frank, it has been in a vicious cycle of very little interest / therefore very few updates, and has not kept up with changes from Philips such as additions to their API and dropping of support for the v1 (round) bridge.

From the start, Hue-topia had its own interface concepts which it shared with LIFXstyle. These didn't always align with the concepts of the Hue system. Therefore HT was doing a lot of conversion / bridging. This led to a lot of unnecessary complexity and inconsistency within the app,

Hue-topia version 4 is a new version for 2021 and way more of an overhaul than it may appear from the interface. It is intended to be more of an interface with your bridge, and have concepts which align with the Hue system.

Key changes include:

Presets are now Scenes. The scenes list is a nice way to control your lights (click to select a scene appropriate for the mood or time of day, using manual controls for creating those scenes). HT4 allows you to add your own photograph / icon to represent a scene.
Uses newer additions to Philips' API, such as 'localtime' rather than 'time'. These changes tend to make HT less complex and more likely to work as expected.
Sunrise and Sunset functionality used to be managed pretty heavily by HT. It calculated times using your location, allowed you to select from the various definitions of sunset/sunrise, and could regularly update scheduled times on the bridge accordingly. Now the Hue Bridge has its own daylight functionality with configurable offsets and it's more appropriate to make use of that. (not yet implemented in the v4 beta).
Support for sensors. The motion sensor, besides detecting motion and having a little configurability, also has a temperature sensor which can be viewed in HT4.
Effects and the effects designer are no longer a feature of Hue-topia. We feel it's more appropriate for this functionality to form a separate app, which we'll do if people ask.

Version 4 is just about ready for beta. ie most of the functionality (that's intended for v4.0) is there but is in the testing / fixing stage. It'll be freely available for public testing very shortly.

Tuesday, 25 May 2021

Loading files onto RC2014 from Mac

Background: the RC2014 is a Z80-based homebrew computer. I love programming 8-bit computers in Forth, Assembly, sometimes even BASIC.

The ROM I use allows me to select basic/monitor/cpm at startup, I almost always use CP/M. There's a CF card there in the middle of the computer.

Getting files onto that card is the issue. My computer won't read that card natively. There are tools for mounting the card, and for sending a file to the RC2014 via the terminal but I've not been able to get anything working on my Mac yet.

The methods that I've used from the start involve pasting an IHX file in using Hexload or SCM, which load the file into the computer's memory, or a PKG file together with the DOWNLOAD utility which stores the file in the current drive on the CF card.

This requires an easy way to convert the source file to IHX or PKG. Fortunately this isn't too difficult. Those formats just encode the data as hex characters (along with some checksumming / formatting etc).

Here's my little utility. The Open button allows you to choose your source file via a file browser.

When I develop for the RC2014, I'm obviously changing my source file frequently (ie my built binary, .COM or .BIN, or as here, a forth source with extension .F) so the reload button allows me to simply reload the same file with a single click.

In these screenshots, I'm choosing to convert to PKG, which begins with the DOWNLOAD instruction. It's obviously important to have DOWNLOAD in A: on your storage device (This may not work with RC2014 ZED computers). The button labelled 'Out Ext' simply chooses the extension that the file will have when saved. (When I build assembly source, it ends up with .bin extension, but I need it to be .COM when transferred over to the RC2014).

So having chosen the right options and 'Open'ed the file, the converted file is displayed in a text field ready to be copied and pasted. For pasting over to the RC2014, make sure that the terminal is set to make a small delay between characters (as always when pasting). And switch to the drive where you want to save the file. Here's that file being 'pasted' into my F: drive on the RC2014:

Here's the same file, with IHX chosen as the conversion format. This type of file is suitable for loading directly into memory using the Hexload utility on the RC2014, or the SCM (small computer monitor).

This time the 'Start' memory address comes into play. With CP/M this will always be $100.

My utility is not very polished, as is the way with things that you make for yourself. But if this will help you, I've signed and notarized it and you can download it here. It's built to run on MacOS 10.14 upwards.

Let me know if this is useful to you, or if you have any comments / suggestions.

shiela@peacockmedia.software or leave a comment below.