fustakrakich's Friends

Browser Rendering - Going Backwards

Posted by turgid on Thursday July 09 2015, @08:21PM (#1330)
1 Comment

I'm still using Firefox, and I have it on my (new) Android phone as well as my home Linux system.

A couple of days ago, Firefox updated itself on my phone, and now it renders pages differently, and less well, in my opinion. It may just be a coincidence. Maybe soylentews.org has changed?

Up until the upgrade, it used to render the main text area in stories and the comment threads below to fill the width of the screen automatically, and the text would wrap at the screen edges. I like this, because the (useful/interesting) text is automatically the most prominent and is given all the screen area. Also, zooming would make the text larger, and would still wrap it at the edges if the screen, so you could still read everything without scrolling left and right continually.

Now, the whole page takes the whole width of the screen, and you have to manually zoom to the text, and it doesn't wrap, because you're zooming the whole pages, borders, menus and all, not just the interesting stuff.

Have I missed something? Is there a setting in the browser?

In general in the last few years as shallow but wide screens have become the norm, we pages are generally designed to a certain fixed width. Gone are the days when you could resize your browser window and the text would reflow to fit your personal preference.

I read better in relatively narrow vertical columns. I was once told that this is most natural, and one of the reasons that traditional newspapers printed in columns. It's tiring and easy to get lost reading very long horizontal lines.

And those of us who like to use our window managers to have multiple windows tiled and overlapping on our multiple desktops do not like to have to maximise a browser window or to take up 80% of the screen just to render a fixed-width web page.

And web pages these days are all L A R G E F O N T S, W H I T E S P A C E , A N I M A T I O N S, V I D E O S A N D F L O A T I N G P O P O V E R M E N U S A N D C A N C E L B U T T O N S.

Bah!

Update: It appears that Firefox has an option to make the text larger which solves the immediate problem with rendering this site.

Python

Posted by turgid on Saturday June 20 2015, @09:10AM (#1293)
6 Comments

The time has come to learn some Python. I have a rough idea what it is having read about it in the past and probably spent about half an hour playing with it many years ago.

I'm so busy these days (working long hours, family life) I find it hard to keep up with all the developments so I'd like to ask a couple of questions, since I believe the Python language changes significantly between each major release.

At my current place of work, we have development systems running ancient versions of Red Hat with Python 2.6.x. At home I have Slackware which has Python 2.7.5 by default. There are much newer versions of Python out in the wild these days, and I'm not scared to compile from source.

So, which version of Python should I start with? In a nutshell, what are the main differences? Which parts of the language are backwards-compatible?

Number Five

Posted by mcgrew on Friday June 19 2015, @03:47PM (#1290)
4 Comments

I just sent off for the fifth and, I hope, last pre-publication copy of Yesterday's Tomorrows. I was sure it would be finished a month ago, but there were problems printing it due to some of the illustrations being too high of a resolution. It took a month to get the fourth printed.

I can't decide whether or not to assign an ISBN to it, since the book may not be legal in all countries. What do you think? I only have three or four left, and a block of ten is $250. Should I use one? The only country besides the US that has bought my books was Great Britain, and very few there although the web site gets visits from all over the world.

I'm pretty sure I'll never sell a book in Australia, because they're crazy expensive down there; tariffs, probably.

Oh, if you want to read the copy of Huckleberry Finn at my site, better hurry because when I post Yesterday's Tomorrows I'll have to take the Twain book down to make space. It will be back up this fall when I renew my URL and upgrade my hosting level. When it's back up I'll have a version that's easy to read on a phone.

A suggestion to mobile browser makers and the W3C

Posted by mcgrew on Thursday May 14 2015, @05:54PM (#1220)
3 Comments

There are an awful lot of pages on my web site, and I've been busy making them all "mobile-friendly". Most of them are little or no problem making them look good on all platforms, but there are three that are especially problematic.

I jumped this hurdle (well, sort of stumbled past it) by making two of each of the pages with a link to the mobile page from the index.

Ideally, I could just check to see if it was a phone or not and redirect phones to the mobile page, but there's no way to make this 100% successful*. Each brand of phone has a different user agent, there are a lot of installable phone browsers. On top of that, is it an Android phone or an Android tablet? With the minimum typeface size and viewport set, those pages are fine on the PC version but the phone version looks like crap.

Apple should have thought of this when they made the first iPhone, and Google should have thought of this when developing Android. The answer is simple, but it can only be implimented by browser makers and perhaps the W3C.

From the beginning of the World Wide Web, browsers looked for index.html, the default front page in any directory. This worked fine before smart phones, but no longer.

Phone browsers should look first for mobile.html, and if it exists display that, and display index.html if it isn't there. Tablets and computers would behave as they always have.

It doesn't have to be mobile.html, it could be any name as long as everyone agreed that it was the standard, like they did with index.html.

Maintaining a web site would be much easier if they did this. What do you guys think?

* A fellow Soylent tipped me to the Apache Mobile Filter. It looks promising, especially since my host uses Apache. I'm looking into it.

Yooman Rights

Posted by turgid on Monday May 11 2015, @08:23PM (#1213)
0 Comments

Yooman rights? Yooman rights! I don't need no yooman rights! I ain't foreign and I ain't done nuffink wrong.

Michael "Teachers are the Enemies of Promise" Gove is going to give us a nice British Bill of Rights instead. They did promise to stop their supporters voting for Nigel and the bigots. Nigel didn't resign after all.

And Gove is going to be working with Theresa May, who will be pushing through the Snoopers Charter.

And the kickings are about to begin.

General Election's a Comin'

Posted by turgid on Tuesday May 05 2015, @07:58PM (#1198)
2 Comments

Here in Blighty, we're having a General Election on Thursday 7th May.

This time around, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party has conceded that it will probably lose votes to UKIP.

Oh dear.

How to make "mobile-friendly" web pages

Posted by mcgrew on Thursday April 30 2015, @07:48PM (#1189)
4 Comments

I finally got the full texts of Nobots and Mars, Ho! to display well on a phone. My thanks to Google for showing me how, even if the way they present the information is more like trial and error, but it's actually easy once you jump through all their hoops. I'll make it easy.

First, you need to make sure it will fit on a phone's screen. I've been preaching for years that it's stupid to use absolute values, except with images; if you don't tell the browser the image size and you are using style sheets, your visitors will be playing that annoying "click the link before it moves again" game.

Some of you folks who studied this in college should demand your tuition be refunded, because they obviously didn't teach this.

Giving tables, divs, and such absolute values almost assures that some of your visitors will have that incredibly annoying and unprofessional horizontal scroll (*cough* slashdot *cough*).

None of the elements (images, divs, etc) can be more than 320 pixels wide, and you need to tell the browser to make it fit on a screen. To do this, add this meta tag to your page's head:

Next, you need to make sure the text is large enough to read without double tapping. The <p> tag does this:

This needs to be placed after the <body> tag and before anything having to do with text.

To test it, just pull the page up on your phone. If it scrolls sideways, you need to work on it.

If you're worried about your Google pagerank, Google has a "mobile friendly test" here. If you flunk, well, when Google says "jump"...

My main index page fails their test. To make it pass the test I would have to ruin the desktop/tablet design. As it is now, the text is readably large on a phone but it has a sideways scroll, which is tiny if you hold the phone sideways, and I added a link at the very start of the page to a version that will pass Google's test, looks fine on a phone, not bad on a tablet but looks like excrement on a computer. The main index works fine on a tablet, since I've made it as "mobile-friendly" as possible.

I'd have it redirect if it saw Android or iOS, but it's been fifteen years since I've done that and I've forgotten how.

Sorry I haven't written...

Posted by mcgrew on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:33PM (#1182)
2 Comments

I have two new stories nearly finished, but I've decided to see if I can sell first publication rights to a magazine. If everyone rejects them, I'll post them then. If one is accepted, it will likely be quite a while before I can post.

With three books in the works I've been really busy. Hell, I've been working harder since I retired than I did when I worked! I got the index pages to my three published books and the "coming soon" page for Yesterday's Tomorrows "mobile-friendly". I don't know why I'm bothering; almost nobody surfs in on a phone or from Google. But at any rate, I got the book Triplanetary and the first two chapters of Mars, Ho "mobile friendly" as well. The Time Machine is next; the epub versions of my books are better than the HTML versions, on a phone, anyway. Twain, Dickens, and God are going to be mobile-hostile for quite a while because of all the artwork in them.

I couldn't make the main index "mobile friendly" without making it look like crap on a computer screen, so I made a copy "mobile friendly", posted it as mobile.html and added a link from the main index.

Site stats say Google has spidered, so I tried to find Mars, Ho!" by googling on the phone. Nothing but Marsho Medical Group, Andy Weir's The Martian, and a facebook page for someone named Mars Ho. Googling "Mars, Ho! novel" did bring up Amazon's e'book copy halfway through the page.

"Mars, Ho! mcgrew" brought up Amazon's e'book first, followed by the mobile-hostile main index, THEN the actual Mars, Ho! index which IS "mobile friendly" (it passed their test). And I thought "mobile friendly" was supposed to raise your ranks? What's up, Google?

The second copy of Yesterday's Tomorrows came yesterday. I didn't expect until the day after tomorrow. I went through it twice yesterday and it's almost ready; there is still a little work before it's published, but it won't be long.

It's a really nice book, with stories by Isaac Asimov, John W Campbell, Murray Leinster, Frederik Pohl, Neil R Jones, Kurt Vonnegut, A. E. Van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, Phillip K Dick, Frank Herbert, James Blish, Lester del Rey, and Jerome Bixby. Covers of the magazines they appeared in are shown, with short biographies and photos of the authors. It's also well-illustrated with illustrations from the original magazines.

Random Scribblings: Junk I've littered the internet with for two decades will probably be next year.

Oh, how do you like my new shirt?

OLD DAYS

Posted by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday April 25 2015, @03:54PM (#1181)
2 Comments

Your friends

Soylent Memes: Our contribution to Galactic Literacy

Posted by aristarchus on Thursday April 23 2015, @07:29AM (#1174)
11 Comments

I have been long impressed with Soylentils. We have forked the beast, beat the dead horse, spanked the monkey, and did something to llamas. So now it think it would be a good time to keep track of our contributions to internet culture. As some are aware, these are usually referred to as memes. I believe the term derives from Mimesis, an ability to copy. As such, many things on Soylent news are copies of earlier Slashdotisms.

Here are some examples:

In soviet russia

I, for one, welcome . . . . overlords!

Frost Piss!

(and this one needs to die)

What I am looking for are memes unique to Soylent News, such as that we are made of people, or referring to members as Soylentils, which just sounds so nutritious and healthy. One other example I am aware of the the term "soyled" as a replacement for "slashdotted". Not sure if we actually have this ability, but it is something worth pursuing. Any other memes, trends, recurring expressions, whatever, that are unique to Soylent News? Soylent minds want to know!

Oft times such things are inadvertent. Just yesterday we had a Fine Article that ended up saying that failure to vaccinate dogs lead to many of them parishing from global worming. OK, that may not stick.

Personalities? We have our own ---I will not name names, but everyone knows who they are. The most nortorious gewg_, the slightly less nortorius and more whining _Anti_gewg_!! And of course. . . no, I said I would not name names, and I only named these two because they are not names, only names posted under AC posts, which could be, and probably are, only me.

So chip in! The sooner we identify memes. the sooner they die! Wait, that is not my intent! I want them to live! Live like quotes from "The Princess Bride" or references to "Firefly" or "Serentity", or anything Monty Pythonesque, and possibly mandatorially XKCD. This is what culture is made of, this is what we are, and we need some way to bring the less culturally sophisticated up to speed, besides ridicule and mod-bombing (if such a thing actually exists). What are the uniquely Soylentilish turns of phrase, a Soylent reference, a Soylental dismissal? I will try to keep a record, so that in the distant future, they will know that we were Soylent, and we were mighty!

SoylentNews

SoylentNews is people

Navigation

Sections

SoylentNews

Log In