I’ve finally finished my South African News aggregator website. It’s a website that collates news items from various news sources from South Africa and puts them on one page. You click through to the actual news story website if you want to read more than just the short excerpt.

Why South Africa and why do this?, I hear you ask. Well firstly I thought the domain name was funny so I bought it on a whim. I overheard a South African talking about his country in a pub and it did sound like Ifrica, but maybe Efrica is more accurate?

Then I was left with what I wanted to achieve with the actual site. Greedily I just wanted to earn money from advertising and get as high up certain online search facilities for the phrase “South Africa”. I suppose thats what every other commercial site wants. South Africa is hosting the 2010 World Cup so that gives me three years to climb those rankings and get a piece of that action. The World Cup will be a huge boost for the country and it could be possible to sell the domain name for a very nice profit.

Now I had to work out what to actually do with the site (I’m sure I’ve thought about this the wrong way round). I was toying around with RSS feeds and I suddenly thought of making one place where all the news from South Africa could be screened on just one page. Add some local bloggers and we have a site! Thats what’s up there now.

Over 2007 I’ll keep tabs on its search rankings, the amount of bandwidth the special Magpie RSS aggregator engine uses and the visitor statistics. If it does well then I’ll probably work on stage two of the site which would have the ability for people to select their local cities, choose sports and businesses, nominate their favourite blogs etc.. A little more interaction. We’ll see.

Oh, and if you know any South Africans please send them the site URL and ask them to forward it to their friends, thanks!

Fluffy kitten playing with a laptop, on Google Video.

Found this at the bottom of an old bag I haven’t opened in over fifteen years. Very prophetic.

Moon War, funny online game.

Extremely creepy Monoface person generator. This is great fun and very clever, if a little too high definition occasionally.

Play the 5 Minutes To Kill Yourself game.

Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’ – Superb music video.

And finally, make your own long lost cassette tapes using this online cassette generator.

A Brighton man who runs a message in a bottle service has been asked to “investigate some of the many other ways to send messages overseas.” I just don’t think email is as romantic as that.

Gah! My eyes! I hope I’m nvere asked to make a website as cutesy as this Japanese website I discovered. Here’s Pet Salon Angela.

Science. An article about Superconductors at BBC Science. I remember watching Tomorrow’s World when I was young, seeing the levitating sheets of metal and thinking there would be skateboards like that one day. Seems like there’s still going to be a bit of a wait.

PDF Mags. A brilliant collection of downloadable design magazines from across the world. I’m hoping I get some inspiration from these.

A good video about the future of Net Neutrality.

My latest site. Simple one-page website for a new female plumbing business in Brighton. Introducing Girlz On Tap.

Colorstrology. A really good looking Flash website which will tell you the colours associated with your day of birth. I may start using this for clients!

Seminars about Long Term Thinking. It’s always good to have an idea of what the future holds. This site has a collection of audio seminar mp3s to listen to all based around what the future holds.

Life has consisted of mainly Zelda, The Wire and work this year. No time to find any funny links.

So here’s a clip from The Wire I’ve just uploaded to YouTube. In a rare montage-to-music scene drug dealers Avon Barksdale, Stringer Bell and Stinkum enter the Lowrises to see D’Angelo and check that their product is being sold correctly. The Wire is all filmed on location using no sets whatsoever giving it a real air of authenticity.

The music supervisor of The Wire has his own blog at www.tenthousand.org and wrote a small article about the scene above. There’s some great music downloads and mix tapes at his site too so please go and check it out.

As for The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess on the Nintendo Wii I think I’m about half way through. The video below shows the last boss I finished off a day ago. It’s not me doing the spinning but it’s a good example of the current level of escapism going on at King Mansions. This may act as a small spoiler for those only a short way through the game, and I’m sure I had this baddie down in under 7 minutes:

And as for work well I’m sure I can show you a little of what I’ve been working on here: http://www.audemos.co.uk/redesign/

Ok, here’s some good links:

Ingenious way to kill bees.

The new Burn My Face Off Elmo on YouTube.

No, I didn’t go to see Fat Boy Slim yesterday. There’s some good pictures at The Argus though. Including this famous Brighton face I haven’t seen in ages:

The webstats for KingOfMyCastle during December really skyrocketed. This site had over 80,000 hits and nearly 6,000 unique visitors.

The BBC’s John Simpson looks ahead to World news events in 2007.

I finished watching The Wire Season 1 too and it’s so good I’ve ordered the second box set. Probably the best drama I’ve seen in a very long time. If you skip to the 2:20 in this YouTube video Charlie Brooker gives his opinion of it:

del.icio.us is one of a new generation of community sites that handle your links, posts and articles in interesting ways. Del.icio.us prides itself on being the most popular social bookmarking website allowing users to keep their favourite links or bookmarks online, rather than on their PCs. Nothing too remarkable about that you may say but the clever bit comes when they combine this information to use it in other ways. Then you can see if other people have similar links to you, just how popular your bookmarks are and you may find some links that are more useful than your current ones.

Today I decided to add the ’send to del.icio.us’ links to the bottom of my posts to allow people to automatically add them to the network. This should have been easy as the del.icio.us Save Buttons page has some code there I could use specifically for the the WordPress files which run this website. Unfortunately it didn’t work.

I’ve never programmed JavaScript before so I was stuck on how to make this work. So after around four hours of reading JavaScript primers and some pointing in the right direction online, I managed to fix the code myself.

So for anybody wishing to put a pop-up javascript del.icio.us link on their WordPress posts then please try this code:

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post" onclick="window.open('http://del.icio.us/post?v=4&noui&jump=close&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=< ?php the_title() ?>','delicious', 'toolbar=no,width=700,height=400'); return false;">Save to del.icio.us</a>


The reasons the original code wasn’t working were the encodeURIComponent functions in combination with the apostrophes. I removed them, as they’re both url encoded anyway, and it seems to have worked. So if you come across this page from a search engine or one of the other new social/community/network sites then please save it to del.icio.us as this could help some more people out.

I may be adding links to the other popular sites such as Digg and Reddit but I’ll need a long rest first.

During the redesign of this site I had to take into consideration the current hot topic of web standards, accessibilty. This is where you design your site with respect to people with disabilities, such as blindness, so that it can be viewed in as many different kind of browers and screen readers as possible. There are laws, such as the Disability Discrimination Act UK and US Section 508, demanding that public bodies make their websites fit certain criteria. This makes web accessibility a valuable skill to add to your arsenal. It was also the topic of the recent Brighton & Hove web awards keynote speech by Kevin Carey, the head of HumanITy, a digital inclusion charity. The good news is that accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) share the common traits of demanding well-writen code in line with web standards so there are also financial reasons to adopt them.

During this sites redesign one of my main goals was to fix the poor CSS layout in an attempt to help its SEO. The old fluid layout technique had demoted the middle content to the bottom of my HTML file leaving the busy left and right bars sitting in the middle of the code. Search Engine robots often give up reading a sites content after a certain amount of code and stopped before they got to the actual post. This has now been fixed and the code is semantically sound with the correct use of headers and other CSS tags (with no hacks) allowing me to post my CSS validation badge at the bottom of the sidebar. To get a better understanding of this you should view the source of this web page and you’ll be able to almost read the site yourself (in Internet Explorer go to view/source and in Firefox press CTRL-U.) If most of it makes sense to a human then it should work better on all devices.

After last Wednesday’s post on the live implementation I thought there might be nothing left to change on this site. The PHP templates were fixed, the CSS was fixed, the design had improved by a factor of 10, what else was there to do? After adjusting the rightbar adverts and the comments form I thought I had finished. It was only after I decided to check my site out with some online validation tools I realised there was a lot more to do. The goal was to get one of these:
and to do that I needed to get a pass from a range of different sources. I did well and made around 10 changes that have increased the accessibility by quite a margin. I now present a list of different validation sites, along with comments on why this site failed to pass.

Cynthia Says. My site passed the Section 508 test and only came up with a few warnings, not fails, on the WCAG tests. One problem was with the alternative text of images (the description of the image). You are meant to use an ‘alt’ tag so that people whose browsers have images disabled can still know what the image was. Blind people should also be able to read the image description, not guess what it is from the filename. I enter these descriptions when I create each post and I can often get lazy and ignore them. The recommendations are that the descriptions should be between 7 and 81 characters long and I will endeavour to include these from now on.

TAW. This validation service checks your site against WCAG 1.0 standards up to level AAA (priority three) and is the best looking of the lot. Instead of a list it actually visibly highlights problems across your web page making identification of problems much easier. KingOfMyCastle.com passes Priority 1 & 2 but falls over with only one instance of failure to comply with Priority 3. The mistake is with the search box on the right. I am advised to put some text into this box as some screen readers have difficulty when they are empty. Aesthetically, I felt this was wrong so I have left it blank.

ATRC. This checker validates your site to WCAG 2.0 Level 2 on it’s default setting. Unfortunately my site fails on only one factor, a dodgy link created by WordPress. This link has no text to actually click, which is what the validator complains about. Solving this would involve making changes to the WordPress engine itself, something I’m not about to do. Oh well, at least this isn’t my fault.

EvalAccess 2.0. Ouch! This one threw up over 250 problems and 600 warnings although Priority 1 was clean and Priority 2 had only one issue. The issue was that it didn’t ‘associate labels explicitly with their controls’ in the search area on the right. To fix this would mean putting some text next to the search button saying ‘Press this to search’ which I feel is unnecessary on a submit button. Most of the issues thrown up on Priority 3 are with Access Keys which allow the reader to move to specific links using shortcuts, rather than the mouse. A good article about access keys can be found at A List Apart and it’s well worth the read if you’d like to know more about this underused and badly supported feature.

So that’s the automated experts view on my source code but what do I think? Well, I’m upset that I can’t display the badge proudly at the bottom of this site but I’m not a government organisation which lets me off. This is just some place on the web I dump a number of links, images and articles I think people may find interesting. However, the improvments from the last design are numerous. Just try increasing the font size (CTRL scroll wheel) and you’ll see that the site doesn’t break as before. The markup is much more cleaner and I’m sure that anybody using a device other than a standard web browser will be having a much better experience than they were last week. I’ll just chalk this one up to a big experience gain on my part.

will be happening to this website over the next couple of days. There may be times it’s down and other times you might get some gibberish on the screen. Thats because I’m doing a live implementation of my new web design.

Now you should test your sites on your PC before you implement them but that would mean creating a whole new WordPress database on my computer. Unlike many websites this content is dynamically generated by the WordPress blogging engine. You never get to see WordPress as it’s just the back end I use to write posts, manage comments and upload images. All you see are the HTML pages it generates using my PHP templates and my CSS stylesheets.

I’ve had to radically change both PHP templates and all the CSS for my design so over the next couple of days I’ll be putting them through this blog’s WordPress engine (think mangle or mincer) looking at the output and then fixing all the bugs. Luckily you can swap themes quickly in WordPress so once I’ve outputted a web page I can switch back to the old style while I work on fixing the code.

Hopefully they’ll be a fully functioning website by tomorrow morning.

It’s now 22:50, Wednesday 15th. Let’s see how long it takes. Hope you enjoy the new design!