Fed up of IE6? Tell your visitors to upgrade with sevenup
I really liked Internet Explorer 7 and love Internet Explorer 8 (yes you Firefox lovers, I love FF as well 
). But, being a web designer since mid 2000, I’ve had the opportunity to design several sites for several browsers and it has always been a pain to support them all.
One really really really really painful browser is the infamous Internet Explorer 6. I have a strong feeling it is also one of the reason why IE has gained such a bad name among developers.
According to StatCounter Global Stats, IE6 is still being used by about 25% of the users, which is a sizable number and cannot be ignored.
Jason Clarke suggests that Microsoft release an update for IE6 for Windows 2000. I don’t think that will ever happen.
Hence, for web developers this still continues to be a painful experience in trying to ensure that their sites work in IE6. You can also check it for other versions of Internet Explorer if you are interested.
Or, you can prompt out a message to your users suggesting that it is high time they upgraded their Internet Explorer 6 to IE7 or even IE8.
This is where sevenup comes into play. SevenUp is a tiny JavaScript that you can embed in your page / site. Whenever a visitor using IE6 lands up on your site he / she will see a window like this.
This is much better message that the really irritating buttons you see all over telling users to stop using Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox. (rant begins) I don’t see why I should stop using Internet Explorer 7 or IE8, just because you can’t code a site properly for the browser! (rant ends).
Another benefit of sevenup is that it is so tiny that users won’t even feel the impact while browsing through your site. Anyone who is not using IE6 will never see a message.
To implement this, download sevenup from the link below or from the Google Code page and add the following lines to any webpage you design. You’ll need to specify the source for the .js file correctly.
…
<body onload="sevenUp.test()">
This is still very much in its infancy so expect a few bugs here and there. You may need to update at regular intervals as the author releases updates. But, it is a good start
- Download sevenup.0.2.js
- Download sevenup.0.2.min.js
About Ajay
A die-hard blogger, web developer, biker, singer, geek, non-stop talker, foodie, movie freak are just some of the words that begin to describe me.
Speed up your site with Scriptalizer.com
Aren’t we all trying very hard to speed up our websites. You’ll find several tips to speed up your site, but one thing that really works is using a single CSS and a single JS.
Whenever you have multiple CSS and JavaScript files, to download each file, your browser makes a separate request to the web server for each of these files. This entire process increases the time to load your file. Hence, by converting all the CSS files to a single file and all the JS files to a single file, you cut down the number of requests.
This is where Scriptalizer.com comes in.
What does it do?
Turn this…
Into this…
Using Scriptalizer.com is really simple. All you need to do is upload your JS and CSS files to Scriptalizer and it will combine these into a single JS and a single CSS file respectively.
As an additional feature, it even minifies the resultant JS and CSS file to further reduce the total file size. Thus, the resultant is an extra speed boost to your site.
Sadly, the problem is that you need to upload your files, which is a manual process. So, it won’t work automatically with all the files on your site. However, on the plus side is that you need to do this only once.
Via: Andy Jarrett
About Ajay
A die-hard blogger, web developer, biker, singer, geek, non-stop talker, foodie, movie freak are just some of the words that begin to describe me.
Dynamic JavaScript with PHP
Early this morning, I released Top 10 – A Page Counter and Popular Posts plugin for WordPress. I detailed my experience while designing this plugin. The major problem that I faced while working with this plugin was with WP Super Cache. WP Super Cache creates a static file of your post and displays this to the viewer. As a result, any PHP code that is present in your WordPress blog template is executed only once and the cached file is then served to your visitor.
The initial version of Top 10 used PHP to record the page views as well as display them and so using WP Super Cache ensured that both of these would never increment.
This is where JavaScript with PHP comes in. I ended up using AJAX to record the page views. However, for displaying the count I chose to do so by serving the PHP file as a JavaScript file.
Here’s how you go about it.
About Ajay
A die-hard blogger, web developer, biker, singer, geek, non-stop talker, foodie, movie freak are just some of the words that begin to describe me.
Google Analytics Tracking Code Updated
And you don’t need to make the change.
Christina explains the change:
So why the change? Adding the try and catch to the snippet removes the possibility that your visitor sees a JavaScript message that doesn’t apply to her. It’s a fairly rare occurrence because messages like these (frequently in the form of an alert box) can only appear if JavaScript messaging has been enabled on the browser. Most browsers have JavaScript messaging turned off by default, but sometimes people unintentionally turn it on. For those visitors who have enabled messaging, the try and catch will have the effect of halting any messages from the Google Analytics tracking code snippet.
The updated code is:
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src=’" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-50020-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}
</script>
Have you updated the code?
About Ajay
A die-hard blogger, web developer, biker, singer, geek, non-stop talker, foodie, movie freak are just some of the words that begin to describe me.
Netvibes UWA Launched
Netvibes has announced the launch of Universal Widget API. The Universal Widget API will replace the Mini-Module API that was used on Netvibes and will make it easy to assemble a widget for any given web service.
Are you creating any widgets?
About Ajay
A die-hard blogger, web developer, biker, singer, geek, non-stop talker, foodie, movie freak are just some of the words that begin to describe me.
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