Peeled Carrots by Stephen Blake

Favicons have become quite the norm on websites nowadays and I have encountered a few problems with them in the past, since browsers usually cache them and it takes quite awhile for browsers to update when a favicon is changed.

I used to just leave the .ico file in the document root and hoped that the browser would pick it up, but I have recently been told a much better way of ensuring that the correct image is displayed in the URL text field.

Place the file in the images folder and then refer to it in your the head of you html template by using the following code: < link rel="Shortcut Icon" type="image/x-icon" href="../images/favicon.ico" / > (remove spaces in code)

So, one definitely does learn something new everyday. Hat tip to Ali

When I first started doing research on the web to get contact details for Southern African businesses & individuals involved with the web and information technology, I wasn’t convinced that there would be massive interest in another technology conference in South Africa.

However, with responses from over 150 people I am pleased to say that I now know that there is a definite ineterest for a conference like “Technolgy for Africa”. We have had some great responses and feedback from interested people and here are some of the suggested topics which will probably be discussed at the conference:

• Emerging technologies & trends
• Web 2.0
• New Marketing
• The role of Open Source Software
• Blogging & social/community software
• Future of the web
• Telecommunications in Africa - VOIP, mobile/cellular technology
• Web standards

The “power of the blogosphere” has been a great help in getting the word out there. So far there have been at least 6 posts from different bloggers, all of whom have written very supportive articles. It’s a great help to have your guys support, thanks goes out to:

David Duarte
Cowboysengines
Hash @ Whiteafrican.com
Coda.co.za
Scott.za.net
Muti.co.za

During the next few weeks, our main aims are to find a suitable date, add some new features to the website(technologyforafrica.org.) , talk to the key note speakers - and get as much buy in as possible from the Africa web & technology community…

Watch this space, we are going to make this happen!

Technorati Profile

As we are approaching the final stages of one of out projects, I have been doing some serious acceptance testing to make sure that the site is functioning correctly. To set the testing up, I was given a steer in the right direction and used the Seagull wiki as a guide for the installation….hat tip to Demian.

It is really easy to set the test suite up and to get going, all you really need are the following two downloads:

1. Selenium core test suite
2. To record tests the Selenium IDE in Firefox

Once you have installed the Selenium core web application and the plug-in for Firefox (Firefox rocks!!) you good to go:

1. Plan the various tests which you would like to run
2. Set the Firefox IDE to record your actions
3. Once you’ve completed a certain test save the test in an .html file
4. Include a link to your test file in your main index.html (TestSuite) file, which acts as a table of contents for the various tests
5. Then you can either run the tests individually or as a batch

If you would like a more detailed tutorial, I found the one on the thinkPHP blog to be quite useful.

As Demian says, you start getting “addicted” to creating tests and eventually try to become a perfectionist - which is a good place to be in if you want to produce error free sites for clients.

We have finally got the site up and running and are getting some really positive feedback from the web commuunity. Not just in South Africa, but in other parts of the world as well.

The guys at cowboysengines wrote a pretty cool article about the conference idea and they are giving us some solid support!

Please visit the site, at www.technologyforafrica.org and give us some feedback, so that we can give feedback to the speakers, justify sponsorship and organise a really worthwhile event.

Cheers

With the onset of an extremely cold snap of weather on the 1st November, I am longing to go back home to soak up some rays from the hot African sun during Christmas time.

Instead we will be hard at work in a cold and gloomy London, which is really not as bad as it seems. One of the things we have been working on is a project which is really close to the heart and will hopefully benefit the whole of Southern Africa.

The aim of this project is to hold a “web and emerging technologies conference” in South Africa. We want to get international speakers, who are industry leaders and who would like to give some advice to Africans involved in the Web and IT industry.

I have been doing quite a lot of research over the past few months and I really believe that a conference of this nature will be beneficial to the “African technology community”

We have a site up at and running (www.technologyforafrica.org), which is still undergoing some final testing before we start to contact Southern African companies involved in the IT industry. However, if you have any comments or suggestions please contact one of us, or just post a comment to this article.

I am hoping that we will get positive feedback from the majority of people who we contact because I think the concept of “Technology for Africa” is a fantastic opportunity.

Over the past few months, we have done a number of projects using the php Smarty package. Smarty is a fantastic templating engine which is quite easy to use and is extremely powerful. It also enforces the distinction between presentation logic and application logic and provides a great deal of flexibility when developing.

On our most recent project we decided to try and use the php PEAR Quickform module. This has also proved to be a easy to use, yet powerful form generator and processor.One thing which I think needs improving is that when forms are generated, the HTML templates are table based. I am sure that the developers of this package are trying to implement this feature on later realeases, but the package we are using doesn’t generate semantically correct HTML forms.

However, to overcome this sticking point, we combined the smarty and quickform packages to produce semantically correct HTML templates, which have validation and processing ability.

The form generation, validation form processing are extremely quick and provide an awesome amount of felxibility when it comes to both presentation and application logic.

It is truly awesome what can be acheived using open source code.
Go php!!!
For those of you who are intrested in learning about quickform and smarty-check these links out:

• Devarticle
• David Mintz
• Midnighthax

Over the past few weeks, I have been brushing up on the semantics of XHTML and how these impact on CSS, search engines and accessibility of websites. I have been reading Web Standards Solutions, written by Dan Cederholm and I have realised how beneficial it can be to write semantically correct code which is W3C compliant.

All this being said, a thing which has astonished me was published on 456bereastreet, where Roger Johansson pointed out that Google is not adhering to Web standards. I think that this is quite ironic, because Google has become a household name and an industry leader, who have become a role model to a number of businesses in the IT world.

What makes it even more ironic is that semantically correct code is meant to improve search functionality and the most popular search engine isn’t adhering to these simple standards.

I just think that Google have a responsibility in ensuring that they set a good example to web developers throughout the world….