Wood and Wire

I’ve just heard that Australians at Work, a site we built for Film Australia, is a finalist in the Best Learning category of the 12th Annual AIMIA Awards. We’re thrilled because it’s a site we’re particularly proud of — especially from a technical point of view.

For a site that is based around video, Australians at Work exhibits an unusually high level of web-standards compliance. We used content negotiation techniques to dynamically serve 2 levels of standards-compliant code. Where browsers send an http accept header that indicates they are fully XHTML compatible, the pages are served as XHTML 1.0 Strict, using the “application/xhtml+xml” mime type in accordance with W3C recommendations. When accessed by older browsers, the page is converted to HTML 4.01 Strict and served as “text/html”. In both cases all pages have been validated using the W3C validator tool. This ensures they are 100% syntactically correct.

This level of standards compliance (ie. serving valid XHTML with the correct mime type) is still quite rare. I would imagine that this is the only public-sector site in Australia that offers this level of web-standards compliance.

We also put a lot of effort into making the video content as accessible as possible. We used Flash for the video and designed for maximum accessibility by attaching accessible text to all essential controls and by implementing keyboard shortcuts for those controls. By using “.swf” files for video rather than the more common “.flv” format, we were able to extend compatibility to users with version 6 of the Flash player, whereas most sites using Flash video require version 7.

Anyway, we’re up against some stiff competition in the final round, and most of the competing sites are certainly more flamboyant and graphically rich. Having been an AIMIA awards judge myself, I know that immediate visual appeal and ‘wow factor’ usually counts for more than what’s under the bonnet – but here’s hoping!

It’s been a hectic week, but we have now moved Ether into new premises.

When we first started the company back in 1993 we had offices in the wonderfully bohemian and sadly demised Blackwattle Studios. During the late 1990s Ingrid and I tended to work on-site with clients, so there wasn’t a great need for anything grander than a desk or two at home. From 2000 onwards we set up an office in the largish basement of our townhouse, and that was working well – at least the commute to work was quick, and it’s made it easy to work while bringing up 2 kids, although finding separation between work and home life has always been rather difficult.

But the last few years have seen the business growing like crazy.

Late last year we realised we needed to get more staff but we had nowhere to put them, so we looked around for commercial space and were pretty uninspired by what we saw, and certainly nothing lived up to the glory days of Blackwattle Studios. Then a couple of the townhouses in our row came up for rent, and it occurred to us that renting one of those might give us just enough separation without losing the convenience of having an office within shouting distance (almost) of home.

So far we couldn’t be happier. Our house now feels spacious again now that Ether has moved out, and in the new place Ingrid and I are both loving having a room each! We’ve also now got a separate video editing suite which is a big improvement on our old situation which was completely open-plan.

My New Office.

Finally, the complex’s pool is just outside the back door of our office. (You can see it on the GoogleEarth snapshot above.) If only they’d finish repairing it so it had some water in it

Earth Shines,
originally uploaded by pietroizzo.

This one is for Jayda Tham and Pete Talbot. I just found this on Flickr. It’s what you guys missed when you fell asleep in the back of the car on the way back to Reykjavik and wouldn’t wake up to come and look at the crater!

Google Earth has just been released as a beta application for MacOS (Tiger only). Oops, there goes the weekend!

I just started a Nick Drake group on Flickr, since I noticed I had a few photos in my collection that would fit in such a group, and I wondered if anyone else might. Having set it up I was surprised how many images on Flickr had connections with Nick. Anyway the group is starting to grow…

I’ve been using US-based DreamHost as a web hosting provider for 3 months now and it has been a uniquely enjoyable experience.

I’ve been building web sites since 1993, and I’ve used upwards of 20 different hosting companies during that time, so I’ve experienced most of the things that can go wrong with a hosting provider, so it’s a joy to have finally found a company that seems to have got it right. I am now in the process of moving all my sites to DreamHost (including this blog as of yesterday), and recommending them to all my clients. In the interests of full and frank disclosure, I should point out that DreamHost offer a particularly generous referral program (such that if you follow one of my links to them and buy server space I score cash!) and that has prompted me to write this public review, rather than just verbally referring my clients to them - which I would be doing anyway.

What I was looking for in a host:

• The ability to administer many domains on one account (DH has no limits)
• Many MySQL instances (once again unlimited on DH)
• PHP4 and PHP5
• Ruby on Rails
• Plenty of cheap storage (I serve many GB of video to my corporate clients)
• Shell access (DH offers this via SSH)
• A powerful control panel

DreamHost offers all of this in spades, as well as somehow managing to be one of the cheapest services.

I had resisted the DreamHost hype for quite a while. Their advertising always seemed a bit tacky and “too good to be true”. I assumed that by promising so much for so little they had probably oversold their server capacity resulting in a service that runs slow and fails often. Nevertheless I signed up as a trial (they have a 97 day money-back guarantee), and I’m glad I did.

The service provides everything they promised plus a few pleasant surprises:

• Their control panel is the best I have ever used (I was initially sceptical that they didn’t offer the industry-standard CPanel)
• The server I am on seems very fast (at least faster than any other shared host I have used)
• There seems to be a strong sense of community among their users which they actively encourage. I get the impression that they are also quite responsive to feedback from that community.
• Little things keep impressing me – for example their one-click install of WordPress was upgraded to version 2.0 on the same day it went final.
• They keep improving the service – a few days ago they announced that they were increasing everyone’s disk allowance x4 and bandwidth allowance x8.

I don’t know what their tech support is like since I haven’t had to use it once.

Update: DreamHost have a special offer on their “Code Monster” plan. For an unspecified limited time, you can get a stonking great 60GB of storage and 1.6TB/month of bandwith for only US$15.95/month. What’s more your allowances increase weekly (by 480MB and 16GB respectively). This is the deal I’m now on and already I’m up to 101GB/2.8TB!

Welcome to the new WordPress 2.0 powered Wood and Wire.

Being a glutton for punishment, I decided to simultaneously upgrade my blogging software, change my blog design (using the fabulous, but still a bit beta/dodgy K2 theme), and move to a new web host at the same time as moving offices!

Anyway, it seems to be working reasonably well – I just need to fix some pages that don’t quite validate, and solve a weird display problem on the new archives page. Let me know what you think of the new design, as I’m still tweaking it and I could do with some feedback.

Update (2 hours later): I decided K2 is still a bit too flaky for regular use, so I’ve reverted to my old design — a hacked version of Clemens Orth’s Relaxation 3-column theme. In addition to the issues mentioned above I discovered that K2 goes completely pear shaped when viewed in IE for Mac (and I still have a number of regular readers stuck on OS9 who still use IE). I also noticed some weird rendering when I tested it in IE/Win, so I thought I’d can it for now. I’ll keep an eye on the project though, as I think it will be really good once the bugs are ironed out.

I’ve just uploaded 42 photos Ingrid took of the New Year’s Day bushfires at Woy Woy (NSW Central Coast). We were staying at the family weekender which is just a few hundred metres across the water from the fires at Phegan’s Bay. You can see the full set at Flickr.

I won’t bother describing the fires as Spike from Woy Woy has done an excellent job of recounting the day’s events on his This Isn’t Sydney blog. He’s also got some great photos.

I spent much of last night sitting on the end of the jetty watching houses burn across the bay. It was an unforgettable sight — if you were able to ignore the tragedy it was actually chillingly beautiful. In the morning, however, the tragedy was all too evident.