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Alexander Rehm

Alexander Rehm is a web designer, information architect and usability & accessibility auditor. He's currently working as a Director of Live Operations and has extensive experience of developing large-scale architecture and frameworks for online services, catering for millions of users concurrently. In his blog, Alex shares his musings on all things internet, usability, accessibility and gaming.

The trouble with IE6 – why you still may have to support it (and debunking some myths)

the trouble with supporting IE6 - whatwasithinking.co.ukOver the last week or so, the discussion “should we continue to support IE6” has been gaining more and more momentum. Digg, Mashable, Techcrunch and other websites ran features about why IE6 should be given the boot, websites like facebook and youtube are starting to phase out the browser, hinting users to upgrade their browser.

This sparked a long and heated debate in a number of web design agencies and clients I am working with (or have worked with / for), whether it would be worth just dropping the support for Internet Explorer 6 and ask users to upgrade their browsers so that they can enjoy the website to the fullest.

Coming from a usability, accessibility, SEO and web dev background, I thought it might be a good idea writing why I would recommend supporting (or not supporting) IE6 in the industry I am working for. Keep Reading

WordPress 2.8.1 – tighter plugin security and a faster dashboard

WordPress has just released an update to their popular blog-software: WordPress 2.8.1.

Aside from the usual bug fixes, this update addresses a security issue where admin pages created by certain plugins could be viewed by unprivileged users. In other notes, the update reduces the memory usage of the dashboard (always welcome!), improves the automatic upgrade process (no longer will the upgrade accidentally delete files from a failed upgrade), fixes glitches in styling in the plugin editor and auto-save errors in IE as well as a fix to the rich-text-editor not loading properly due to compression issues.

For a full list of changes, head over to the official WordPress blog, and download WordPress 2.8.1 from here.

Mozilla Jetpack – FireFox add-on development using HTML, CSS and Javascript

Mozilla Jetpack released - whatwasithinking.co.ukA couple of weeks ago, the creative minds behind Mozilla Labs have launched the open source project Jetpack to the FireFox community.

Jetpack is an API which enables designers and developers to write add-ons using HTML, CSS and Javascript, encouraging more and more developers to join the 8,000+ people strong add-on community.

The Mozilla Labs Jetpack website already has a wealth of information, from guidelines to tutorials (ranging from how to disable <embed>’s or how to integrate the twitter API) and information on distributing your new add-on.

If you would like to find out more, just head over to Jetpack.mozillalabs.com for more information.

FireFox 3.5 – big update, new technologies, faster browsing

firefox3.5 released - whatwasithinking.co.ukFireFox, one of the most popular browsers on the market, has been updated to version 3.5 yesterday. Based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, this browser promises to be about twice as fast as FireFox 3 (and 10x faster than FF2!), to support new technologies, improve its performance and be even easier to use than before…

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Small downtime – but now I’m back!

Downtime - whatwasithinking.co.ukDear reader,

I would like to apologise for the downtime and/or sluggish speeds in accessing this weblog over the last week. The reason was that one of the servers of the datacenter this website is being hosted with has malfunctioned and needed some TLC and a reboot or two.

Everything should be sorted now and we are back in business! 🙂

While you’re reading this, why not check out one of the most popular posts of this site or follow me for more news, information, links and advice here?

Cheers,

ALEX

WordPress 2.8 – upgraded and ready to go!

wordpress 2.8 upgrade - Whatwasithinking.co.ukWordPress 2.8 has been released just a few days ago. Here are the most notable features of 2.8:

  • New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
  • Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
  • Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
  • Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
  • Improved database performance
  • Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
  • Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation
  • Improvements to the script loader: allows plugins to queue scripts for the front end head and footer, adds hooks for server side caching of compressed scripts, adds support for ENFORCE_GZIP constant (deflate is used by default since it’s faster)
  • Load the minified versions of the scripts by default, define(‘SCRIPT_DEBUG’, true); can be used to load the development versions
  • And many more!

For a list of all features, please have a look here.

You can download WordPress 2.8 here.

Time to upgrade Google Analytics?

upgrading from urchin to ga.js - whatwasithinkingIn April, Pingdom released information on their web monitoring survey of 10.000 well-known websites to discover who was using Google Analytics. The results – about half of the websites tested used Google Analytics, and 40% of those were still using the legacy tracking code urchin.js.

Just over a year ago, Google stopped supporting urchin in favour of their own ga.js tracking code, recommending everyone to switch over to the new tracking code…

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