Adrian World Design

Checking on keywords in searches is always funny. This time somebody landed on a page with this sentence

why does the web reload

Are we really supposed to get all our news in G+, FB or with tweets now?

To me RSS feeds is a much cleaner (aka noise free) way to receive the latest information and updates and Google Reader really is a nice clean product for this.

I'm not really in the mood to go shopping for another reader or moving all these feeds into G+, Facebook and tweets. First I get the basic information three times in each channel and way more stuff than I really need and want.

It is one of these mysteries especially when you are a developer and your work revolves about stuff like it. You really wonder how come that major companies involved in Internet technology, website and user experience simply don't care or cannot see certain things.

I have a few websites hosted on a server in Amazon's cloud, commonly known as AWS. They made it pretty simple to open an AWS account from the account you use with your current book/CD/DVD Amazon shopping experience. Convenient but ultimately I have to say just wrong because one is dominantly for private use while the other is usually I think business related.

Anyway. I receive an email that there is a problem with my credit card and payment and sure enough it is an old card I don't use anymore. While entering a new card is as easy as can be, removing the old one is not so much.

It's official. As the year 2012 draws to an end I can honestly say I hate Zend Framework 2, aka ZF2.

Forms had some issues in Versions 1.xx but once you got the hang of it you could do great stuff in a short period of time. Forms now are just a major pain in the butt and the hoops you have to jump through to get things done is beyond me.

The latest aggravation is academic but over the top for me. I've downloaded a release on October 17th that was Version 2.0.3 and looking up the documentation for something I'm stumped to see we are already at 2.2 and some things they write are just plain missing in my release or have considerably changed.

I've been doing a lot of system maintenance lately. Setting up a new PC, moving around files and of course install applications. What I'm experiencing is just not funny and I'm afraid of where this all is going.

Somewhat the Dell system has Adobe Reader pre-installed which is okay because lets face it we have to read PDF files a lot.

But just a few days in it already needs a "new" update which takes more than just a minute on my new blazing fast system. This is already ridiculous but here's what is really bothering me.

One of my websites experienced a little Social Media storm yesterday. Well actually it was more a tempest in a teapot but it was enough for me that I noticed and witnessed what I've suspected for a long time.

Someone visited my Country List website and they considered it worthy enough to tweet about it. It happened what you expect and hope for when somebody tweets about your website.

Within minutes about 20 followers who saw the tweet visited my website and some of them even looked around a little bit. Woohoo! But then it happened what I'm so skeptical about with social media—especially Twitter, Facebook and to some extend even tumblr here.

The storm lasted pretty much 45 minutes and then it was over. And I mean really over. Within the following 24 hours only 2 more hits came from the link. Mind you that they have close to 3,000 followers, hence about less than 1% clicked the link in the tweet.

The problem I see with Twitter and Facebook is that we are so overloaded with "new" information that we cannot keep and people usually simply do not scroll back in history more than a couple hours. You would also think that the news aggregators will come to your rescue but there have been only a couple more hits. And guess what? Pretty much within that exact same time period.

The naked truth is this: If your followers don't see your tweet or Facebook update within an hour or two of their online social media presence your message goes unnoticed. The same applies to the news aggregators. The other problem is that you cannot really place or send links to tweets and Facebook updates. As a site owner you don't really benefit from it in a long term like some SEO juice.

If you have a website and some monitoring you can see all sorts of strange stuff. Hackers and also some shady SEO practices like referrer spam. Lately I see something new that looks just like yet another new SEO scheme.

In this scheme they are submitting a GET request to your website with usually just one key/value pair. The key string appears to be just something random but the value is an actual URL string for some website.

As I wrote earlier about Zend Form Decorators and other stuff in Zend Form in ZF2 my antagonism with Version 2 of the Zend Framework just keeps growing.

In Zend Framework 1.x and with Zend_Form you could create an element with a couple simple methods: addElement() or createElement(). If you wanted a set of radio buttons you just added "radio" into the method. Add your options, done, simple.

Now with ZF2 you have to add the whole frikking class name as the type which means as a string. As a string probably most if not all IDEs don't help you out with completion. The add() method in Zend Form passes the whole request to the Zend\Form\Factory which is expecting a full valid class name.

Checked my logs and see that somebody visited a page of my main website AWD who typed the following question in Google.

how to use facebook and to zend a message for the world

So, when you type zend instead of send and this for the world you will naturally find my website because I work with and write about the Zend Framework and have the world in my name. Plus I have Facebook on my site and I also have a couple articles that relate to Facebook.

Sometimes I wonder. There's a company offering web development with outstanding code and excellent customer service. Now they are placing something like a little ad saying:

"we would love to talk to experienced web designers about best practices for web design and web development"

Oh, and there's some free coffee in it for you. Awesome!

How can you provide outstanding code and yet have to ask (your competitors nonetheless) for best practices?

The journey continues into Zend Framework 2 (ZF2) and I'm still not thrilled; quite the opposite the more I see.

In Zend Framework 1.x you could write simple yet powerful ini configuration files for use in your applications. I'm developing such an application right now with some heavy use of configuration files. Simply speaking I have something like a configuration file per controller and sections for all the different actions in it.

So far so good but now I have a controller and ran into some actions with a configuration file where I have a lot of duplicate content. There are just some minor variations between them which means in each section I could use some inheritance from a default section.

In Version 1.x no problem because you simply used the colon and reference to what you like to inherit. In ZF2 this is simply gone because of some thoughtful but wrong decision.

In a meeting log you can see the discussion to have "No more environment sections in configuration files" and little bit below "... to be replaced by individual config files per-environment".

If they think this is a wise decision for their MVC skeleton application so be it but for other cases I just don't like to maintain different files and like in my new project I have to deal with duplicate content now.

Here's my question: "Do you hate the decorators in Zend Framework 1.x for the forms?" Yes? You're welcome, your voice has been heard.

I finally have some time to look at Zend Framework 2 and because it was just announced to be RC1 you could expect something decent and close to a final release. Actually they silently moved over RC2 and within just 3 weeks to RC3 on August 10.

Looking at a few things and now the Zend\Form I'm pretty much stunned and disappointed. For instance, the whole Form section is basically just a pile of individual components and it appears the documentation lags miles behind.

Many developers apparently hated the decorators in Zend Framework 1.x but it basically allowed you to call echo $form->render() and you're done with the output of the form. One short single line of code and done. Thanks to the decorators. Now it looks like the decorators are gone, the render method and with it the view as an integral part of it.

Looking through the documentation and investigating some of the classes you basically have to pick every single piece from your form object and your element objects. Then you'll pass it on to the view—and this is just delicious—select the corresponding view helper for the particular piece. What you'll get back is a simple naked string. No indents, no line break, no echo! Just a string!

You will have to call echo for every return, manage your own indents and add the new line for each statement.

Want labels? For your label you'll have to provide some special treatment. While the documentation tells you to add it as an attribute it's actually an option. Good luck figuring that out. Next Just calling the view helper $view->formLabel($element) won't cut it. You have to pass the text as a second parameter which has to be the 'formText' view helper and yes the same effing $element object once more!

If you're lucky and read all the documentation or wonder about every view helper you will spot the formRow() view helper. It's the magic bullet so you can actually loop through all your elements and it will call all the right stuff for; yes, including the label view helper. Otherwise you'd have to first check what type of element and then switch to the appropriate helper.

The error message is also a separate part and pass it all on the view and view helper.

I've just read a blog post about how Pinterest can be used to improve your search page result ranking, aka SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Not my specialty but SEO is still a thing I am very much interested as a web developer.

Now the point they are making is absolute valid. I have no doubt that this will work just fine in terms of SEO.

However, I wonder if and how you have to change your content to attract Pins for your pages—especially for a business. If you get the elevator pitch about Pinterest it is about pinning images around web to your board. So, what about if you don't have images as your main focus or content? It's probably not much of a technical problem I think but we deal with people here. It's really the question: "What does it take so people will pin your webpage to their board?"

It is getting harder and harder every week for a business to have people "Like" your webpages on Facebook or tweet about it. Unless it is something funny, cool or really stupid. If you did something stupid don't worry, people will "Like" you like crazy and if you're big enough you'll even become a trend on Twitter—easily.

Otherwise, people tend to shy away from promoting businesses. Same so far on Pinterest. Most things I see is still fun stuff or "cool" aka expensive consumer products, which in many cases are not even linked (or is it pinned now) to the company's website but somebody else's webpage.

It seems as if Firefox (Mozilla) is not accepting any old browsers of its brand on the Internet anymore.

I have a developer system and was still running Firefox 3.x on it and any update message so far usually only informed me that there is a newer version but nothing else.

Today I was flashed with the update message "Restart Now" or "Restart Later" and for version 12. There's no way around it, Firefox wants me to update to their latest version. Dang it!

Once I've restarted the browser I got a default page saying "Congratulations!" You're welcome.

You know what's a little funny, though? Right next to the Congratulation message "Your Firefox is up to date." there is a download button in bright green saying "Firefox Free Download".

After the initial experience with downloading the trial versions the slightly annoying journey with FileMaker continues.

First of all, when you execute the downloaded 289 MBytes file it extracts data into a new folder on the very same directory. If you thought about storing that initial setup file on a separate drive or network it will create that folder right there, without asking! Once the installation is complete the folder, of course, remains right there where it has been created.

There is this concept about a tmp or temp folder, that's short for temporary. The folks at FileMaker (Apple) apparently have never heard of it.

Second, and this is really annoying, once you start the new installed FileMaker application you are welcomed with the message that your fresh downloaded version was not the latest. Well, I know the folks at FileMaker are not the only people out there who don't understand the concept of download versus shipping a CD or DVD but I really don't see why it is so difficult to provide the latest version for a download from your own website.

Third and last but not least, the icing on the cake, the so called "updater" is a file basically the same size (287 MBytes) as the originally outdated version. That's not an UPDATER, that's a full version. A FULL VERSION you could have used for the first download!

Here's a bet. When I start this UPDATER will it create a new directory in the current folder and extract more data? I bet it will and it did. In the end I have more than 1.09 GBytes of data wasted just for downloading a simple trial version.

Dear people at FileMaker (aka Apple)

It's always about first impressions and in today's world a company website is not only a part of the product or services it is like a handshake or a business card. The website is the first impression we get from a company and a product.

I know your name for quite some time, sometime in the last century actually. Not really your product, though. Now for an upcoming project I might be doing as a freelance developer I finally have to deal with your product(s) and you know what? I think you are stuck in last century because of this first impression I got with your website.

So, I went to download the trial versions. This project I might be doing involves PHP and for that I need the FileMaker Server. Plus, this also requires me to know and download FileMaker Pro. For this two trial downloads you want my information. So far so good, no problemo.

What I have a problem with is that I have to provide, i.e. TYPE, the same information twice for each product during the same session. Somehow it hasn't occurred to you that people might want to download more than just one version.

Now, this isn't just about you FileMaker. Unfortunately, you are not alone.

I always have a hard time to understand why I have to provide my information in the first place because rarely I hear anything back. THANKFULLY, I might add!!! Unless there's a newsletter involved which in most cases can be unchecked.

There are quite a few, lets say famous, blogs out there talking about the web and Internet technologies. Most writers are contributors or independent writers as in they don't work for that blog they just on occasion write an article. They usually get compensated for the article and the blog makes money with the ads running.

Now, so far so good. Sometimes they have a writer who writes a piece with some rather decent content but in between just baloney. The latest I found is about privacy with a section about browsers and how they transmit information.

For instance, popular browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Opera, RockMelt etc, which are based on the WebKit layout engine, are by consequence, insecure. This is not so with Internet Explorer (IE), which supports 128-bit encryption of all data passing to or from its’ servers, making it a tough nut to crack. 

Oh, really? I have no clue how anyone who knows just a little bit about HTTP can say something like this.

Unless you have SSL, aka HTTPS, there is never ever any encryption and a browser has no way of encrypting the data stream. Simply because encryption begins with the server where the data stream gets encrypted. A browser has no saying in this whatsoever, i.e. a browser cannot just simply encrypt the data on the web server. The browser only de-crypts the data with the provided keys. The only exceptions are uploads and the request strings but if the server does not provide HTTPS and with that the keys there is no way the server would know what to do with the data.

Encryption begins with the web server and not a browser!