Vad gäller användningen av bl.a. s.k. cookies klargörs det att uppgifter får lagras eller hämtas hos en användare endast om denne får tillgång till information om ändamålet med behandlingen och samtycker till denna

Which in essence means that before use of cookies and all technologies like it(a bit fuzzy here) the visiting user has to be notified that a piece of information about the user is stored on their computer and what it is going to be used for.

This piece of legislation will go live as per the 1st of july 2011, so in less than two months. It’s gonna be a lot of sites to rebuild.

A better approach to this legislation would be to have put demands on browser makers instead of web site creators(roughly 20-ish browser makers vs. billions of websites to change their code).

So here we are, what do we do? Well there is going to have to be some precedent verdict on this issue before we know for sure, but from my stand point I can identify two viable paths:

Path 1 – In the land were localstorage is king

On the off chance that HTML5 local storage is not being within the reach of this legislation (depending on how the courts see the issue) we could just change our cookie-wrapper-functions to talk with HTML5 local storage.

For browsers that don’t support HTML5 local storage we display a large sign informing them that their browser is old and needs to be updated or they will have to receive tons of popups explaining each cookies purpose and requesting a approval. I mean, they were warned.

Path 2 – In the sober grim reality

But since the law is actually aiming at(and I think that this is how it will be interpreted by judges and jurys) is that tracking has to be done with consent. We will se a lot of sites just ignoring the law al together. Why? Because being the first site to follow this legislation is definitely going to be bad for business. So as all other laws that are impossible to adhere to, it’s going to be largely ignored until someone actually get a law suite agains them.

On twitter @drrotmos is currently trying to persuade a bunch of people suing the governments public web sites for braking this law. First and foremost for getting a really important piece of precedence and maybe, also setting the path for others to follow.

According to HTML5Readiness.com it’s supposedly supported in Firefox 3.5, Firefox 4.0, Chrome 8, Safari 5 and Opera 11. But with just using the navigator.geolocation-object I’ve gotten it to work out of the box with only Firefox 4.0, Opera 11 and Chrome 8. Both Firefox 3.5 and Safari 5 just give me a blank stare.

And it works surprisingly well in Firefox 4.0 and Opera 11 with accuracy down to 80 meters. In Google Chrome however, the accuracy is at 122 000 meters. No, thats not a typo, it’s at 122 000 meters! The most interesting part of this is that in Opera you have to agree to use Google’s location service to enable geolocation. So Google is licensing it’s product to Opera, and yet Opera gets better results.

Shocking!

The code is available at lab.stefan-wallin.se/geopos

I recently had some issues with my internet service provider and had a 76.75 hour long interruption. Service should be restored to normal again. Sorry for the disturbance this might have caused you!

Learn at least one new language every year.

And that I intend to really do!

So to solve this and to get back up on my horse, and catch up to the competition, I’ve bought a book called Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages by Bruce Tate. I hope that it will be inspiring and that I will learn a lot. I will make an effort to at least learn Erlang and Haskell, two languages that I think will broaden any programmers perspective a lot.

Whish me luck, or better yet, hire me!

And here is the image as it is presented to visbly able user with images turned on. The half price on Taco products seemingly just appeared out of nowhere.

However, as a web developer, I know better. I dug up the inspector and fired away, here is the code used to present the image:

<a href="http://clickredirect.com/lr3.asp?mKey=632882&cKey=123665" target="_blank">
<img height="87" width="600" border="0" src="http://www.relationbrand.com/secure/login/medit/users/medmera/_coop_medmera2-Tacos_spakryssning_och_tavling/6.jpg">
</a>

I would’ve done it  this way:

<a href="http://clickredirect.com/lr3.asp?mKey=632882&cKey=123665" target="_blank">
<img height="87" alt="We now offer certain taco products from Santa Maria at half price!" width="600" border="0" src="http://www.relationbrand.com/secure/login/medit/users/medmera/_coop_medmera2-Tacos_spakryssning_och_tavling/6.jpg">
</a>

So in the future, please mark up you’r images that have meaning with the alt-attribute, it helps at least both blind and mobile users!

Each tweet that you publicize is limited to 140 characters which synonymously with the SMS being limited to 160 characters has forced people to invent a short hand language to express them selves more efficiently.

The massive volume of content in all tweets is simply to big for anyone to read in real time. Most tweets contain a url for an article that the tweeter wants their readers to know, read or participate in. Since tweets are limited to 140 characters and links are between 17 and 255 characters, including a full size URL can be problematic. Don’t know what a URL is? Let this image explain it for you:

To solve this problem a special kind of web application have been invented. Namely the URL Shortening Services with really short domain-names and resource paths, such as:

• http://bit.ly/99DCUW
• http://ow.ly/2Etil
• http://t.co/
• http://su.pr/

This has made sizes of URLs to decrease enourmosly, to be between 18 and 25 characters. 25 characters is way less than 40, 50 and often 70 characters for a link. One of the main downsides with these URL shorterners is that the URL, most of the time, become impossible to parse for meaning, heading, topic and other important informations that a URL can contain.

The process of search engine optimizing a website is usually started out when a SEO marketing firm comes to you and claim “I’ll get you #1 on Google”. They then convince the corporate stakeholders with logic statements like “We can provide a higher flow of traffic for your site, and more traffic means higher conversion rates”.  While they certainly can drive larger amounts of traffic to your site the latter part of their statement does not have to apply here. Higher traffic generating more conversions is generally true, but it highly depends on what traffic is driven to you web site and how.

Optimizing your site through traditional SEO has a couple of pros and cons. The most prominent pros is that you will rank higher on the keywords that you specifiy, if you have competing businesses, which almost all companies have, you will often try to rank higher than them on specific keyword. However, this is also the most prominent con, because when you get into optimizing your content for keywords you most often destroy your content instead. The key should never be to score high on a search engine, it should instead be to serve your content as efficient as possible without any hint of confusion to your actual users.

So what is your ultimate goal?

First up, just measuring the number of visitors your site gets á la 1995 is not enough! You need to measure your conversions, that is, the number of users, in percentage over time, that performs a set task that is considered important for your site. The task may be finalizing a purchase, registering for a free account or filling out a form. If you like me don’t have a strong quantifiable variable to measure, you should check out my earlier post about tracking content engagement. So now that you’ve found out your variable you need to measure it through your analytics package.

How would I instead improve my conversions?

Well, you always need to market your site, both through traditional marketing and more modern styles like viral marketing, and e-campaigns. On the web you can buy access to target your advertisements toward your target audience!

So instead of trying to manipulate search engines, by designing for algorithms with SEO, you should offer services and design for your user audience. Designing an SEF-website is to add features for search engines, doing good markup, avoiding flash and making it easy for users to refer other humans of your awesome site.

An example that is most relevant for modern web apps is to deploy public API’s for other companies, services and users to integrate with and utilize your web app, users and data. The API-approach is a very powerful marketing tool because you have a potential to reach customers in many different environments which you normally couldn’t imagine to target with your marketing.

“Always remember a higher ranking is not the aim. The aim is to convince as many users as possible to respond in some way to your site.” - Paul Boag, Episode 209 of Boagworld.

“Mom needs to see a specialist and then has to have a series of physical therapy sessions. Biweekly or something. I’m going to have my agent set up the appointments.”

Pete immediately agreed to share the chauffeuring.

At the doctor’s office, Lucy instructed her Semantic Web agent through her handheld Web browser. The agent promptly retrieved information about Mom’s prescribed treatment from the doctor’s agent, looked up several lists of providers, and checked for the ones in-plan for Mom’s insurance within a 20-mile radius of her home and with a rating of excellent or very good on trusted rating services.

It then began trying to find a match between available appointment times (supplied by the agents of individual providers through their Web sites) and Pete’s and Lucy’s busy schedules. In a few minutes the agent presented them with a plan.

How could this be possible?

So starts the article on The semantic web from 2001 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The sematic web, a giant myth or a dream to come true? It all started around 1999 when Sir Tim Berners-Lee stated the following:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Current status of the web

Nowadays there is something boiling beneath the surface, a movement, which is lobbying to get public institutions and corporations  to generate their data in a way accessible to machine interpretation. There are solid protocols to achieve this goal, among them are LinkedData, RDFa, Atom and RSS. You all know RSS and Atom, but they differ hugely from RDFa and LinkedData in that the semantic meaning of the content is not explained.

LinkedData and RDFa changes this, through linking words, concepts, dates and other distinct data-types to a set of common dictionaries and taxonomies, we the people, can explain what this data means.  The really big difference between the two approaches is that it with LinkedData and RDFa becomes possible to deduce what concepts, articles and links mean by referring to other material already interpreted.

And by telling machines what data means, they can help us perform these everyday tasks that’s critical and hard work. Tasks could be setting up a biweekly schedule for chauffeuring, setting up a meeting with many parties or scraping the web to research specific topics automatically instead of doing it all manually.

This all sounds like a holy grail right? But there are applications out there today, and a large movement is working hard at improving the deductive reasoning, getting mass amount of data linked up, and writing dictionaries and taxonomies in a machine-friendly way.

Applications today

Today there actually exist applications, most of them is proof of concept or very early beta.

• Paper.li -  a daily aggregated newspaper on the topics you are interested in. For example,  a newspaper on the topic of web design would be based on tweets with the hashtag webdesign(#webdesign). Within these tweets there are often links and they share common keywords. These are then mashed up to a finished newspaper.

Further reading:

• The original article from Tim Berners Lee
• Introduction to RDFa part I
• Introduction to RDFa part II

The linked data image is courtesy of the www.linkeddata.org-project.

Reason 1 – Egocentric bastard

So well, I am! I like to think that some people actually care what I write and think about. For example if a client is not up to par on a specific term I can always just refer them to my webpage. So it serves as a knowledge base for my customers that I can utilize at my peril.

Reason 2 – Learning process

But it’s also a learning process. It’s a process where I force my self to put my thoughts into words by writing on topics that concern me, either personal, political or work(web related stuff). Many people read and do stuff that others put in their articles, but instead of just consuming, I try to refine and write about what I think could be and improvement to said technique and by that solidifying the concepts, technologies and thoughts which leads me to a better understanding and higher chance of remembrance.

Reason 3 – Content is king

Well, content is king, it is an indisputable fact. This type of content especially since I lift terms that I need to fully grasp in my line of work. It’s also good for SEF-reasons, since it makes my site appear higher up in searches for the stuff that I specialize in.

The header area is the space in the top of your site. It is one of the most important areas for determining your site identity which makes it a natural area to place main navigation, logotypes, statements and you most important widgets. My header is very simple and consists simply of my name and some main navigation.

A well designed header can really draw a visitor into the page and create conversions.

Headers – The technical way

In HTTP and HTTPS, the two major application protocol’s for the web communication are sent with headers. For example, when you visit www.stefan-wallin.se the following requests and responses will occur, each with a separate header:

1. Your browser will send a GET header which requests the page at http://www.stefan-wallin.se/ – basically asking a server: “I want your resource at / transferred using the HTTP 1.0 protocol.

GET / HTTP/1.0

2. The Server then replies and closes the connection with a set of headers and the full content response. In my particular case the headers are listed here

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:19:00 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: W3 Total Cache/0.9.1.1
X-Pingback: http://www.stefan-wallin.se/xmlrpc.php
Cache-Control: max-age=600
Expires: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:29:00 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

These header are necessary to tell the browser how to behave when it comes to caching, content encoding and other technical stuff that makes your web browsing more pleasant. Headers is a form of metacommunication so that you don’t have to.