Creating Valid HTML With Flash Widgets

For those of you who are anal about creating Valid HTML, embedding widgets that use Flash can be a pain, as the third-party creations do not necessarily pay attention to W3C guidelines. Although widgets can add functionality and a fresh feel to your pages, sadly they are sometimes not well-coded. This is the case for the Goodreads widget which appears in the left sidebar. Given the literary nature of this site, its quite nice for readers to know where my literary tastes of the moment are heading. However, the widget does not validate, because it uses the <embed> attribute, which has been deprecated since HTML 1.0.

Happily, without too much effort, and reference to one website, I have been able to rework the Goodreads widget to ensure that the pages on which it appears validate correctly, replacing <embed> with <object>.

The old version appears on the Goodreads website like this:

<div style="margin:0px;">
<embed width="190" height="300" src="http://www.goodreads.com/images/widget/widget2.swf" quality="high" wmode="transparent" flashvars="id=222222&shelf=read&title=Ishmael's bookshelf: read&sort=date_added&order=d&params=amazon,associateid,dest_site,amazon">
</embed>
</div>
<div style="margin:0px;">
<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/987180" target="_blank"> <img alt="Widget_logo" border="0" height="32" src="http://www.goodreads.com/images/widget/widget_logo.gif" title="my goodreads profile" width="190" /></a>
</div>

Where "id=222222" will be replaced by your own unique reference number, and "associateid" by your Amazon Associate's identification, allowing you to cash in on any click throughs to Amazon via the widget. The following alternative seems to work fine, although for a reason I don't understand it eliminates the pleasant bevelled margins (something I can live without).

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.goodreads.com/images/widget/widget2.swf" width="190" height="300">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.goodreads.com/images/widget/widget2.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="FlashVars" value="id=222222&shelf=read&title=Recently Read&sort=date_read&order=d&params=amazon,associateid,dest_site,amazon" />
</object>

<div style="margin: 0px;">
<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/987180" target="_blank"><img alt="Widget_logo" src="http://www.goodreads.com/images/widget/widget_logo.gif" title="my goodreads profile" width="190" border="0" height="32" /></a>
</div>

Substitute your own id number and Associates ID (if applicable), and hey presto, clean and valid HTML and a snazzy widget. To compensate for the margin problem, you can replace <div style="margin: 0px;"> with <div style="margin: 2px;">, or whatever margin you prefer.

Please Help Me Redesign the Pequod

The Pequod underwent a serious refurbishment in July 2007, and I am generally pleased with it. However, I spent this weekend doing a bit of spring cleaning, changing the look of the highlights sidebar down the left, and cleaning up the right-hand navigation column. This now bundles all the RSS, save, print and share facilities together above the search box, and includes a direct commenting feature. I have also increased the line spacing and changed the font of the main text, to improve legibility.

The reasons for the slight change were twofold.

Firstly, though hits across the site overall are quite good, there seem to be few people who actually browse across all the sections. Some visit the photoblog, but not the blog or essays. Others read one essay, but do not explore the poetry. I suspect much of the reason is to do with the quality of the content, which is by no means exemplary or captivating. Nevertheless, I hope the rejigged sidebar will draw more visitors to explore content across the site.

Secondly, I know from tracking the "came from" option that many users download the essays to their hard disks, or email them to friends. This suggests that they are being read seriously, and used. However, I get very little feedback on them. By putting a comments box on page in the right sidebar rather than at a central comments page, I hope to facilitate more immediate responses to my work (which is, after all, a key reason for putting it online).

However, I am considering one other change that may be more dramatic. I like the three column layout because it places the text at the centre, improving legibility and making a direct connection between the horizontal navigation bar at the top (allowing me to dispense with individual page titles). But which order should the sidebars be in? There seems to be quite a debate about whether a navigation sidebar should go on the left or right of the page. One theory runs that since the eye scans from left to right, items on which you place the greatest emphasis should go on the left. On the other hand, since the dominant text on each page of a three column layout is clearly in the centre, the eye may skip over the left sidebar and concentrate on everything from the centre to the right margin.

On The Pequod, given my first point above the most important sidebar element is the cross-promoted content i.e. the latest blog and photoblog post, and featured writing. This currently resides in the left sidebar. Should it move to the right, with the navigation switching to the left? Happily, a quick change of the CSS stylesheet allows me to see this in action, though I am not the best judge of the content. So what do you think? Compare the layout of the blog you are reading to the test page, and please let me know your considered comments.

My First E-Book

I have just read my first e-book! Ho, I'm not an English Literature luddite who believes that literature refers to the medium - paper - rather than the message; I use JSTOR, Muse and Literature Online virtually every day to read electronic journal articles. But I find that a 20 page journal just about pushes the limits of my attention, before I tab to Facebook, and my eyes, since the screen is a fundamentally unfriendly medium. However, forced by my unerring procrastination to come up at short notice with a conference paper proposal relating to a book I had not actually yet read, I found myself taking a jaunt to Google Books and reading all 280 pages of The War of the Worlds in a couple of days.

Actually, Google Books is not so hard on the eyes, as the fonts are rendered very clearly, on an uncluttered screen. However, the fundamental problem I have is this. Just as physical maps allow one to see all the elements in relation to each other, whilst digital maps provide a far smaller geographical overview, I feel lost in the thicket words of the digital text. The physical book allows me to know instinctively where things are, through a haptic union of mind and body: in this most disembodied of mediums which takes your mind to other worlds whilst your body stays still, the sense of touch and the situatedness of the book in space remains vital. I remember a passage of interest occurred when my fingers and thumb were millimetres apart holding the early pages of the book; that passage from the middle springs to mind, because I lost it when the pages sprung together again as I tried to hold the book open on the table; the most of the book behind me, a mere translucent page tantalisingly left to turn, my pace of reading quickens to a frenzy as I know I'm close to the conclusion.

The physicality of my digits as I hold the printed page tells me something unconsciously, spiritually, that I cannot receive through the transient and ephemeral ghosts of digitality. Amazon's new e-book reader, Kindle, may have sold out overnight; but such electronic readers have been around for a couple of decades now, and there is a reason why they have not caught on that has nothing to do with their technological limitations.

Pequod: The Porno

I spend quite a lot of time working on this site, writing poems and essays, blogging, and taking what I hope to be good photographs. So it was slightly disapointing to discover through Statcounter that the sudden burst of visitors to my Photoblog was due not to its aesthetic quality but a sexual one; they were arriving there having Googled for "Britney Spears Skirt Flash." Now celebrity voyeurism is not a form of photography I have ever tried (enviously, I don't have a long enough lens), so I had no idea why hopeful voyeurs might be visiting my site. Those who were, though, were going to be disappointed. The landing page for that search query: a picture of a Land Rover.

I have since discovered that the new version of Pixelpost (1.6) is slightly more susceptible to spamming, and comment spam with certain sexual keywords was being sent to the photoblog, and picked up by Google's cache before the moderation filter kicked in. I was in two minds about whether to sort out the problem, though. After all, and evidencing the effectiveness both of spam and the use of sex to sell online, I received more visits through this than any one other method of search engine optimisation. Besides, I would be interested to know whether those sexual browsers showed any interest in the other content of the site. A skirt flash, with an essay on deconstruction on the side, sir? Of course, you will appreciate that it is purely in the interests of academic research (in which I become reciprocally a voyeur of my visitors) that I have decided to label this blog post "Britney Spears skirt flash hot xxx," as well as its more conventional categories.

The Pequod Redesign

It being a soggy day outside, I decided to indulge in the virtual equivalent of spring cleaning, a thorough redesign of The Pequod website. Partly, this was due to the fact that having suffered from the deletion of the photoblog last week, and having used the blank slate to deploy a shiny new Pixelpost template (Macstyle), I needed to ensure that the other parts of the site were more in keeping with this new design. Additionally, I had started to feel that the site was looking a bit "texty." Though this may seem an odd complaint given that it is a literary website, Statcounter suggested that visitors were not browsing, simply staying at the one landing page, and I think the old version was not doing enough to "cross promote" content, such as linking an essay to a related blog post.

I am quite pleased with the overall outcome, which I think retains the accessibility (indeed, improves it, given that the tables for layout have been replaced by divs in stylesheets) whilst making the screen less cluttered. There is still a bit of tinkering to be done, but in the interim your comments and criticisms would be much appreciated (you can compare it with the old versions at Internet Archive)

Plagiarism (Again)

An email I received last month from a teacher confirms for me what I had long suspected: that this site is being plagiarised, and my essays passed off as others' work. I am not sure if I can feel guilt about this - plagiarism has always happened in paper form, and the benefits of me using this digital space as a substitute for being published on physical pages outweigh the risks of others abusing it. I have commented before about the measures (explicit warnings and a citation guide) I have taken to minimise the risks of plagiarism, or at least leave plagiarists with no excuse.

However, an email a few days ago reminded me (as my correspondent did) of the other academic moral problem of this website, which is that my Google Adwords links sometimes promote "paper mills," or assignment writing sites. Another email a couple of days ago reminds me of this. It was from "the UK's most visited essay company," asking if I would like to exchange links. The email noted that the company had "been featured on ITN News, the BBC, Radio 2 and Radio 4, in the Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Independent and hundreds of other publications." Indeed, if you go to the website of this company, which shall remain nameless, there in a bold headline banner is a quote from The Times: "The essay was independently assessed by a leading university as being of 2.1 standard." Hilariously, though, if you follow the link it leads to the article headlined "Student Cheats Fuel Online Essay Boom," and is an expose on the prevalence of cheating in university law degrees. Of course, the disclaimer made by the companies is that the essays are provided as a "basis for producing your own work. Just as you would not reproduce a book or journal which happened to exactly address your question, you should not hand in our essays as your own. We stress this time and time again but it is a point that the press fail to appreciate - we do not condone plagiarism." Yeah, right - stupid press for not appreciating how helpful these companies are to education. A quote from the boss of similar service says all you need to know about their real moral attitude: "The more complaints about us the more hits we get (on the website). We are all prostituted to something; it is not my problem. If you buy a gun in a shop, what you do with it is your business." Well, frankly, if I sold guns, like all legitimate stores I would make it my business to ensure that they are held by people with the proper licenses for the correct purposes. It would not be of moral concern to me only if I was a black market dealer, selling guns for the improper purposes of crime. And the black market is precisely where these sites peddle their words.

So I wrote a snotty email back to the company, explaining why, as a university teacher, albeit at a minor level, it would be wholly inappropriate for me to endorse their product with a reciprocal link. More generally, however, I realise that whilst I have tried to block many of these adverts from my Adwords account (a fact which led me deeper into a moral maze) , it is always going to be a losing battle. As I have almost reached the magic $100, at which point Google will send me a nice cheque to cover the costs of my web hosting, I was considering deleting Google Adwords altogether from the popular essay pages. However, the company whose motto is "Don't Be Evil" gets there first, announcing that it is going to ban advertisements for essay writing sites.

Windows Vista: Not Much to See

I got my first look at Microsoft's new operating system on a friend's new PC yesterday, and I have to admit I was pretty stunned by it: transparency effects, a gadgets sidebar, 3-d window switching, smooth fonts. But then, once I had seen through the transparent glass in about 30 seconds, I realised with greater shock that there was so little new to see.

It has taken almost six years and thousands of man hours to produce an OS that is admittedly pretty, but also pretty much identical to Windows XP. All of the key security features (especially Windows Defender) are available free for the earlier system, as is the new web browser (should you be daft enough to prefer it to Firefox), and media player. It is indicative that it took one man a year to design the Vista shutdown button, and a shame to image all the worthwhile programming he might have implemented had he been allowed to cut free from the red tape.

Worst of all, my friend had the 64-bit version of the system. Though very fast, like trying to drive a Ferrari with the handbrake on, if you cannot run the programs in the first place it is not much use at all. This version of Vista does not support RAW photo files as standard, but the Microsoft RAW viewer that you can download does not support 64-bit Vista. Neither does AVG Antivirus, or iTunes. 64-bit processing is going to appeal most to hardcore digital photographers and multimedia fanatics, but if its capabilities in these fields are hamstrung from the start, then the product simply will not sell. Vista presents a scene of wasted potential, and like many people I will be sticking with XP - stable, secure, faster and opaque - for while yet.

Google Exists!

On occasions such as Halloween or Christmas, when you visit the Google home page you will see that famous logo modified slightly, in reflection of the events in the calendar. It is a nice touch, because it reminds that behind this simple interface, through which so much of the world's information comes pouring into your experience, are real human beings.

In the digital age, "to Google" something has become a verb, replacing those traditional words that imply an embodied act of discovery: to search, to find, to explore. Though I find it wonderful, it is also slightly strange that now my knowledge appears, instantaneously, through no more physical an act than the tap of a key, and the flick of an eye. So I was quite happy today when, in the post, I received my Google Adwords security pin. Here was a letter, stamped from America, a tangible piece of proof that Google is more than an algorithm, a method and a name, but is a real company in a real building, at which physical people work, even if only folding envelopes. Today, at least, my interactions with Google were sensual, not simulated: the flutter of paper onto the doormat, the satisfying rip of a finger against glue, the unfolding of the creased pages.

Have You Seen the PC Man?

I bought my current computer off ThePCMan, a small and award-winning family firm based in Scotland. I was really, really pleased with their service, prices and the build quality of their PC, on which my 3 years of thesis work depends. However, I checked a couple of months ago and their website www.thepcmanuk.com was not working; it still appears to be down today, and I can't find any reference to them either closing or moving. Have you had any contact with this company in the last six months? It would be a great shame if such a good firm has gone under, or been swallowed by a larger competitor.

Pequod Nostalgia

Have just visited the web archive Internet Archive, so of course I checked to remind myself how The Pequod looked 11 months ago when it was first launched. As with all things, it has evolved dramatically, if not beyond all recognition then at least to a stage where I am now happy with the way it looks and is structured. But what do you think? Let me know!.

Words Worth?

Sorry about the dreadful pun, but I thought I'd plug a piece of software I have been using since I bought my new computer (from the first-rate thePCman Computers).

Rather than packing my clean, new hard drive full of Microsoft Office, I have gone for the free option of Openoffice. I started with version 1.1.4 of their suite, which includes the same functions as MS Office (excluding the database). Concentrating on the word processor, I found it difficult to get the hang of the functions, most of which are labelled differently to MS standards; importing documents was less than flawless (especially with bullet points and tables); it lacks that desperately needed (and feared) tool of the essay-writer, the word count; and it seemed (even on my new speed machine) slightly on the slow side.

I was just about to read for my trusty MS Office disk, when I thought I'd give the new Version 2.0 a shot, something I had avoided the first time of looking as it is still in the Beta stage. And am I glad I did! Suddenly, everything looks and runs as smoothly as its expensive big brother. Functions are labelled and located where I expect to find them; importing between formats is seamless (indeed, I still use the MS formats for the documents, to ensure compatability); and the word count has made its entry. In short, the MS Office CD is in the bin for good, and with the final version ready to roll from the website any time soon, Microsoft Office is finally not worth it.