Blog: November 2008

Plenty of Postage

November 28, 2008

I almost wonder (though I know there’s no such thing) if there was a sale on two cent stamps at the time this client was mailing their payment to us. And yes, that is sixteen stamps you see there. smile

Posted by Rachael Ashe at 4:12 PM | Comments (0)

Jaywest Country Homes (page)

November 28, 2008

JayWest Country Homes has been in the business of selling Viceroy Homes for ten years, and is the largest independent distributor in Western Canada. The company is a one-stop shop for the buying and building of Viceroy Homes as they also offer construction services under JayWest Construction Limited. The company needed a web site from scratch as they did not yet have an existing web presence, and felt it was an important step in reaching potential customers. Hop Studios worked in partnership with Boxcar Marketing to create an elegant, warm design to match the style of homes Jaywest provides to their clients. The site is built in ExpressionEngine and features an online gallery of photos and floor plans of their most popular customizable home designs. For further browsing of their full range of products, clients also have the options of ordering a Viceroy Dream Home catalogue through the site, and are welcome to visit their show home near Calgary.

Posted by Rachael Ashe at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

Print Matters

November 24, 2008

The web is a necessarily translatable media form. Web Sites can be viewed by many different browsers, mobile phones, video game consoles, PDAs and other hybrid devices like the iPhone. With so many high technology possibilities it’s often easy to lose track of the humble printer. Print versions of web sites have presented some unique problems for Hop Studios, and we have devised a couple of good solutions for dealing with them (aided, as always, by the fantastic work of Eric Meyer).

No doubt in your travels around the web, you have seen the most popular solution for printing from web pages, the homely click here for a Printer-friendly version or print version. This is generally just a link to a simple HTML document with its styles removed. And, as you might have guessed, this is bad.

Why is this bad? First, it forces you to maintain two separate pages with the same information on it, creating the possibility of discrepancy, even if you are working out of one databsae—even worse if you’re using plain HTML files. If you are using flat files, it doubles the number of pages on your server, with a printer-friendly duplicate of each page. Finally, (and this is the big one) it’s inelegant. It’s like putting on a play but having your actors change costumes on stage. It distracts from the main event, showing all your undesirable bits to the people you want to impress!

A much better solution is a Print Style Sheet. CSS documents can be designated as applicable only for a specific media type. You can essentially say: “These rules are for the web, and this other set is for print.” This is good because there are a lot of things on web pages that you don’t want to print, and a print style sheet can reduce or eliminate them for you. By using a Print Style Sheet, you have traded many pages for one, and discrepancy for accuracy.

These are the things I generally remove or change in a print style sheet.

  • Remove the navigation. What do you need that for? You can’t click on anything in print (yet!) and it just wastes space.
  • Remove background Colors. It’s going to burn through your ink printing that solid background, and because of the RGB to CMYK color shift, it might make the text unreadable.
  • Make your text darker. I won’t say black, but that wouldn’t hurt.
  • Change your text from a sans-serif to a seriffed face. Typefaces with serifs are considered easier to read in print.
  • Converting pixels to points. Things on the page are measured differently than things on the screen, and I try to make sure that I have as much control over that as I can.
  • Adjusting the leading. Making the text more readable.
  • Fixing floated elements. This is a well know problem, text in floated divs will not print across multiple pages.
  • Just take things out. Buttons, forms, anything that wastes ink or paper and doesn’t function on the page are all targets.

The best practice is to go through your style sheet and edit or turn off styles as needed, but a quick and dirty work-around is to add some mark-up to the html and this style to your print style sheet:

.print_remove {
display: none;
}

Now adding the “print_remove” style to anything on the page will make it disappear in the printed version. Magic.

Eric Meyer lays out a great case study in his post on A List Apart. He is smarter then me, and covers print style sheets in greater detail.

Posted by Matt Gardner at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

Security Issue in ExpressionEngine (pre-1.6.6)

November 24, 2008

As a Hop Studios client, we keep you informed about security updates that affect the software you use. This one is particularly important, as it concerns ExpressionEngine.  In an nutshell:

  • A small but serious security hole in ExpressionEngine has been discovered.
  • Upgrading to 1.6.6 fixes this.
  • Upgrading takes about an hour for a site with not much customization, and our standard hourly rate is $140.
  • The license fee for the upgraded software is between free and $39.

Please let us know if you want to upgrade, and we will schedule you in; we expect many requests, and we’ll get to you as soon as possible in the order you respond.

Now, the details…

=-=-=

This email assumes you know what version site software you’re using.

In Expression Engine, this is the number at the bottom of every page of the control panel.

=-=-=

SECURITY UPDATES (Expression Engine)

The latest release of ExpressionEngine, 1.6.6, fixes a security hole. We have not been told exactly what security hole is patched.  The developers say that it is a very minor issue that would only affect display of submitted text on the site, but that there’s is a very small chance that, with interactions with third-party software, it could be “quite serious.” Here is their blog post about it:

http://expressionengine.com/blog/entry/expressionengine_1.6.6_security_update/

The last significant EE security problem was in 1.4.2, about three years ago.  For a software product as large and powerful and widely used as EE, this is a tremendous safety record.  Our confidence in EE is still very high.  But we do recommend very strongly that you upgrade now to 1.6.6, no matter what earlier version of EE you are running.

=-=-=

GENERAL UPDATES (Expression Engine)

Expression Engine is now at version 1.6.6.  We’ve been hoping for a 2.0 version to be released some time soon, but it has been pushed back several times.  Meanwhile, new features keep showing up in the 1.6 branch, which is very stable and well-supported.

Here’s what’s new since 1.6.1, the last time we emailed you…

  • Overall, in the past year, there are about 210 minor tweaks made and bugs fixed.  That shows a very healthy, living piece of software, though. Some of the glitches are very, very small.

Version 1.6.6

  • We just told you
  • Plus about 16 other small fixes

Version 1.6.5

  • Major overhaul of Auto-XHTML typography. More intelligent, more flexible, and improved performance.
  • Added Global Template Preference for Strict URLs.
  • Added a redirect= global variable.
  • Added content-type header to html page output, as some servers don’t seem to declare the type.
  • Added “jQuery for the Control Panel” extension for developers to add jQuery to the control panel.
  • Increased the column size of search queries so extremely large results are not truncated due to column size.
  • Updated the Magpie plugin to use the latest version of the Snoopy connection library, v1.2.4

Version 1.6.4

  • Added if no_results conditional to Category Heading tag.
  • Added sanitization for a deprecated HTML tag that could be abused in user input in Internet Explorer.
  • Modified SAEF preview to allow for conditionals on custom fields.
  • Modified XSS sanitization to no longer add semicolons after &[single letter], such as in M&M’s, B&B, etc.
  • Modified XSS sanitization to no longer strip XHTML image tags of closing slashes.
  • Improved security and performance of cross-site scripting filter.
  • Modified expired CAPTCHA cleanup to be more performance friendly when experiencing unusually high traffic spikes.
  • Changed the gallery preferences to hide font size when truetype fonts not used and this option is not available.
  • Changed some code in category URL title discovery to work around a bug in PHP 5.0.1.
  • Removed a hardcoded referenced to ‘More News...’ in the CP homepage, and replaced it with a language variable.

Version 1.6.3

  • Increased security with uploaded file names to prevent Apache from overzealously parsing a file as a script.
  • Modified the weblog search so that case insensitivity is forced.

Version 1.6.2

  • Added a Last-Modified header to the output of stylesheet= pages in order to reduce load with 304 Not Modified headers.
  • Added the ability to change the case of Gallery Category names without changing the spelling.
  • Modified Publish page title focus to only occur for new entries.

The full change log is here:
http://expressionengine.com/docs/changelog.html

=-=-=

We hope this helps you understand the necessity for this upgrade.

Posted by Travis Smith at 4:16 PM | Comments (0)

You First Financial Blog

November 21, 2008

You First is a financial consulting firm based in Vancouver, BC, that wanted to take their site’s search engine standings up a notch. They came to us on a recommendation from eMarketing101 who is their adviser on improving their SEO. You First approached Hop Studios to have us create and integrate a blog seamlessly with their existing site.

The blog incorporates elements and colours from the design of the You First web site, with custom elements specific to the blog, such as save and share icons for the most popular social media sites. The blog is part of a long term plan to increase traffic, interest, and business opportunities through a growing web presence. The company did not have a blog previously, so part of the project was to train employees on how to use the software and how to blog.

Good luck to You First and happy blogging!

Posted by Rachael Ashe at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

Bonjour, Francouver.ca!

November 7, 2008

francouver logo Hop Studios enjoys working on projects that involve the creation and fostering of online communities, so when Alex Brabant came back to us, excited about an idea for local Francophones social networking site, we were thrilled.

Alex was inspired to create the site because he wasn’t satisfied with the online options already available and felt something more specialized was needed. The site, called Francouver, is geared specifically towards the Francophone community of Vancouver and just launched this week. The current version is a first phase of development and features two blogs, one for event listings, and one for news items, as well as a photo gallery, and member login. Members will eventually have access to these features to add their own content and help build Francouver into a vibrant online community.

The site’s launch has been covered by radio and television, and has gotten great reviews. This Saturday is the official launch party for Francouver, hosted by Alex at the Anza Club. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at Eventbrite. Good luck to Alex, and have a great party. (See you there!)

Posted by Rachael Ashe at 8:45 AM | Comments (0)

Closed for Veterans / Remembrance Day

November 6, 2008

image

photo by striatic

Hop Studios will be closed on Nov. 11 for Remembrance Day / Veterans Day.

We don’t always get to close on holidays, because we have U.S. and Canadian clients, and U.S. and Canadian employees, so Victoria Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving we end up being kind of sort of open in order to be available for those who are still working.

Therefore, it’s nice not only to be taking the day off, but to do so on a day that’s set aside to remember those who worked and were hurt and who died in the service of protecting our nations’ freedoms.  Coming in the midst of all these elections, it’s a nice reminder that, if they hadn’t given their lives, we wouldn’t be able to choose our futures.

So thanks, veterans.  We’ll try hard not to make any more of you.

Posted by Travis Smith at 12:20 PM | Comments (0)