Yahoo announced yesterday that it will be supporting the OpenID 2.0 protocol with a public beta starting on 30 January. Not only does this mean that Yahoo’s 248 million users will have access to an internet-wide single login, it also means that other website can have a “log in with your Yahoo ID” button.
It will bring the number of people with OpenID-compatible accounts to 368 million. Other sites that currently use OpenID include AOL, LiveDoor, LiveJournal, Technorati and hosted versions of WordPress.

This is a great step by Yahoo. I cannot be the only one who is sick of having to register on a site every time I want to try out something new. Remembering the passwords is horrendous.

This also opens up some interesting possibilities for WebCards.

Currently, I am very reluctant to add membership services to WebCards. This includes features such as address book, favourites and reminders. This is because a user would have to register for every domain they want to send a Webcard from. If you wanted to send a WebCard from example.com and then send one from somesite.com you would have to register on both sites.
I do not have the resources to operate a central database, so OpenID seems like an ideal solution. It’s one thing having a single login for multiple sites but it is another thing to have a single login for multiple sites and have access to your Yahoo address book from this single login.

Obviously, this is something that will take some time to roll out (I am talking about Yahoo and WebCards here) but it is definitely something to watch. It may now be possible to implement one of the most requested features of WebCards.

What is OpenID
This is taken from the OpenID website:

For geeks, OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman) and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photostream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins.

Take a look at the OpenID website for more information.

You can also read the whole Yahoo Press Release.

Back in December, the French appeal court Tribunal de Grande Instance ruled that Amazon.fr was violating the country’s 1981 Lang law with its free shipping offer. This law forbids booksellers from offering discounts of more than 5 percent off the list price. Amazon was ruled as having broken this law if free shipping is factored into the cost of the book.

They were told they would face a daily fine if they didn’t start charging within ten days. This can continue for 30 days (€30,000) and then it will be reviewed by the court. They can increase, decrease, or extend the fine. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in an email to the site’s customers: “France would be the only country in the world where the free delivery practiced by Amazon would be declared illegal.” Amazon was also ordered to pay €100,000 to a French bookstore union.

The law was originally passed when supermarkets were outselling independent book sellers. It was supposed to mean that customers had access to all kinds of books, not just massively discounted best-sellers.

Amazon say that “are determined to follow every avenue available to us to overturn this law.” They are unikely to succeed as the law has come before the European Court of Justice twice before. On both occasions it has been affirmed. The law is not considered anticompetitive because all book retailers are held to the same standard.

You can read the extended article at the International Herald Tribune website.

Continuing on this week’s theme of website optimisation, I came across an interesting article posted by encyclo on Webmasterworld entitled 26 Steps to a More Accessible Website. The post is superb it lists 26 important steps for improving the accessibility of your website to users who may not have easy access to all your content.

Here are the headings but please read the article for the full explanations:

A. Alt text and alternate content
B. Transcripts of video content
C. “Click here!”, or descriptive link text
D. Space between links
E. No javascript: links
F. Use the lang attribute
G. No gratuitous animation
H. Don’t depend on color
I. Captcha alternatives
J. Labels on forms
K. Accessible Tables
L. Page structure: use meaningful headings
M. Page structure: divide up information blocks
N. Simple language
O. Acronym (and abbr, cite, p, li…)
P. No meta refresh
Q. noscript
R. Relative text size
S. Bigger font sizes!
T. Alternate stylesheets
U. Skip to… links
V. Page size/weight
W. Add a sitemap (HTML not XML)
X. Check in Lynx
Y. User testing and feedback
Z. Accessibility statement

I use many of these on WebCards and on the website. These include relative font sizes, alternative stylesheets, labels on forms, the lang attribute and alt text. Accessibility is one of the main reasons why I will not implement captchas on WebCards. Accessibility is essential, and in the UK is even the law (see the Disability Discrimination Act). This article is great for those who want to make their website more useable.

Yesterday’s post entitled “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site” has had me thinking about other ways to increase the loading speed of websites. People obsess over optimising SQL queries, caching templates and other more minor things. But what about the more obvious things? What will increase your site’s loading speed more: knocking 5kb off the size of an image, or making an SQL query 8ms faster?

I have trawled the search engines to find some sites with good ideas about how to optimise your website.

The first step is to analyse your website. The tool I most frequently use is Web Page Analyzer from Website Optimization. Enter your URL and it will tell you the total size of the page, the estimated download speeeds on various connections and a list of each different type of object on the page. Under “Analysis and Recommendations” it will tell you where you will need to focus your attentions. Putting mywebcards.net into the tool shows that the page size is far too big. There are apparently too many scripts and too many images. The total page size is 203517 bytes.

Next, read yesterday’s post about speeding up your website and implement the ideas that are relevant to you.

Here are a list of some of the best articles I have found about optimisation. I will list some of the ideas from each one.

The first is an article from Paul Stamatiou. It was published back in June 2006 but the principles still remain the same.

1. Reduce Overall Latency by Reducing HTTP Requests
2. Properly Save Your Images
3. Compression (of CSS, JS and PHP)
4. Avoid JavaScript Where Possible
5. Strip Extraneous PHP/MySQL Calls

Read the full article.

Next is an article from Webcredible - Ten ways to speed up the download time of your web pages. This from even further back - 2004 - but again, the principles are the basic ones that always remain the same.

Here are their suggestions:

1. Lay out your pages with CSS, not tables
2. Don’t use images to display text
3. Call up decorative images through CSS
4. Use contextual selectors
5. Use shorthand CSS properties
6. Minimise white space, line returns and comment tags
7. Use relative call-ups
8. Remove unnecessary META tags and META content
9. Put CSS and JavaScript into external documents
10. Use / at the end of directory links

Read the full article.

Third is an article from Webweaver entitled Formatting Tips To Speed up Your Website. The same ideas are beginning to crop up in each article, but this one features a few new ones.

1. Use CSS For Faster Pages
2. Use External Scripts
3. Remove Anything You Don’t Really Need
4. Avoid Nested Tables
5. Avoid Full Page Tables for Faster Rendering
6. Split Up Long Pages - Multiple Short Pages Load Faster
7. Remove Excess “Whitespace”
8. Keep Your Code Clean
9. Don’t Go Overboard On Images
10. Use Height And Width Tags on Images
11. Correctly choose gif, jpg or png

Read the full article.

The final article is aimed particularly at the server but is also worth a read. It is entitled Don’t just wait for Digg to kill you - be prepared!. It looks at the “Digg effect” and how it can hammer your server. Definitely worth a read.

Also, you should take a look at this book, Web Performance Tuning, 2nd edition for some more great ideas (disclaimer: affiliate link).

Over the next few days I will begin to optimise the WebCards homepage. I will see if I can reduce the page from 203517 bytes to something (well, according to that tool anyway) a little more reasonable. Let me know if you can notice any difference.

Steve Souders at the Yahoo! Developer Network has posted an article called Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. It is an excellent article that concentrates on speeding up the front end interface to increase speed.

Many efficiency articles concentrate on tweaking database queries or altering loops but Sounders’ research has shown that the front end is where the most significant speed gains can be made. He lists 14 best practices:

• Make Fewer HTTP Requests
• Use a Content Delivery Network
• Add an Expires Header
• Gzip Components
• Put Stylesheets at the Top
• Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Avoid CSS Expressions
• Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Reduce DNS Lookups
• Minify JavaScript
• Avoid Redirects
• Remove Duplicate Scripts
• Configure ETags
• Make Ajax Cacheable

Souders has produced an extension for Firefox called YSlow which integrates with FireBug to give your website a “performance report card” and a list of all the object on the page.

He has compiled his ideas into a book which is also well worth a look at. Some of the ideas here are excellent and they will most certainly be used in WebCards. Take a look and see what ideas you can put into use on your own website.

Please note: the links to the book in this blog post are associate links.

I have added a new example WebCards installation to the WebCards Gallery.

It is an excellent example so please check it out.

I have also added a new forum to the WebCards Forum for you to post your own example of WebCards. I will add all the good ones to the WebCards Gallery.

For those of you who wish to support the French language on your WebCards installation, we invite you to download the WebCards French Language Pack. This Pack is suitable for WebCards 1.3.

The translation was done by Webcard Forum member Cattss and you can read their announcement on the forum.

There is a detailed explanation on how to use Language Packs in the documentation but it is a very simple process.

• Download the pack from the downloads page and upload it to your “export” directory. Do not unpack the .tar archive.
• Log in to your admin centre and click “Import/Export Language” under the “Languages” section.
• Choose the tarball lang-Francais.tar and choose a name for the language. French of Francais would be the most logical.
• Simply click “import” and the language will be ready for use by your users and administrators.

Big credit is due to Cattss for the excellent translation.

I am pleased to announce the availability of WebCards version 1.3 for immediate download.

This new features of this release include those announced in the previous blog post, including a new mailing class (PHPMailer), admin profiles and an administrator log. Please see the changelog for more details.

This release was made a few weeks ago but the announcement was delayed until some bug testing could take place. The feedback from the WebCards community has been excellent and some changes have already been fixed in the main release code, particularly the installation file.

An upgrade file is required to upgrade from version 1.2. Please read the upgrade instructions very carefully before you attempt to upgrade. Take a look at the upgrade documentation for more information.

Please feel free to post any bug reports or request help over at the WebCards forum.

I thought I would share a few of the new features that I have added to WebCards over the last few weeks. I haven’t posted a development update in a while and I am keen to let people know how development is progressing.

1. New mail sending class

I have implemented PHP Mailer into WebCards. This replaces the old SMTP class that was used. I don’t believe in re-inventing the wheel and so decided to include an excellent, well-maintained mail class for sending mail. Sending email is very much the heart of WebCards, it is important that it works. Using PHP Mailer expands the sending methods to include mail(), SMTP, sendmail, Qmail and potentially even Gmail if you wish.

2. Admin profiles

Each administrator has their own profile which includes standard information such as name and email address and the ability to change their email address. This opens up the possibility for user permissions and also enables the implementation of a password recovery feature.

3. Administrator logs

In addition to the email logs, WebCards now features administrator logs. This tracks all activity such as editing images and templates, logging in, deleting cards and also tracks the cron logs when delayed cards are sent.

Please post on the forums if you have any comments or feature requests. Some requests that have been posted on the forums are already being implemented in the next WebCards release.

It seemed like not so long ago that Saw III was released. I looked back at my blog and saw that I had reviewed it on October 31, 2006. This franchise releases films very, very fast.

Anyway, on to the review. As usual this will contain some spoilers, as I can’t express my frustration without giving some bits away.

The first thing I thought when I left the cinema was “I don’t have a clue what happened in the movie!” I was genuninely confused.

I got home and started looking on some of the Saw message boards. Then I came across some very important pieces of information that they didn’t make clear in the film:
1. Saw III and Saw IV happen at the same time. This is so important and it really wasn’t clear.
2. The autopsy scene that you see at the beginning of the film actually happens at the end of the film. I guess they show you it first to let you know that Jigsaw is really dead. But this really confuses people. This is an extract from the BBC Movies review:

After a tape recorded message is found in Jig’s stomach, Detective Hoffman (Carlos Mandylor) and SWAT Commander Riggs (Lyriq Bent) are thrown into yet another fiendishly complex morality play.

Even the BBC didn’t get this. The tape is found at the end of the film, not at the start. See what I mean? Confusing.

While I am on the subject of things that confused me I need to talk about characters. I had a really hard time working out who everybody was. I would see people and I would keep asking “Who is that guy?” Maybe it’s just me.

Darren Lynn Bousman (the director) told us that Jigsaw’s role wouldn’t be confined to flashbacks. Not true. These are the only appearances he makes in the whole film. We do get a lot of insight into what makes Jigsaw do what he does and we do learn who the woman is in his flashbacks in Saw III.

However, other things that should have been answered were not, such as what was in the letter that drove Amanda crazy in Saw III. One would guess these will be answered in Saw V or VI (which were approved way before III was released). Perhaps not. Maybe we will have to wait until Saw VII or VIII.

The traps are good, very twisted and gruesome. We see some very hardcore stuff, even by Saw’s standards. Scalpings, daggers to the eyes, Eyes and a mouth stitched closed. Very extreme.

As a standalnoe film, Saw IV is a complete no-no. But if you have watched the first three you will have to watch this one, you just will. And we will all inevitable watch the next two, no matter how bad they are.