_{Jamie Balfour's}Personal blog

When I first released my website, there were occasional pages with expletives within them but as my website became more and more public and eventually used within my role as a teaching assistant I had to make the decision - remove them all or just hide them.

At first, the latter appealed to me more. I developed a JavaScript (using jQuery) script that would simply hide the words and show them when the user hovers over the word. I have since decided to remove this in favour of removing the words altogether but I thought I'd share my original code with you:

//Swear words
if (showSwearing) {
	jQuery(".swear").mouseenter(function() {
		var sword = jQuery(this).attr("data-sword");
		var nword = jQuery(this).html();
		jQuery(this).attr("data-nword", nword);
		jQuery(this).html(sword);
	})
	.mouseleave(function() {
		var m = jQuery(this).attr("data-nword");
		jQuery(this).html(m);
	});
}

This very simple script works on the basis that each word contains an nword (normal word) and sword (swear word) set in the data attributes on the span element that contains the word. As I say, it's a simple little implementation that works well enough for the job, but you could do it quite easily with CSS.

BalfBar has had a significant improvement to make it even easier to get your website the way you want it. You can now forget about setting the height when BalfBar becomes a fixed menu - it figures it out itself. Now all you need to do is tell it you want it to check for this and it will make the decision as to when to float the menu.

On top of this, a significant chunk of JavaScript has been removed from the core, making it much more streamlined and lighter. Suggestions for future versions can still be made on my website.

I'm very happy to say that I have kept my word on website changes in that I haven't made major changes to the structure of my website in the last year. Minor usability tweaks have been made but nothing major, and a lot of the stuff that I have changed has remained quite consistent with the 'new' flat interface.

General tweaks to make the site more efficient with bandwidth and processing time have been made and as a result, I feel that my website is much better, even better than it was a year ago when I made the change to remove a few hundred lines of JavaScript and CSS and made my website much flatter.

If you feel the same way, please leave feedback, I'm really interested to know. Also, my website achieved 1000 people each week this month - by a long shot the best result to date. It has also moved up 11,852,082 places in the Alexa ranking system as a result of this surge in the last month alone. 

I think a lot of the improvement on my website comes from the fact that I have not been focusing on these changes and ensuring that there is good content on my website, as my blog is now one of the most viewed parts of my website and my reviews are not far behind. 

A lot of the time changes are now directly to improve the DragonScript concept for a more efficient server side website. I have also been removing bits and bobs from the accessibility menu, since I no longer feel the need for this.

However, as a suggestion was made to me to do this, I will be updating my website with a new cover picture-esque thing like Facebook pages have. This will likely be a picture of Perthshire or somewhere in Scotland.

As HTML, CSS and JavaScript keep advancing, the power that resides in your web browser grows. More can be done efficiently and interactively with JavaScript in the web browser, and with server side languages doing back-end processing. As a result of this, more and more software applications are being written in web languages instead of standard systems languages such as Java. 

This post has come to be because of something I noticed the other evening when out for dinner at one of my favourite restaurants - they were using Google Chrome to manage orders and so on, this was the first time I'd ever seen this kind of e-commerce application.

I'm a huge fan of web technologies and developing for the web, but I'm not entirely a fan of the use of the web to develop every bit of software required out there. For a start, none of the languages used on the front end are compiled before being sent (now this would be a good idea for JavaScript) so it's easy to manipulate them with some kind of other underlying program (such as a virus). This could indeed by a security problem that could be avoided by a compiled program written in a language such as C. Also, as JavaScript is an interpreted language, it is interpreted considerably slower than that of a compiled program.

But web based technologies do offer some major advantages that can be seen as the main reason for their use.

The first is that they are available on any computer with a web browser. This also makes them platform independent since the web is a single standard that must be implemented by all web browsers. It also means if they are on a server somewhere, they can be accessed from anywhere and indeed do not need to be installed.

The second reason is because of the kinds of tasks being performed in these applications are relatively simple and do not require the full power of a system. As a result, the JavaScript scripting language is sufficient for performing these tasks and therefore cheaper too.

The third reason relates to user-preference as web-based applications offer a much easier alternative to other applications when it comes to setting user preferences. First off, we have cookies and session storage. Both of these let us save information for later and quickly restore it, and there are plenty of APIs for using this kind of stuff. Secondly, CSS makes it really easy to style items on the screen and is far more favourable for most companies out there.

Processing performance is a big advantage here too since we can do major processing on a server that is connected to the application rather than doing it on the local machine. This is a huge advantage that can help with mission-critical situations, such as a traffic monitoring system. 

Another major argument is scalability. Whilst some desktop languages really suffer as applications grow, web applications are by nature sub-divided into smaller programs and can be seen as more scalable. Expanding an application written in web based technologies does not need a full redeployment of the application, simply that a user refreshes the page. 

Security is also a huge advantage now, at least in terms of keeping parts of the application safe. This is because the code that is stored on the server will never be transferred to the client, so you can keep all of the secure stuff away from the users of application. This all makes it less likely that the application will be misused by its users.

Finally, the main argument for many developers, including myself, is ease of development. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP or JSP are easy to develop for. It is this argument that draws most developers to it.

As many of you know, I'm a huge fan of the Warcraft game series and since the very first game I ever played was a Warcraft game, I've always been not only entertained by the series but fascinated by it's lore. 

Once about 10 years ago, slightly after the release of World of Warcraft, I declared that I could not play the game because of two reasons. The first of those was the price of £8+/month and the second was that I believed it would ruin the Warcraft story lines. 

Well today, I tried out WoW for the first time (and I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but I really do not like the idea of playing it on my own). My opinion has changed. I learned so much about the mechanics of the game today (I thought at first that players battled each other constantly, it seems I was wrong!).

Today I even got the pleasure of experiencing a moment I remember from 14 years ago when I played Warcraft III (my favourite game of all time) for the first time when I saw King Terenas' throne room.

An amazing sight - King Terenas' throne

All of this is enough to convince me that this game is for me. 

I obviously thank my good friend Calum for finally making me see sense and getting into WoW!

We all know that responsive designs are the way to go. For a long time now my website has been fully responsive, but one of the features I used that was developed by someone else was the responsive table. For as long as I have had it in use on my website I have disliked it.

I dislike it because it shifts the first column of the table to the left, essentially floating it above the rest of the table, whilst letting the user scroll the rest of the table. It created an ugly, ugly mess of things being thrown all over the place. Alas, finding the best solution for a responsive table could be much easier.

What about using an overflow:auto and display:block on it? Good idea, but the problem is that now the tables will not stretch the full width of the container.

The solution I am now using is a combination of JavaScript and CSS. The solution involves using jQuery's wrap function like so: jQuery("table.responsive").wrap("<div style="overflow: auto;"></div>");which will wrap each table with the class responsive in a scrollable div (see, very little CSS and JavaScript). Also, by giving the table inside a minimum width of 100%, they will always stretch the width of their container (which is the wrapper div), ensuring that they are always 100% of the content.

The problem though is with the interaction design side of things - how are users supposed to know when they can scroll some table in the middle of the content?

After reading a few articles, I found a comment in one of the websites with a link to this page. This allows you to make scrollbars always visible - something that should not need to be hacked together but should be a CSS feature, but Apple and Google don't agree with this so we do need to hack it together.

Although this does not guarantee that users will notice the scrollbars, it does leave some possibility that they might notice them.

Tables are a difficult thing to work with and making them responsive is one of the most difficult things to do in terms of usability. Let me know if you have any solutions to these problems.

Here is an example table, resize your browser or use a smartphone to test it.

I'm not really doing much on my website in terms of design but I am simplifying my website by removing things I no longer deem necessary. The first of those was the removal of Dark Mode (a feature of BalfBar and always will be, but not of my website any longer) since I was always in favour of the dark menu myself and will not be letting users choose the light menu any longer. I have also removed the invert colour feature of my website as of recently and will next be looking at removing the max page accessibility feature and the font size changing features. I will also look at removing other accessibility features and I'm not sure where it will end.