It's April Fool's Day...

A classic piece appeared on Sitepoint today.

Jason Gried? 37 Singles? Beautiful!

Fuji Digital Camera - No Fault Found?

Purchased this FujiFilm FinePix S3000 probably 18 months ago now (maybe a bit more). Initially, it was great. The second Fuji digital camera we have purchased.

But then after about 9 months it started chewing through batteries. I'd put a fresh set in on Friday for the weekend, take maybe a dozen photos over the weekend, and then go to use it again early the following week and they'd be dead!

We have about 4 sets of NiMH batteries that we cycle through 2 cameras and a few other things, and the batteries last fine in everything else so it's safe to say it's not the batteries.

Took the thing back to Harvey Norman (where I purchased it) and they sent it back to Fuji under warranty.

About 3 weeks later, it came back with the message "no fault found".

Apparently you're not supposed to leave your batteries in this thing over the weekend? Which means that when you do want to take a photo, you have to put the batteries in, reset the date and time, and adjust all your settings again as it defaults to 1 megapixel when you take the batteries out!

Is this normal? I don't think so!

So what can I say about this camera? When you first put the batteries in it's great. Good lens, nice quality photos, easy to use.

What can I say about Fuji's after sales service? Well, pretty lame. If they think that this camera's behaviour is "normal" - that there's nothing wrong with it - well...

It's pretty safe to say I won't every buy a Fuji digital camera again, that's for sure!

7 Essential Title Tag Strategies

The latest Market Position newsletter has a nice summery about good use of the Title tag. Main points covered:

1. The length of your title


2. Word proximity


3. Keyword location


4. Word order


5. Repitition of words


6. Titles for human consumption


7. What words to use

The author contradicts himself a little - in point 3 he suggests better results from placing your keywords at the beginning of the title and then in point 6 reminds us that the Title tag is important for human consumption too. Ever looked though your browser's History and tried to find a site you were at yesterday and they have used keywords (or something else just as unpredictable) at the start of the title tag?

Like everything else, a balance is required.

Simple Problem Solving

Found this little gem in a post at Signal V Noise - a simple, step-by-step guide to problem solving:

1. write down the problem


2. write down why it’s hard to solve


3. write down what would make it easier


4. write down possible ways to implement things that would make it easier


5. write down why those ways suck


6. then make it not suck

Beautiful!

Crazy Egg - Another Web 2.0 Stats Pack

These things seem to be coming out of the woodwork - Crazy Egg is another invitation-only Web 2.0 stats pack.

Although it does look like it's got an extra nice feature missing from others - a heat map showing where visitors are clicking. Nice touch.

Well, I've signed up for an invite. Will take it for a test drive when I can get an account set up!

(Via TechCrunch)

Tags: crazy egg | web 2.0 | statistics | Stats

The Yellow Fade Technique (YFT)

Some time ago 37 Signals pioneered what they call the Yellow Fade Technique, or YFT. You might have seen it on Basecamp or Backpack.

Jamie asked me the other day if I knew how it was done. I had seen a tutorial for it before, but hadn't bookmarked or blogged it! So after a few minutes of Googling a found a couple of possible how-tos:

• The Yellow Fade Technique, Revisisted. I don't know how or why this is better than the original. But it's revisited, so it must be, I guess!


• The Fade Anything Technique


• And the find of the afternoon - script.aculo.us - this site has lots of goodies. Shall have to poke around here some more!

However, none of these were the original tutorial that I was looking for... :/

Tags: yellow fade technique | 37 signals | web 2.0 | javascript

Formatting for task descriptions

Thanks to Sawan for this suggestion - don't know why nobody thought of this earlier

Anyway, have just finished integrating TinyMCE with task descriptions in NetOffice. So now you can add lists, include hyperlinks, stikeout previous instructions etc etc!

A couple of things have been changed:

1. Obviously, TinyMCE files need to be copied into your NetOffice installation.


2. We have added a file called tinymce.php to the /includes/ directory. It only contains Javascript, but we've used a PHP include so we can pass variables to it later if we like. That will mean we can enable or disable certain buttons dynamically depending on other page variables.


3. This file is called in the head of the page, so /themes/deepblue/header.php has been adjusted accordingly. If you're using another theme, change your header.php to include /includes/tinymce.php.


4. Then obviously /tasks/edittask.php has been adjusted - basically just giving the textareas id attributes so TinyMCE can find them. There is also a little bit of code at the top of that file that calls a function to convert < and > to their HTML entities, which we don't want any more! So that's just been commented out for now.

That all might sound scary, but if you're using the standard Deep Blue theme that comes with NetOffice 2.6, all you need to do is unzip the following file into your NetOffice directory. I've even included TinyMCE so it should be pretty straight forward.

• Download ZIP file - 1.53 Mb

This is only tested with NetOffice 2.6 - I have no idea what will happen on earlier versions.

Also... just in case, make sure you back up your NetOffice installation so you can roll back if needed...