Blogs

Adobe, the maker of Photoshop, Illustrator and many other useful tools has posted the below video handy for polishing up your pictures.

It’s called SkyReplace, and it intelligently works out the difference between the sky in your pictures and everything else, and then allows you to replace it (it was kind of in the name there really). It’s a cool little tool, nothing which can’t be done in Photoshop, but very handy indeed and worth keeping an eye on.

The coolest thing won’t be just sprucing up your holiday pictures, but the weird uses people will find for it.

On a project I was involved with a few years ago, the client asked for the picture of their building to feature a local landmark in the background, a mountain. The problem was, that the building was side on to the mountain, and you could have either the mountain, or the front of the building, not both. So the client asked us to Photoshop it. So we carefully cut around the building and the horizon, and took a picture of the mountain and inserted it, and the client was happy.

However around the office there were now several versions of the picture, with the clients building with Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings, the Death Star, etc in the background, since the hard part was cutting around the building and horizon tidily, and dropping backgrounds in was the work of seconds once that was done. However, Adobe has now made this kind of silliness easily within the reach of everyone, and no doubt far, far more.

 

While mobile has been growing in importance for search rankings, two announcements from Google over the past few weeks have made mobile achieve complete dominance in the search market.

Firstly, Google announced that they would be serving different results to Mobile and Desktop users, with results being targeted for those formats, so sites without mobile compatibility being downgraded in the rankings on mobile. Meaning no matter how good your site used to rank, without a responsive website or a completely separate mobile website it will get downgraded on mobile devices.

Secondly in the last few days, Google announced.

Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we’re going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.

We understand this is an important shift in our indexing and it’s one we take seriously. We’ll continue to carefully experiment over the coming months on a small scale and we’ll ramp up this change when we’re confident that we have a great user experience.

Meaning that even on desktop, sites which perform badly on Mobile results will be downgraded in search. This in addition to the penalties that Google already heaped on non mobile compliant websites which lowered their search rankings.

These announcements now put the importance of the mobile version of your site at an absolutely premium, making it far more important than the desktop version of your site. If you don’t get mobile right, quite simply, you’re not getting your web presence right.

 

As I’ve mentioned before about the town where we’re based, there’s a whole load of history going on here. And since it’s halloween, and that he’s been trending in the past week or so, I’ve done a new video about Irvines connections to Edgar Allan Poe.

He’s an author of gothic stories, mainly known for his horror stories such as The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, and the story that’s been trending on social media recently, The Cask of Amontillado. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but moved to Irvine when he was still very young, living here for 2 years, attending the Kailyard School in Kirkgate, right next to the Old Parish Church until it closed and the Irvine Grammar School opened at the other end of the town, which he then attended for the last 2 months or so of his stay in the town.

As his aunt is buried in the Old Parish Churchyard, and his school was only yards from it, it can probably be assumed that he spent some time in the Old Parish Church, and knew the churchyard fairly well. But records from this time are sketchy, and there are few records of exactly where in the town and with who that Edgar Allan Poe lived while he was resident in the town.

With connections to an author of this stature, and others such as Robert Burns, the Old Parish Churchyard is an important historical site. If you’re interest in our campaign to Digitally Preserve the Old Parish Churchyard please visit https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/record-of-irvine-scotland-old-parish-churchyard-history-photography/x/2892856#/ or to find out more please visit http://IrvineScotland.info

Today we’ve had the pleasure of launching IrvineScotland.info, a site we’ve been working on for the past month or so along with the great people at Clyde Imagineering.

The site is fairly obviously about the town of Irvine in Scotland, and sets out to make available in one place the history and community of the town. Having sections on the history of Irvine, the town as it now is, a section covering the redevelopment that occurred in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the people both modern and historic who are connected with the town. We’ll cover all these and more over the coming few days.

One of the aims of the site is to bring the history of the town online, and to share it’s culture and historical significance with the world.

The first project we’ve launched along with the site is to document, photograph and bring online the Old Parish Churchyard in the town. The Old Parish Churchyard dates back many centuries and has headstones for friends of the poet Robert Burns, the step family of Edgar Allan Poe, one of those credited as inventing the screw propellor and even a resurrectionist (grave-robber).

However the site suffers from the harsh scottish weather and from vandalism, leading to many headstones collapsing, some of them down a 20 foot drop into a public footpath. Despite amazing efforts to preserve the churchyard and the headstones, the situation is getting worse.

Although we’ve already recorded the main part of the churchyard and put it online, we’d like to complete this project to transcribe the headstones we’ve already captured and make them searchable. We’d like to be able to photograph and do the same for the second churchyard at the read of the Old Parish Church. And we’d like to put the headstones in historical context, to connect them to the histories of the people beyond just the inscriptions.

To help fund this project, we’ve started an Indiegogo campaign, and would be grateful if people could have a look and share it with anyone who might have an interest in Irvine or saving this historical site and sharing it with the world.

The Indiegogo campaign is at

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/record-of-irvine-scotland-old-parish-churchyard-history-photography/x/2892856#/

So please check out IrvineScotland.info, check out the campaign, and consider helping out.

Now here’s some footage of the site and me talking about it.

 

I noticed with some interest this week the Nobel Prizes being announced, which reminded me of our hometown Irvines connections to the Nobel factory.

Obviously better details can be found at wikipedia or the like, and I’m lifting heavily from the articles on there, but Alfred Nobel was the inventor of Dynamite, who capitalised on this by setting up the largest explosives factory in the world at Ardeer, just outside Irvine.

The site was founded in 1870, and was chosen for the company’s first factory. The business later diversified into the production of blasting gelatine, gelignite, ballistite, guncotton, and cordite.

It was commonly known locally as the ‘factory’ or the ‘Dinnamite’. At the time the company generally provided higher quality employment regarding terms and conditions and pension rights than other local firms. At its peak, the site employed almost 13,000 workers in a fairly remote location and the Ardeer site was almost like a community, and there were so many people employed there that a bank, travel agent and dentist were at one time based on the site.

The local bus company at the time, Western Scottish Bus Company, provided tens of buses per day to transport the workers to and from the site, and there were even two trains per day to transport workers to a station within the factory which was used solely for workers and any special visitors with business in the ICI plant, and was never a regular passenger stop.

The factory had its own jetty on the River Garnock in Irvine Harbour serving ships disposing of time expired explosives or importing materials for the works, and it’s own tug boat, the Garnock, which upon retirement was donated to the Maritime Museum in Irvine Harbourside.

Being an explosives factory Ardeer had its share of explosive accidents, including fatalities, and on at least 2 occasions it shattered windows across Irvine.

1913 Explosion

Alfred Nobel used the template of the factory at Ardeer for sites across the world, and in fact created a near exact copy outside Melbourne Australia, even down the the train station being named Ardeer.

https://www.secretscotland.org.uk/index.php/Secrets/ICIArdeer

When his brother died, a newspaper accidentally printed Alfred Nobels obituary instead, and was entitled “The merchant of death is dead”, shocked Nobel into creating the Nobel Prize and signing over the bulk of his legacy to maintaining the prize.

So that’s how the Nobel Prize in connected to my hometown of Irvine, Scotland, there’s plenty more the the Ardeer Factory, and to the life of Alfred Nobel, but I thought I’d just give a little glimpse into another fascinating little connection that this small Ayrshire town has.

So what is XSS, well firstly that acronym is a little confusing, as it stands for Cross Site Scripting, so should be CSS surely. But if you’ve been reading these more techy updates I’ve been doing, then you’ll know that CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets (read more about those by clicking here).

XSS is another way of hacking a site, but not this time anything to do with breaking into it and taking control. It’s actually a way of hacking that is more true to the original use of the term, it’s a way of making a site do something it’s not really supposed to do. And yes, that can be used to cause problems for users.

Cross Site Scripting (XSS) is putting code into a website somewhere where it will be displayed and run on the site. So for example, when you make an account on social media say Facebook, it’ll ask you your name, which will then be displayed on the page when someone visits your profile. Now imagine you could put absolutely anything in there, and it was just displayed without any filtering. So if you put in <b>My Name</b> (if you read the What is HTML article you’ll know all about that) your name would be displayed in bold. Which would be a cool little hack so that your account looked different than everyone elses, and you look a bit like a l33t hax0r. So that might be something that the designer of the social media site might want to leave in, a little bonus for people who know how.

Now, what if you could put in code that will run in the Browser, like some Javascript (again, if you’ve read the What is Javascript article, you’ll have some idea about what I’m writing about). So if you put in something like the below into the name box?

<script>
 alert("Hello, my name is Bob!");
</script>

Well, if it was totally unfiltered, then an alert box would pop up saying “Hello, my name is Bob!”, every time a page which was supposed to show the users name was loaded.

Which again, might be something kewl that a designer might want to leave in. But how do you know that the code being run is totally innocent, how do you know it’s not doing other things, like clicking buttons on the page (something Javascript can do), or taking you to another site, or even downloading code onto the visitors computer?

Well, simply put, you don’t. So by default all Javascript, and probably all HTML should be cleansed from all inputs. Why HTML as well? Because HTML allows such things as

<iframe src="http://www.scruffydug.com"></iframe>

An iframe allows the inline loading of a separate web page, or indeed entire site within another, so quite simply, even if Javascript was blocked from the input field, someone could open up another webpage, which contains the malignant code.

So even though it sounds a little dirty, every web developer should make sure he cleanses his inputs to avoid XSS. Quite simply, never trust anything from the user side of the website, whether it’s input boxes, cookies, uploads or anything else. Don’t let it be displayed on your site without being filtered, don’t let it near your database without being filtered, and certainly don’t allow the file to be accessed on your server without being checked and filtered (imagine if you allowed a user to upload their picture, but didn’t check the file at all, the user could upload a script instead which would allow them to seize control of the server if they so desired and then just run the script (which would be trusted by the server as it was uploaded seemingly legitimately) by coping the image url into the address bar of their browser).

So how do you filter out unwanted inputs? Well, simply put, you’re probably best to find a library which does this for you, someone elses code which takes angle brackets and converts them to character codes, which filters out and removes Javascript, and provides a level of security for your site. Why trust someone else? Simply put, because this is a massive job, you need to be aware of all the tricks to get around this security people will use, using break characters to avoid filters, using nested instructions to avoid detection, writing obfuscated code such as

var _0xc5b2=["\x6F\x6E\x6C\x6F\x61\x64",
        "\x48\x65\x6C\x6C\x6F\x20"];window[_0xc5b2[0]]=
    function (){alert(_0xc5b2[1]+username);} ;

or even

eval(unescape("var%20_0xc5b2%3D%5B%22onload%22%2C%22Hello%20%22%5D%3Bwindow"+
  "%5B_0xc5b2%5B0%5D%5D%3Dfunction%20%28%29%7Balert%28_0xc5b2%5B1%5D+username"+
  "%29%3B%7D%20%3B"));

Both of which decode to

window.onload = function() { alert("Hello " + username) };

Working out ways to avoid that is someone’s full time job, and unless you’re truly brilliant, and truly committed, you’re going to miss something, somewhere, and there’s going to be something which slips through.

 

Now, email marketing isn’t something we really do here at Scruffy Dug, as it’s to near spamming, but I found the below video interesting. It not only gives you a template for a good introductory email, but you could easily take the text and warp it into almost any text you need to use to sell, web page, tweet, facebook, etc.

So what can I say except “If you don’t watch now, you’ll hate yourself later!”

This morning I read this article http://computerworld.com/article/3120413/robotics/ai-and-robotics-could-replace-6-of-us-jobs-by-2021.html about how robots and artificial intelligence will put 6% of the American workforce out of work by 2021, which I thought made somewhat sobering news.

The research by Forrester Research focusses on how the invention of driverless cars will lead to many drivers being put out of work, and that as chatbots and the like become more advanced, that many call centre jobs will also be phased out to be replaced by machines.

But this has been a realisation of mine for the past 5 years or so, that the use of machines will grow and grow, mechanical engines have replaced biological muscles long ago, we phased out use of the horse and replaced it with the petrol engine, and machines and robots replaced humans in factories, now thinking engines will replace biological minds, firstly in routine tasks then later in more complex tasks.

Because this isn’t just low waged work, why would you need to employ a human doctor to diagnose someone, if a system can talk to the patient and have access to the entire worlds medical databases of the latest research.

There is a robot you can buy, for just over the average annual salary called Baxter. Baxter is a machine which can be shown almost any repetitive activity that a human can do, and repeat that activity 24 hours a day, for pennies of electricity. Why would an employer want to employ a human again, no holiday pay, no sickness, it probably even comes with a guarantee.

And while at the moment it may seem a little laughable that driverless cars will replace all the long distance truckers and taxi drivers out there, but all it will take is for them to become 1% safer than humans, and insurance will start penalising humans for driving at all. While thinking jobs may appear safe, I’ve been told that around 5% of all the text in newspapers is already written by machines, and that figure will only go up. Just think how many self operated checkouts you’ve seen lately replacing human cashiers, and how many automated sales calls you’ve received in the past year, yes they’re already replacing the call centres which had already been moved off-shore.

The stock market is almost exclusively run by machines these days, the fluctuations in the market (buy low, sell high if I remember my “Wall Street” correctly) happen in microseconds, Machines noticing a momentary drop in the price to buy the shares/currencies to sell again as the fluctuation corrects less than a second later to make millions. By the time a human could had noticed the same thing, the computer routines have completed and profited off it, and by the time he thought about it the systems are already working on their next deal. Humans are just too slow.

The article tries to put a positive spin on it, by saying that the industry of making these robots, driverless cars and artificial intelligences will create 2 million new jobs. But the math is still against us, the US job market last month stood at 253,854,000 , six per cent of which is 15,231,240, so we’re still 13 million jobs down. And the jobs of building these machines and systems aren’t going to go to the drivers and cashiers and call centre workers who are put out of work, they’re going to go to people with qualifications and experience working with these types of systems. Which leaves us with a problem.

So what do the people do?

Well personally I see the future as craft. If machines are doing all the big jobs, running the stock market, driving the trucks, working the factories, what do we mere fleshy mortals do? We do the opposite of mass produced. The machines can mass-produce products, but humans can make unique and interesting things. The same reason you wouldn’t buy your wedding cake from a supermarket, you want it unique and special, not mass produced. The same reason craft beer is so successful, when you can buy far cheaper mass produced products from the big breweries, many prefer something a bit unique and bit special. And the same reason that while you can buy a suit in a chain store, many prefer something handmade which fits them perfectly.

But that’s just my opinion, what do you think, let us know below.

 

Now we use WordPress for the majority of our websites, along with 74,652,825 others that also do. But the thing which makes WordPress so impressive is the plug ins.

By adding these to a basic WordPress site, you can expand its functionality way beyond what you would expect, and it’s these which makes WordPress so damn useable.

So what I’m going to do today is list the WordPress plugins  that I find so useful and that have impressed me so much, some of these are really obvious, but I hope some will pique your interest.

Jetpack

Well, I did say that some of these were obvious, but Jetpack should be the first thing you install after WordPress, the range of extra functions it embeds is incredible. When I was first getting to know WordPress, there were numerous times I installed a plugin from the repository only to find the Jetpack already did it and all I needed to do was switch on that function and configure it. Incredible, useful and very nearly vital, Jetpack provides you with useful visitor data, social media connectivity and lots and lots more.

Akismet

Again with the obvious, while WordPress is a truly incredible way of getting online, and creating a website which is useable and allows you to communicate with your visitors, one of the flaws of it is that spammers know how good it is at sharing, so target it for their adverts and junk comments. Akismet is the best way of filtering out comment spam. One of the sites I run has hundreds of thousands of comment spam that Akismet has filtered out, and saved me the need from going through message by message and getting rid of.

Tablepress

Tables have always been a bit of a pain to produce on the web, they’re clunky and annoying, but presenting data in a table whether its a list of prices or services, or the results from yesterdays games, is pretty much vital. Tablepress makes this easy, just create the table you want within Tablepress, then paste it into your page or post, really easy, looks great, what more could you want.

Yoast SEO

Getting yourself found is vital on the web, no matter how interesting you think your site is, there are a million people trying to get themselves to the top of the search engine listings as well, and they’re willing to cheat. Yoast SEO gives you advice on how to write your blog posts and pages best optimised to work with the search engines. It’s not a guaranteed result, but it’s friendly nature and the fact it updates as you type, makes it almost like a game, to write your posts and get the best results you can.

Pagebuilder by SiteOrigin

Perhaps a little more for the site builders rather than just the bloggers out there, but Pagebuilder allows you to totally customise a blog or post. While you won’t get the exact results of hardcoding a web page, in all likelyhood, Pagebuilder will create a version of your page which will work better in WordPress than something you could write yourself. By allowing you to put plugins and other core elements into a post or page, you can totally customise the look of each page within your site, beyond the standard text and image that it usually conforms to.

WooCommerce

Again with the pretty obvious, so you want to sell something online, you need an eCommerce platform. WooCommerce is exactly that, but built into WordPress. It’s fast, secure and is totally customisable through it’s own set of plugins which allow you to totally modify its performance and look, allowing you to sell almost anything, in almost any way, and let your customers pay however you want.

Sendpress

While plugins to send email are pretty common, Sendpress is this taken to the next level, with management of your mailing list, subscriptions, unsubscriptions, newsletter templates, and statistics showing who received, opened and clicked on links within your newsletters. Fascinating data, and really really useful for maintaining your newsletter lists.

GuiForm

Dropping in a contact form, or other data gathering details into a post is just a really handy add on to WordPress, nothing much else I can say about this one, its nice and easy to use, and does exactly what it’s supposed to.

Awesome Flickr Gallery

Now this one is to a fairly niche audience, but something I’ve found very handy. Awesome Flickr Gallery, allows you to use galleries from Flickr within your website, meaning that if you’ve got a gallery of your pictures there, you don’t need to duplicate it to use those within your WordPress site. It’s got a great range of functions, allowing you to show a random selection of pictures from your gallery, or the entire thing if you should so wish.

Disable Comments

So above I mentioned Akismet as being a great way to filter out spam comments, but this is the nuclear option, disabling the comments completely. The plugin allows you to disable them on a page by page basis, which I find leads to a more sensible site (since if you’re using a page within WordPress as a menu, the base install allows people to leave comments on your menu and I’m sure there are loads of other types of pages you can think of that you don’t want people to comment on). It’s remarkable how removing a feature, can actually lead to a better user experience, on one site I ran, there was a page advertising jobs with an email address for people to send their CV through to. And email address that didn’t go it IT, that went to HR, where the applications really should go to. However, the number of people who just left their details in the comments, and then came back again and again complaining that no-one was getting back to them. Far better just to block comments from that page, and avoid confusing those users.

Wpdevart Facebook comments

And once again with the comments, Wpdevart Facebook Comments, replaces the WordPress comments system with Facebook instead. This avoids a lot of comment spam, as the comment is left using the visitors Facebook profile, and also has the advantage of hooking into the visitors social network who will be able to see that he’s visited your site and commented on it, and who can moan about a little free social advertising.

So these are just a few that I’ve found handy, your mileage may vary as they say, so if you’ve got any favourites, let us know.