Wordpress crack down on plugin developers wanting to Earn Money from their hard work
I have had to remove the PluginSponsors.com Wordpress plugin from all my Wordpress plugins due to Wordpress threatening the maker of the PluginSponsors.com plugin that they will remove any plugins that utilise his harmless advert with removal from the wordpress repository.
It's not as if Wordpress Plugin developers make much money from their hard work in the first place and people who use them seem to expect 24 hour support for free as well.
Rarely I might get a small donation from one of my plugin users but it is hardly enough to cover the expense of running a cloud based server so in my opinion Wordpress is bang out of order.
Not only have I had numerous blogs on wordpress.com removed without explanation (one I have had returned without any reasoning behind the ban in the first place) but when my first wordpress.com blog was banned the other year I found out just how unreasonable the people at Automattic can be from my email discussions with them.
Not only would refuse to offer proper explanations for their reasoning behind the ban even when I gave them logical counter arguments to anything they mentioned but their intransigence reminded me of a stubborn child demanding more sweeties and refusing to back down until they got them.
Then when logic and reason was too much for them they just ignored my emails leaving me with a banned site that was up until then receiving high amounts of traffic.
Today if I was recommending a free hosted blogging tool to anyone I would tell them to go and check out blogspot with Google.
I know this blog is a blogspot blog and doesn't exactly look much but it was my first foray into blogging and I created it a good few years ago.
Nowadays their blogging software is much better and unlike the free wordpress.com blogs they actually allow you to upload images into the header, show adverts and customise the CSS of your blog for free.
After trying to set up 3 wordpress.com blogs that all had the word "horseracing" in the domain which were all instantly banned (without any kind of reason) I set this one up on blogspot: UK Horse Racing Star without any problems at all.
As you can see it's a lot better looking than this old blog plus it took me less than 20 minutes to style it, upload a header image and set the adverts up.
From now on I think I will be sticking to blogspot as Automattic have shown that they don't care about the plugin developers who spend hours even weeks writing all the thousands of plugins that make their system work.
If they did care they would offer a marketplace like Joomla for developers to sell their hard work instead of cracking down on those plugin authors who want some kind of recompense for their development.
You can read the author of the PluginSponsors.com thoughts on the matter here Automattic Bullies.
Showing posts with label support. Show all posts
Showing posts with label support. Show all posts
Monday, 28 November 2011
Friday, 6 August 2010
Techies Law - Definition
The definition of Techies Law
In a similar vein to "Murphys Law" which states if something can go wrong it will I have over the last two days experienced multiple occurrences of what I call "Techies Law" which all developers should be well aware of even if they haven't heard the term described as such.
The law is pretty simple and states that
If you have spent considerable time trying to resolve a bug in your code, technical problem or other such computer related issue and you finally resort to asking for help from a colleague or support team member. You can be rest assured that when you go to show said person the problem in action it has miraculously resolved itself. You are then derided for either being a numpty and/or wasting their precious time for no reason.
Obviously Techies Law often leaves developers looking foolish in front of their colleagues but I have decided to utilise this unfathomable law of nature to my own benefit.
Every time I now have a problem with my network connection or a bug in my code I need fixing instead of spending a long time trying to fix it myself I will now only spend a quarter of the usual amount of time I do before asking for help and in doing so I usually find the issue magically resolving itself.
The knack to this tactic is to make sure the person you ask for help is not someone who is able to rip the piss out of you and is someone who won't mind being pestered for such a reason otherwise you could find yourself being the subject of many jokes.
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Browser Usage and other Traffic Statistics
Browser Coverage and Other Visitor Statistics
A year ago I wrote an article about Browser Usage, graceful degradation and support levels for different browsers. As I was investigating Operas new browser today Opera 10 I thought it would be good to run a few reports to check out the current state of browser usage on my sites. I have posted the reports here as you may or may not find the data interesting.
The data is from one of my database servers that handles 200+ domains and was collated from 560,000 page loads using server-side logging methods for the date 01-Sep-09.
I have only listed the top 10 or 20 items for each report therefore do not expect the percentages to add up to 100% as the missing numbers will be for items excluded from view.
Top Browsers
IE 7.0 33.29
IE 8.0 21.03
IE 6.0 18.32
Firefox 3.0 8.00
Firefox 3.5 7.61
Chrome 2.0 3.10
Default Browser 2.32 (unknown, or new version not in browscap.ini)
Safari 4.0 1.42
Safari 3.2 0.77
Opera 9.6 0.77
Safari 3.0 0.65
Firefox 2.0 0.65
AOL 7.0 0.65
Safari 3.1 0.39
Mozilla 1.9 0.26
Nokia 0.26
BlackBerry 0.26
iPhone 3.0 0.13
iPhone 3.1 0.13
Top Operating Systems
WinXP 60.03
WinVista 30.21
MacOSX 3.86
unknown 2.57
Win2000 1.03
Win2003 0.77
Linux 0.39
SymbianOS 0.26
iPhone OSX 0.26
Win7 0.26
Win98 0.26
WinNT 0.13
Javascript Enabled / Disabled
Enabled 84.13
Disabled 15.87
Flash Support & Version
10.22 31.74
10.32 29.03
NA 15.61 (could not log due to JS disabled or other reasons)
10.12 7.87
9.124 6.06
9.115 1.94
None 1.94
9.28 1.03
9.47 0.77
9.16 0.65
Top Crawlers and Robots
Google Webmaster Tools 21.96 (googlebot)
Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 18.22
Twiceler 17.76
msnbot 1.1 12.15
MSN 2.0 10.75
Yahoo! Slurp 5.14
Teoma 2.80
Yandex 2.80
Google Toolbar 2.34
Inktomi 1.40 (hackbot)
libwww-perl 1.40
PycURL 0.93
Rippers 0.47 (hackbot)
Wget 0.47
Microsoft URL Control 0.47
Check&Get 0.47
Gigabot 0.47
What does this tell us?
Obviously these stats are from my system and may not be exactly comparable to other systems or the web in general however half a million page loads from 200+ different sites is quite a wide sample and should be enough to see general trends. Some of the key points are:
A year ago I wrote an article about Browser Usage, graceful degradation and support levels for different browsers. As I was investigating Operas new browser today Opera 10 I thought it would be good to run a few reports to check out the current state of browser usage on my sites. I have posted the reports here as you may or may not find the data interesting.
The data is from one of my database servers that handles 200+ domains and was collated from 560,000 page loads using server-side logging methods for the date 01-Sep-09.
I have only listed the top 10 or 20 items for each report therefore do not expect the percentages to add up to 100% as the missing numbers will be for items excluded from view.
Top Browsers
IE 7.0 33.29
IE 8.0 21.03
IE 6.0 18.32
Firefox 3.0 8.00
Firefox 3.5 7.61
Chrome 2.0 3.10
Default Browser 2.32 (unknown, or new version not in browscap.ini)
Safari 4.0 1.42
Safari 3.2 0.77
Opera 9.6 0.77
Safari 3.0 0.65
Firefox 2.0 0.65
AOL 7.0 0.65
Safari 3.1 0.39
Mozilla 1.9 0.26
Nokia 0.26
BlackBerry 0.26
iPhone 3.0 0.13
iPhone 3.1 0.13
Top Operating Systems
WinXP 60.03
WinVista 30.21
MacOSX 3.86
unknown 2.57
Win2000 1.03
Win2003 0.77
Linux 0.39
SymbianOS 0.26
iPhone OSX 0.26
Win7 0.26
Win98 0.26
WinNT 0.13
Javascript Enabled / Disabled
Enabled 84.13
Disabled 15.87
Flash Support & Version
10.22 31.74
10.32 29.03
NA 15.61 (could not log due to JS disabled or other reasons)
10.12 7.87
9.124 6.06
9.115 1.94
None 1.94
9.28 1.03
9.47 0.77
9.16 0.65
Top Crawlers and Robots
Google Webmaster Tools 21.96 (googlebot)
Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 18.22
Twiceler 17.76
msnbot 1.1 12.15
MSN 2.0 10.75
Yahoo! Slurp 5.14
Teoma 2.80
Yandex 2.80
Google Toolbar 2.34
Inktomi 1.40 (hackbot)
libwww-perl 1.40
PycURL 0.93
Rippers 0.47 (hackbot)
Wget 0.47
Microsoft URL Control 0.47
Check&Get 0.47
Gigabot 0.47
What does this tell us?
Obviously these stats are from my system and may not be exactly comparable to other systems or the web in general however half a million page loads from 200+ different sites is quite a wide sample and should be enough to see general trends. Some of the key points are:
- Microsoft is still cornering the market with its browsers occupying the top 3 spots.
- IE 6 still has a large market share and will most likely continue to occupy the 3rd spot due to the large number of intranet sites and client systems build for that browser along with Microsoft's decision to support it until 2014.
- Chrome has done very well since coming on the scene early this year,
- Opera continues to do very poorly,
- 15% of visitors have Javascript disabled and this figure will probably continue to rise over time due to security fears of getting XSS hijacked or infected by a virus.
- Its hard to accurately know the number of users who have Flash enabled that also choose to disable Javascript as the only way to accurately log Flash usage and version details is with Javascript. However as most people seem to deliver flash content with script they are missing out on up to 15% of their audience when they don't have to. Delivering flash content server side instead would mean more coverage, better degradation and remove any reliance of another technology having to be enabled.
- Browsing from Mobile Phones and PDAs seems to be much more common and this means developers need to consider how their sites render on small screens as well as how they run on those mobiles that deliver web content through proxies (usually no flash and limited Ajax and scripting).
Thursday, 18 September 2008
What browser support do you offer your users.
Graceful degradation
In an ideal world you would want any website you develop to have the largest audience as possible. Sites these days can rely on multiple technologies to work (Javascript, Flash, Java, ActiveX, CSS) most of which the user can disable through choice even when their browser supports it. This means that when it comes to developing a site you have the decision between drawing a line in the sand and saying you must use this browser above this version and have JavaScript, Flash and ActiveX enabled for it to work which will mean a small and very annoyed audience. Or the better way which is to build the site from bottom up starting with a good HTML core structure that should work in all browsers and then add layers of functionality on top.
This means making sure all links have href tags that point to URIs and not Javascript: , images have alt tags, client side validation is duplicated on the server (which is good practise anyway to prevent hackers avoiding it by disabling javascript) and that the core navigation is not reliant on Javascript to work. This is called graceful degradation and ensures that your sites core functionality is available to as many users as possible.
For example if you were displaying flash banners you would start with an image that had alt tags defined so that if the user has a text based browser they read the content within the alt tags. If they have image support they would see the image but if they had Flash enabled they would view the movie.
The site I am currently working on divides browser support up into 3 levels and to help the user we include a browser compatibility page that lets the user see what level of support their browser settings are providing them along with links to let them download the latest version of their browser if they are using an old version. As well as showing the browser support level (see below) the page lists a number of key settings and features that the site makes use of with an indicator of whether this feature is enabled or not. Settings displayed include Flash, JavaScript, AJAX, Java, Cookies etc. Having one or more items on this feature list unavailable does not mean the site will not function only that certain parts of the site use this technology and therefore to get the richest experience from the site and enjoy all the functionality they should enable those missing features. Obviously there are some items that have to be available for the site to work such as forms and session cookies and we let the user know whether their browser and settings are compatible with the site by showing them crosses or ticks next to each item and an overall compatibility rating.
Browser support levels
The browser support grades are defined in the following way.
Leval 1 Support
This means that the site should be fully functional and display correctly. We will test the site fully in level 1 browsers to make sure any bugs are fixed as soon as possible. Currently our level 1 browsers are IE 7,6, Firefox 2 (3 still buggy), Safari 3, Opera 9.
Level 2 Support
This means browsers that should work without any problem with our software but as we cannot test every single available browser we cannot guarantee that everything will work. For example if the browser is the latest version of SeaMonkey or Firebird which is based on the same Gecko rendering engine that Firefox is (which is a level 1 browser) then the system should work perfectly depending on your browser settings. However as we do not fully test
the system with this browser we do not guarantee it will work 100%. Current level 2 browsers would be Firefox 3, Opera 8, Sea Monkey, Konqueror.
Level 3 Support
This means older or niche browsers such as PDA/Mobile phones that we do not test the system on. This is not to say the system won't work as it might do depending on your browser settings. However we are not going to test our system on Netscape Navigator 4 or every mobile phone to ensure it works.
A fully functional site means no Javascript errors however the Javascript is not really a problem as most code that works in IE 7 is going to work in IE 5 and we all try to write cross browser code nowadays which is made easier with all the libraries available. The issue is more to do with CSS and all the quirks between IE/Mozilla and the various versions. IE 6 for instance has a number of major differences which means special stylesheets or hacks have to be implemented. As much as we would like to downgrade IE 6 to a level 2 browser we cannot due to the simple fact that a number of our largest clients still use IE 6 as their browser. We have enquired about the possibility of them upgrading but were actually told that their technical support team would not allow them to which is understandable if you consider how much support time would be taken up by requests of help because of the new browser layout. I can imagine don't want to suffer the hundreds of phone calls asking "where has the history menu disapeared to."
I also have Firefox 3 in level 2 due to the fact that there are still a number of outstanding issues with the site which need resolving before we would make it level 1. Some of these issues are definitely a problem with the browser such as the well known problem of playing Flash videos which an upgrade to version 10 is the only workaround I have found. There is also an issue with the execCommand function which I am not sure about as the code worked fine in Firefox 2 and other browsers but has suddenly started giving me Component returned failure code: 0x80004003 (NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER) [nsIDOMNSHTMLDocument.execCommand]" errors in an iframe based wysiwyg editor the site uses.
Current browser usage
I like to occasionally look at the traffic statistics to see whether our grading of browsers over 3 levels is in keeping with actual Internet use.
The system I am logging against is recording on average 350,000 page loads a day at the moment roughly 50-60% of which are from crawlers which is nothing out of the ordinary. So looking at the traffic from those site members who have logged into the website as opposed to just visitors the browser breakdown for this month so far is:
Browser %
IE 7.0 61.56
IE 6.0 27.21
Firefox 3.0 5.44
Firefox 2.0 3.06
Safari 3.1 2.72
Which is no great surprise and shows how much of a market share IE 6 still has even after 2 years of IE 7 being around.
As for obscure and old browser versions would you be surprised or not to know that for today only the following browsers appeared in the stats for all non-crawler traffic:
Although not earth shatteringly exciting it does show the breadth of browser types available and also that a large majority of the users out there do not seem upgrade very often, some not at all by the looks of things. With new versions of browsers rolling out all the time it would be physically impossible to test a site in each one but if your site works in the major 4 rendering engines (IE/trident, Firefox/Gecko, Safari/Webkit, Opera/Presto) then you will be covering the majority of those users who do keep up to date with browser revisions.
In an ideal world you would want any website you develop to have the largest audience as possible. Sites these days can rely on multiple technologies to work (Javascript, Flash, Java, ActiveX, CSS) most of which the user can disable through choice even when their browser supports it. This means that when it comes to developing a site you have the decision between drawing a line in the sand and saying you must use this browser above this version and have JavaScript, Flash and ActiveX enabled for it to work which will mean a small and very annoyed audience. Or the better way which is to build the site from bottom up starting with a good HTML core structure that should work in all browsers and then add layers of functionality on top.
This means making sure all links have href tags that point to URIs and not Javascript: , images have alt tags, client side validation is duplicated on the server (which is good practise anyway to prevent hackers avoiding it by disabling javascript) and that the core navigation is not reliant on Javascript to work. This is called graceful degradation and ensures that your sites core functionality is available to as many users as possible.
For example if you were displaying flash banners you would start with an image that had alt tags defined so that if the user has a text based browser they read the content within the alt tags. If they have image support they would see the image but if they had Flash enabled they would view the movie.
The site I am currently working on divides browser support up into 3 levels and to help the user we include a browser compatibility page that lets the user see what level of support their browser settings are providing them along with links to let them download the latest version of their browser if they are using an old version. As well as showing the browser support level (see below) the page lists a number of key settings and features that the site makes use of with an indicator of whether this feature is enabled or not. Settings displayed include Flash, JavaScript, AJAX, Java, Cookies etc. Having one or more items on this feature list unavailable does not mean the site will not function only that certain parts of the site use this technology and therefore to get the richest experience from the site and enjoy all the functionality they should enable those missing features. Obviously there are some items that have to be available for the site to work such as forms and session cookies and we let the user know whether their browser and settings are compatible with the site by showing them crosses or ticks next to each item and an overall compatibility rating.
Browser support levels
The browser support grades are defined in the following way.
Leval 1 Support
This means that the site should be fully functional and display correctly. We will test the site fully in level 1 browsers to make sure any bugs are fixed as soon as possible. Currently our level 1 browsers are IE 7,6, Firefox 2 (3 still buggy), Safari 3, Opera 9.
Level 2 Support
This means browsers that should work without any problem with our software but as we cannot test every single available browser we cannot guarantee that everything will work. For example if the browser is the latest version of SeaMonkey or Firebird which is based on the same Gecko rendering engine that Firefox is (which is a level 1 browser) then the system should work perfectly depending on your browser settings. However as we do not fully test
the system with this browser we do not guarantee it will work 100%. Current level 2 browsers would be Firefox 3, Opera 8, Sea Monkey, Konqueror.
Level 3 Support
This means older or niche browsers such as PDA/Mobile phones that we do not test the system on. This is not to say the system won't work as it might do depending on your browser settings. However we are not going to test our system on Netscape Navigator 4 or every mobile phone to ensure it works.
A fully functional site means no Javascript errors however the Javascript is not really a problem as most code that works in IE 7 is going to work in IE 5 and we all try to write cross browser code nowadays which is made easier with all the libraries available. The issue is more to do with CSS and all the quirks between IE/Mozilla and the various versions. IE 6 for instance has a number of major differences which means special stylesheets or hacks have to be implemented. As much as we would like to downgrade IE 6 to a level 2 browser we cannot due to the simple fact that a number of our largest clients still use IE 6 as their browser. We have enquired about the possibility of them upgrading but were actually told that their technical support team would not allow them to which is understandable if you consider how much support time would be taken up by requests of help because of the new browser layout. I can imagine don't want to suffer the hundreds of phone calls asking "where has the history menu disapeared to."
I also have Firefox 3 in level 2 due to the fact that there are still a number of outstanding issues with the site which need resolving before we would make it level 1. Some of these issues are definitely a problem with the browser such as the well known problem of playing Flash videos which an upgrade to version 10 is the only workaround I have found. There is also an issue with the execCommand function which I am not sure about as the code worked fine in Firefox 2 and other browsers but has suddenly started giving me Component returned failure code: 0x80004003 (NS_ERROR_INVALID_POINTER) [nsIDOMNSHTMLDocument.execCommand]" errors in an iframe based wysiwyg editor the site uses.
Current browser usage
I like to occasionally look at the traffic statistics to see whether our grading of browsers over 3 levels is in keeping with actual Internet use.
The system I am logging against is recording on average 350,000 page loads a day at the moment roughly 50-60% of which are from crawlers which is nothing out of the ordinary. So looking at the traffic from those site members who have logged into the website as opposed to just visitors the browser breakdown for this month so far is:
Browser %
IE 7.0 61.56
IE 6.0 27.21
Firefox 3.0 5.44
Firefox 2.0 3.06
Safari 3.1 2.72
Which is no great surprise and shows how much of a market share IE 6 still has even after 2 years of IE 7 being around.
As for obscure and old browser versions would you be surprised or not to know that for today only the following browsers appeared in the stats for all non-crawler traffic:
- 62 different people used IE 5.0 and 1 came along in IE 4!
- 5 visited on various versions of Netscape Navigator 4.
- Overall users to the site Yandex the Russian search engine came third after IE 7 and 6.
- There were over 100 different types of browser/version recorded today alone.
Although not earth shatteringly exciting it does show the breadth of browser types available and also that a large majority of the users out there do not seem upgrade very often, some not at all by the looks of things. With new versions of browsers rolling out all the time it would be physically impossible to test a site in each one but if your site works in the major 4 rendering engines (IE/trident, Firefox/Gecko, Safari/Webkit, Opera/Presto) then you will be covering the majority of those users who do keep up to date with browser revisions.
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