To be frank, I kinda forgot about the event until Christian Heilmann tweeted about it:

Christian Heilmann's tweet

I didn’t forget about it while developing the new NOVALISTIC though, so if you were browsing the site while it was still CSS Naked Day, I’m sure you saw it in all its black-text-over-white-background glory!

During the event I even noticed some display issues, mostly caused by two things:

• Inline elements being crunched together
• JavaScript-injected CSS

Those were fixed in a matter of hours, really. I was busy with some other stuff so I didn’t do much else but bug-fixing. Sorry about it.

Another thing: the effect lasts on my web site from April 8, 2010 at noon to April 10, 2010 at noon. This is to keep with the international spirit of CSS Naked Day:

CSS Naked Day lasts for one international day. Technically speaking, it will be “April 9th” somewhere in the world for 48 hours. This is to ensure that everyone’s website will be publicly nude for the entire world to see at any given time during April 9.

What about you? How many of you celebrated by stripping your sites of all CSS styles too?

As of this writing, SitePoint has raised over US$140,000 (over AU$200,000)! As a web designer and/or developer, you too can help out. There is a wide selection of books to choose from, so take your time and make your $29.95 worth it! (Then again, helping the Aussies is worth more than enough in itself!)

If you need ideas on what to buy, here’s the list of books I’ve just purchased:

1. The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
2. Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong!
3. The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2nd Edition
4. Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL, 3rd ed.
5. The Principles Of Successful Freelancing

This is both an awesome bargain and an awesome contribution. Let’s help the world — five PDFs at a time

All you have to do is follow SitePoint on Twitter to get the book! But if you don’t have a Twitter account, well, they saw it coming; just visit their Twitaway site for more!

One thing I like about SitePoint is when they occasionally release books for free for a limited time. A few months back, there was a giveaway for The Photoshop Anthology whose PDF I grabbed as well.

They write some of the greatest books I’ve read, and I’m glad to have known the site.

Actually, this might be a post I wrote just to demonstrate Phi, my own WordPress plugin

Here are a couple of simple ways to optimize your PHP for loops. For loops are already the fastest solutions to many situations over foreach and while loops, but you can further better the performance of your PHP scripts. The differences may seem marginal at first, but I figured why not?

Also, there are many other ways, I predict, to optimize your loops. These are the ones that just came into mind as I wrote this post. So enjoy!

You can run these blocks of code in the command line (without the delimiters) to see the timings for yourself.

1. Don’t call functions in the conditional check

This is pretty fundamental, you may already have come across this tip that indeed gives your script’s performance an even greater boost.

Please, don’t call functions in the conditional check (the second expression in the construct), whatever you do. It’ll get called over and over again, and you can imagine how dizzy PHP might end up after having counted the size of a thousand-large array a hundred times. Do the parser a favor, won’t you now?

Example 1: call functions outside the conditional check

<?php

/*
 * An array of a million numbers, for illustration
 * only. You don't always use arrays of numbers,
 * much less come across such large ones as this...
 */
$a = range(1, 1000000);

for ($i = 1; $i <= 5; ++$i)
{
    $s = microtime(true);
    
    // Counting a million-large array a million times
    // is nothing but torture
    for ($j = 0; $j < count($a); ++$j)
    {
        $foo = 'bar';
    }
    
    $t = microtime(true) - $s;
    printf("%d. %f secondsn", $i, $t);
}

for ($i = 1; $i <= 5; ++$i)
{
    $s = microtime(true);
    
    // No doubt it is a huge array, but PHP just counts
    // it only once, then remembers the array count
    for ($j = 0, $c = count($a); $j < $c; ++$j)
    {
        $foo = 'bar';
    }
    
    $t = microtime(true) - $s;
    printf("%d. %f secondsn", $i, $t);
}

?>

1. 0.370603 seconds
2. 0.397640 seconds
3. 0.401025 seconds
4. 0.398929 seconds
5. 0.399258 seconds

1. 0.172618 seconds
2. 0.172244 seconds
3. 0.172764 seconds
4. 0.172037 seconds
5. 0.172171 seconds

2. Post-increment or pre-increment does matter

Did you notice in my above example that I used ++$i to increment $i?

Apparently, whether you tell PHP to evaluate $i++ or ++$i does make some kind of difference in performance. In this case, pre-incremental (++$i) is faster. No doubt you will never notice it since it’s faster only by a fraction of a millisecond, but your application, PHP, your server and ultimately your users will thank you.

In my opinion it makes the loop code look cooler. Perhaps the loop-progressing expression looking different has something to do with it.

Example 2: use pre-increment if you can

<?php

for ($i = 1; $i <= 5; ++$i)
{
    $s = microtime(true);
    
    // Post-incrementing
    for ($j = 0; $j < 1000000; $j++)
    {
        $foo = 'bar';
    }
    
    $t = microtime(true) - $s;
    printf("%d. %f secondsn", $i, $t);
}

for ($i = 1; $i <= 5; ++$i)
{
    $s = microtime(true);
    
    // Pre-incrementing
    for ($j = 0; $j < 1000000; ++$j)
    {
        $foo = 'bar';
    }
    
    $t = microtime(true) - $s;
    printf("%d. %f secondsn", $i, $t);
}

?>

1. 0.178003 seconds
2. 0.176616 seconds
3. 0.176738 seconds
4. 0.176573 seconds
5. 0.176910 seconds

1. 0.166239 seconds
2. 0.166349 seconds
3. 0.165796 seconds
4. 0.165859 seconds
5. 0.165786 seconds

I tried a few plugins like WP-Syntax and SyntaxHighlighter Plus, however they were too complicated and feature-rich for my needs, and recent versions of WP-Syntax, which I’d been using for the past year, were beginning to mess with my styles. That annoyed me real good. Plus, GeSHi colors were getting a little boring for me.

There was WP-Syntax Colorizer, but it didn’t quite satisfy me.

That does it, I thought. So I set out to put together a simple plugin which would fulfill my needs, using PHP’s humble highlight_string() function (PHP manual page).

And Phi was born.

I might release Phi soon. I believe there are others out there who share my opinion about the bigger syntax highlighting plugins. Besides, this is my first, so for additional kicks I’d like to see what it’s like to be a proud developer of my very own WordPress plugin (heh).

Here’s an excerpt of Phi’s source code, highlighted using Phi itself of course:

Example 1: Phi’s source code, highlighted using Phi

<?php
    
    // PHP 4 coughs up <font> tags - clearly highly undesirable behavior
    if ( version_compare(phpversion(), '5.0.0', '<') ) {
        $php = preg_replace(
            array('@<font color="(.+?)">@', '@</font>@'), 
            array('<span style="color: $1">', '</span>'), 
            $php
        );
    }
    
?>

See also, at dev.NOVALISTIC, Phi in action.

I’m going to start hosting my WordPress themes at the new theme directory. If you’re interested in hosting at the new site as well, here’s some stuff you’ll want to know.

By themes, I mean complete themes. My Sandbox designs (Potassium and Bromine) will not be available there. EDIT [7/19]: At least, not yet, until what Adam hypothesizes in his comment comes to light.

And along with this piece of great news, I have also put together Thistle 1.0.2, ready for download now. EDIT [7/19]: It will be available in the theme directory It is now available in the theme directory, and of course it’ll remain hosted here at NOVALISTIC as well.

Here’s what’s new from 1.0.1:

Changelog

• WordPress 2.5 visual editor CSS classes are now present, and thus:
  • The visual editor will be happy.
  • I’ll be able to host Thistle at the new WordPress Theme Directory.
• Thistle 1.0.1′s static Meta widget was not updated to reflect the credit to me. Ouch.
• Images now overflow the left column if necessary and are now visible over the sidebar.
• Corrected inconsistencies in a couple other templates.
• The theme’s PHP code has been edited to adhere to WordPress’s coding standards.

What about me? I have mentioned and ranted about IE6 so many times and have already maintained an anti-IE6 attitude for over six months, but ultimately… shall I forsake IE6 for real? Or shall I just wait a while more?

Let’s see now, searching this blog for the term ie6 brings up a whole bunch of posts ranting about Internet Explorer 6. Just so you know, the new theme happens to work very well (though of course not perfectly) on IE6, and it’s all thanks to the magic Holly hack:

/*\*/
* html #div-to-apply-hack {
    height: 1%;
}
/* */

But I continued to spend an hour or two, just on IE6, just to fix only a couple of display bugs. I had to go through about six or seven minor revisions of the theme to accommodate IE6. I’m honestly uncertain how much that was worth at all.

The following sentence from this post announcing Potassium eleven months ago perfectly sums up my attitude toward IE6 during the course of designing NOVALISTIC 3.0:

I may include a couple more star-html hacks just to have NOVALISTIC display sanely in IE6, but I won’t spend any other effort on it.

Now, I’m still as of now deciding on either carrying on with finishing up NOVALISTIC 3.0 “Oltanis” or just starting afresh with a new NOVALISTIC 4.0. You know, perhaps I should come up with some Oltanis screenshots for good measure since I’ve been like 60% done with it for over six months. It doesn’t look good in IE6, but of course I don’t care.

Here are BoltPress’s statistics from its launch on May 31, 2007 according to Google Analytics, click for full view:

Browser statistics for BoltPress in Google Analytics

22.94% of all visitors used IE, and within that percentage, 37.69% used IE6. Or, 536 out of 6200 total visitors used IE6. Do your math, and you’ll get 8.65%. That’s not really a lot. Besides, IE6 usage is fast declining, with the adoption of both IE7 as well as Firefox 3 coming up (31.4 million downloads so far!), so I honestly doubt it to be a long wait before IE6 no longer matters in my life.

Whenever IE6 comes into play when I’m developing a web design, it will definitely rob me of between two and six hours, depending on the design itself. It’s not very nice, especially when your efforts end up only in vain (i.e. IE6 simply refusing to cooperate, etc).

In any case, whether I’m going to continue Oltanis or start over from scratch, I simply can’t find a reason that will really convince me to maintain support for IE6 in my future designs and applications. I simply can’t.

I think I’m about done ranting. What’s your say on this whole should-we-continue-considering-IE6 thing? It’s happening and ongoing — and we all know it. For me, I’m ready. And I’ve been ready for more than half a year. To say goodbye to IE6. I salute 37signals. They must’ve had a hard time working with that pile of trash.

I’m not sure why I’ve never mentioned Aptana Studio in this blog except at the old About page page. It’s the nicest IDE I’ve found, and for web development, I’ve moved from the also-awesome Notepad++ to Aptana.

Anyway, I wanted a dark colorization so I could read my code a little better, so yesterday, I tried to make a colorization based on the Ruby Blue theme for Notepad++, but I was having a bit of trouble and it was really tedious. To add, it was late.

Frustrated, I was looking around the forums, then I caught sight of a post that linked to a colorization, called Green Chaud (direct download link), made by Boris Popoff. Just one screenshot demonstrates its sheer beauty immediately. I downloaded and imported the colorization to my copy of Aptana, and I fell in love! Here’s the screenshot from that page:

Green Chaud displaying PHP syntax highlighting

You can get IE8 at its Web site for free.

Here I take a first look at the browser, and point out some of its not-too-great areas. I shall not bash IE8 as much as I did its predecessors because Microsoft is finally genuinely putting in good effort to make their browser better, even though it’s been nearly a decade now.

First I’ll show you a shot of the overall browser window.

IE8 displaying the IE8 welcome page

Just a little note, depending on how you stretch the window horizontally, that arrow will switch between left and right according to the position of the Click the Emulate IE7 Button box relative to the button itself. That’s… cute. You can view the source and take a look at the simple JavaScript of that very page.

Microsoft has said they’ll make IE8 as standards compliant as possible. I don’t know whether or not to forgive them for forgetting to proofread their HTML or something, but…

IE8 beta welcome page does not validate

Anyway, now although it’s entered beta… its rendering engine seems unsatisfactory. There are display bugs, or should I say, regressions, that were not present in IE7 but have stuck themselves into IE8.

For example, one of the little annoyances that I’ve just seen with my upcoming design is that anchor links that were set by CSS to display as block-level elements don’t display as block-level elements. The clickable region only covers the text despite me having set padding, height and other properties.

And yes, this is indeed part of my prototype-final design

Display problems in standards mode not present when emulating IE7

That’s about it. I haven’t bothered to test the new Activities and WebSlices features introduced in IE8 because I’m not interested in them, sorry. Also, I’ve already uninstalled IE8 and therefore reverted to IE7. I think Microsoft might just make IE8 that little bit better… though only time will tell ultimately.

The Internet Explorer development team has FINALLY decided to make IE8 render according to W3C standards by default!

Now, you may be thinking, hot damn that’s gonna be a long wait, and when will IE6 be finally phased out? Well, the latter question I have no certain answer to, but for the former… I’m sure it’ll be worth it. Unless Microsoft screws it up again… but I pray to God that He shall see Microsoft not commit any more such web-breaking misdemeanors as developing IE6 and <marquee> (you do realize Microsoft made that tag right?).

So, anyway, I’d just like to say…

Thanks for listening to us, IE dev team! Your final decision has been a long-awaited one and we thank you for doing your part in encouraging Web standards and interoperability!