This was seen by some people as a loss for web standards as Opera were the major company pushing standards and a spec compliant browser. The good news for those people is tonight both Mozilla and Google announced they were each developing a their own new rendering engine, Mozilla have partnered with Samsung to develop a new mobile rendering engine for Android called Servo, and Google announced it was forking WebKit and branding it Blink. Chromium will be updated to use Blink, which in turn means Opera will also be using Blink.

So, in less than two months we have gone from 4 rendering engines, down to 3, now back up to five. Those who protest all browsers should be using one rendering engine and that should be WebKit, will not be happy bunnies tonight!

My initial thoughts on Blink are that while it does mean another engine to test in, it’s no more than we did before with Presto, and as we are all building sites to W3C standards our sites will either work perfectly or degrade gracefully so there is nothing to worry about. I do like that they have decided not to implement vendor prefixes, and the legacy WebKit ones it will inherit will be phased out and removed.

Servo I don’t know that much about other than it’s a mobile specific rendering engine, there no plans to drop Gecko just yet, and its being developed for Android and ARM devices. I’m guessing its an attempt to keep away from WebKit on mobile but not have the headaches of Gecko running on Android. I need to investigate more and report back.

The announcement posts are below, any thoughts/opinions/etc please comment below.

Mozilla – https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung-collaborate-on-next-generation-web-browser-engine/

Google – http://blog.chromium.org/2013/04/blink-rendering-engine-for-chromium.html

Opera – http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/hello-blink/ (technically an unofficial notification but Mr Lawson is official enough for me)

<a href="tel:+441611234567" title="Call us today">0161 123 4567</a>

The big issue with implementing tel: links is that they are not supported by desktop browsers without plug-ins such as FoxtoPhone, if your a Firefox user with an Android device I highly recommend you install.

This lack of support results in a LOT of 404s generated by both human visitors and bots that follow the links. Yes you can style tel links to make human visitor less likely to click them, but people still do and there isn’t much you can do about bots and they are the ones that spam your logs with 404s.

the solution I have found is to pop a .htaccess rewrite to catch those devices that don’t support tel links and redirect them to the contact page.

RewriteRule tel\:\+([0-9]) /contact-me [R=301,L]

Mixed views on Twitter this morning, my opinion is its a shame that they feel the need to switch, it obviously comes on the back of repeated failed attempts to persuade sloppy developers to stop using webkit prefixed code. But its probably a good thing, as they say it means less time duplicating basic rendering code already in Webkit and means the X million webkit users will get a big push of new standards compliant features from the folk over at Opera.

Source: http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit

With only 5 days left, and a total on £130, we have 1 working week left till its over so I need your help! £1/£2/£5 whatever you can afford, please go to  http://mobro.co/gavember and make a donation.

Update – 1st December:

Thank you to everyone who donated, final total was an amazing £330. Donations are still open so if you were waiting for pay day or didn’t get chance, you can still make a donation to the mo.

On the first day of #phpmas #PHPNW sent to me… Michael Heap (@mheap) – Designing Systems to Scale! bit.ly/XgWyT5

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) November 16, 2012

On the second day of #phpmas #PHPNW sent to me… Lorna Mitchell (@lornajane) – PHP 5.4 Features You Will Actually Use! bit.ly/Q5tU30

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) November 19, 2012

On the third day of #phpmas #PHPNW sent to me… Igor Wielder (@igorwesome) – React – Event-driven PHP! bit.ly/UG65LZ

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) November 20, 2012

On the fourth day of #phpmas #PHPNW sent to me… Ian Barber (@ianbarber) – Building a Firehose bit.ly/RTlcTP

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) November 21, 2012

On the 5th day of #phpmas #PHPNW sent to me… Hugo Hamon (@hhamon) – Twig doesn’t make templating your enemy! bit.ly/ObncCW

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) November 22, 2012

On the 6th day of #phpmas #PHPNW sent to me… Ben Longden (@blongden) – Silex, the Micro Framework. bit.ly/TgexCm

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) November 23, 2012

On the 7th day of #phpmas #PHPNW sent to me… Mike Van Riel (@mvriel) – phpDocumentor: Your source code matters: bit.ly/Sbc4qR

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) November 26, 2012

On the 8th day of #phpmas #PHPNW gave to me… Jakub Zalas (@jakub_zalas) – Symfony components in the wild. bitly.com/O8D8pt

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) November 27, 2012

On the 9th day of #phpmas #PHPNW sent to me… Rob Allen (@akrabat) – Working with ZF2s Zend/Form. bit.ly/Tu2QdN

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) November 28, 2012

On the 10th day of #phpmas #PHPNW sent to me… Adrian Hardy (@adrianhardy) – LAMP on a diet bit.ly/QPzqSz

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) November 29, 2012

On the 11th day of #phpmas #PHPNW sent to me… Nathaniel McHugh (@natmchugh) Fork It! Parallel Processing in PHP. bit.ly/11p3GuP

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) November 30, 2012

On the 12th day of #phpmas #PHPNW sent to me… Derick Rethans (@derickr) Practical Date/Time Handling with PHP. bit.ly/UBIRdQ

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) December 3, 2012

On the 13th day of #phpmas #phpnw sent to me… Harrie Verveer (@harrieverveer) – Recognising Smelly Code. bit.ly/YvdkhP

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) December 4, 2012

On the 14th day of #phpmas #phpnw sent to me… Ben Waine (@bwaine) – The Art of Application Logging. bit.ly/Vk1pfj

— PHPNW13 (@phpnw13) December 5, 2012

In case I forget to post one, you can follow the list yourself on Twitter by following @PHPNW13 or following the #phpmas hashtag

There isn’t a list-style-color, or a similar way of specifying a colour for a list bullet in the CSS spec, so up till now its been a case of either set the colour on the <li> and wrap a span around your text in an other colour, or use a background image. I have tended to go for the image as you can have a different size bullet to the default one.

Today I was pottering around and came up with a handy trick for doing a coloured square in CSS, of any size or colour you fancy and using any Unicode character you can find. I am writing here so I remember and hopefully one or two of you may find useful. It doesn’t work in IE6/7 but does fall-back to the standard <li> bullet in the colour of your text, so that’s good enough for me.

HTML

<ul>
<li>This is an item in a list</li>
<li>You may have guessed but this is too</li>
<li>Your on a roll, yes this is another list item</li>
<li>Almost finished...</li>
<li>One more for the road</li>
</ul>

CSS

ul.custom-bullet-demo li {
list-style: square;
font-size: 16px;
}
ul.custom-bullet-demo li:before {
color: #B9D851;
content: "\25A0";
font-size: 1.7em;
margin-left: -19px;
padding-right: 0.25em;
position: relative;
}

Result

• This is an item in a list
• You may have guessed but this is too
• Your on a roll, yes this is another list item
• Almost finished…
• One more for the road

I found a Wikepedia page that has a few Unicode characters on it so you can use all sorts of bullets rather than the standard square or circle (except for IE6/7 that is).

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters

Please bear with me while I get it all sorted.

Thanks.

The Web Developers Conference is aimed at both professionals and students, and focuses on the front end side of web development.

The schedule has now been released, and the speakers have been known for a while, there are a couple of well-known speakers that will be there so I’m really looking forward to this and hopefully learning a few things front end related , as a PHP developer that’s where my skills aren’t so strong.

Tickets are still available at a very reasonable £50 for the days festivities, and will be entering a Late Bird stage at the start of October, so get your tickets now to avoid disappointment if they sell out or go past your budget! Various discount codes are floating around on Twitter if you need one, or just ask one of the speakers if you’re struggling.

You can find out more information on the conference website http://webdevconf.com/

PHPNW is a user group meetup of PHP developers based in Manchester, with the aim of sharing experiences and improving knowledge of all things PHP (and other related technologies). The group meet the first Tuesday of the month for a 40 min or so talk on the speakers chosen topic. They held their first conference in 2008 and have had one each year since. Find out more on the conference About page.

So Why should you attend?
2010 was my first PHPNW conference and as I said in my post at the time it was a great experience, I met a lot of new people, and learnt a lot of new tips, tricks and tools to help my PHP development. I have used them to improve the way I do things both at work and at home on personal projects so it was well worth the money and I had a great time.

This year, the conference is going to be bigger and better, with a new venue, more speakers, a new track, increased sessions on the 2nd day, a pre-conference tutorial day, an unconference, the list goes on. Its going to be an amazing couple of days and I learnt so much last year and am expecting this year to be no different. There are some really interesting sessions going on, am stuck with a couple of talks on which one Im going to go to. The good news is, which ever I decide, all the sessions are filmed so I will get to see all of them anyway after the conference is over and my post conference drinks related headache has subsided.

I really do recommend you clear the 8th and 9th of October from your diary, buy your ticket and pop down to Manchester for a great couple of days. If you do attend, don’t forget to say hi, and mines a Carlsberg

Now, enough of my waffling, down to the important bit. You have just 1 day left to get your Early Bird Tickets, before the price increases a little (not too much) in the final days run up to the conference weekend.

You can find out more information on the PHPNW11 conference website or by following and tweeting to the @PHPNW Twitter account.

This week, Google took that idea and extended it into an independent online tool, making it available for anyone on any browser. It uses a version of WebKit installed on a server to run the test (via the Chrome version of Page Speed Im guessing) to test your site and suggest improvements.

It seems to work in exactly the same way, and suggests the same kinds of things to improve your score, and has the same issues I pointed out last time, in that it marks you down for incorrect caching on Google Services you include on your page (Analytics in my case).

When I first ran the test on my site, I had dropped to 76/100, this was down to the javascript includes I had slowing things down, and the image caching wasn’t long enough. A couple of tweaks later and I’m now back up to 96/100 which is 3 above where I got to last year.

Read the Google post or start testing your site, please note tho, that as its being hosted on the Google Labs site, this could (as many have done before) disappear without warning. If it does I’ll update this post to reflect that.