Web design survey

Last year, the excellent web design site A List Apart ran a survey of web designers/developers. They hired a couple of statisticians to analyse the data before publishing the results in a very detailed report.

They’re running the survey again this year. They say they’ve improved on the survey from last year. If you work in the web, you should fill it out.

Accessing the Coldfusion Developer’s Journal

For those that don’t know, the CFDJ was a journal all about Coldfusion, published for about 10 years by Sys-Con. In 2007 they had a bit of falling out with Adobe over funding, and effectively pulled it (or rather renamed it to the Silverlight Developer’s Journal instead).

Over the last few years their website (and I believe the publication itself) went seriously downhill, with crazy video ads etc. often causing the browser to crash. Ben Nadel even wrote a Greasemonkey script to circumvent all the things that would kill the browser.

However, they had many articles on their site from some notable CF gurus, like Charlie Arehart and others. So, if you’re maybe searching for something, and their site comes up in the search results, rather than just avoid it like the plague, here’s a simple trick for viewing the content without killing your browser.
Just view the print version of whichever page you want to read.

For instance, here’s the URL for the article announcing the end of the CFDJ:

http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/read/426141.htm

If the link is in that format, just stick _p at the end of the filename, before the extension:
http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/read/426141_p.htm

Update: If the link is in the format:

http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/node/41875

stick /print on the end of the URL:
http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/node/41875/print

Coldfusion RandRange bug

Dan Lancelot posted about a bug he was experiencing in CF 8, with Query of Queries.

I tried a little bit of code to replicate the bug in CF 7. In doing so, I came across the following bug in the RandRange function.

<cfset lower = -10>
<cfset upper = -5>

<cfoutput>
	<cfloop index="i" from="1" to="10">
		#RandRange(lower, upper)#<br>
	</cfloop>
</cfoutput>

What seemed to happen is, with negative numbers CF would add 1 to the value. So in the example above, I would only ever see values between -9 and -4. It would never display -10, and it would go beyond -5 up to -4. If you set both lower and upper = -5, it will display -4 ten times. If you set upper to -1, it will display zero some of the time.

If I’m right and not being stupid (always a possibility) this seems like a pretty major bug to me. According to the documentation, RandRange works between -2,147,483,648 and 2,147,483,647.

Flickr Interestingness strangeness

I published the above image on Flickr on December 3rd 2007. To begin with, it didn’t get much views. Then it was used in a blog posted by Alex Walker of Sitepoint, and was also included in the May issue of ‘Design View’, an email newsletter they publish. Initially they didn’t credit the photo to me, contrary to the Creative Commons license for that photo. A quick email to them corrected it.

Then a few blogs picked up on it, but traffic died down after the newsletter. But the views for that photo had gone from almost nothing to I think about 1000+, making it one of my most viewed photos. I kept an eye out for it on my list of most interesting photos, but it never showed up.

Then around the 5th July the photo started getting a lot of traffic from Stumbleupon and Reddit. I don’t use either of those, so I’m not entirely sure how it works, but I suddenly got a lot of visitors, and people adding it to their favourites. 12,000 visitors and 12 favourites, all in one day. Since then there’s been over 100 views of that photo every day.

Stop Looking At My Bottom statistics

Currently, it’s my:

• most viewed photo (21,736 views);
• most favourited photo (68 faves);
• 7th most commented photo (12 comments).

So you might expect it to also be one of my most ‘interesting’ photos, as defined by Flickr’s interestingness algorithm (patent pending).

But it’s not. It doesn’t appear in my top 10. It’s not even in my top 100 interesting photos. It’s actually listed as my 1103rd most interesting photo. That just doesn’t seem right.

So, why might this be the case? Firstly, what do we know about Interestingness? According to Flickr’s Explore page “There are lots of elements that make something ‘interesting’ (or not) on Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.“

So it could just be as simple as Flickr disregarding any traffic from the likes of Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg, Fark, Slashdot etc. Although as long as the Interestingness algorithm remains secret, I’ll never really know.

I’ve also noticed this with another photo:

3,185 views, 33 favourites, 12 comments. 82% of the traffic came from Stumbleupon. It’s sitting as my 1165th most interesting photo. Oddly though, it’s also at number 60 in Explore for the day I uploaded it. Unlike the first example, which isn’t in Explore at all, and never has been.