5 valuable Cufón tips

cufon test page zoomed in: quality is less what default fonts have to offerCufón is one of the solutions available to force browsers to display a page with non-default fonts. Here are 5 tips for using Cufón, based on real-life experience:

  1. Don’t use Cufón unless you can sleep knowing that at least some of your visitors are bound to run into cufon-specific issues
  2. Be sure to include all characters you might need (e.g. €, é, ç, …) when generating your Cufón font files.
  3. Be sure to enable gzip/ deflate and to implement caching directives on your webserver to somewhat limit that often ridiculous amount of font-data users have to download
  4. Tell Cufón to render using cufon.now() before calling those nasty external javascript-includes (e.g. Google Analytics) to avoid a visible delay between the moment the DOM is loaded and your cufon-javascript applying the new fonts
  5. Try to find a “default” font that comes as close to your Cufón font as possible (in terms of size, weight, …) to limit the visual impact of any Cufón-rendering delay

As for the accompanying image (of a zoomed in Cufón demo page); don’t be surprised if someone tells you your text seems just a little bit less readable, because it will be.

Obliterating your content with Google Wave

Als je hier terecht gekomen bent op zoek naar een Wave invite, klik dan door naar deze blogpost.


Google Wave is not a content management system. By far. Sure there’s content, but you can’t manage it, you can just release it to the world and hope it doesn’t get obliterated. The current pre-beta implementation indeed lacks some important functionality, rendering the platform useless for anything more than small-time collaboration and chatty communication.
So what is wrong with Wave? Well, basically, there’s a complete lack of rights management. If you start a wave and invite 5 people to participate, all of them immediately have full access. If you make a wave public, everyone has full read/write permissions. There is no official way to make a wave read-only. So from the moment others have access to your wave, your wave isn’t yours any more. That’s might be OK when you’re collaborating with people you know and trust, but if you want to use it for anything more, you’re bound to run into serious trouble.
But wait, the same is the case in the biggest collaborative platform of them all! Because on Wikipedia anyone can read and write everything as well, no? Well, not entirely. Besides the fact that Wikipedia can (and does) protect specific pages, there is another important difference; Wikipedia allows anyone to view and compare revisions and to easily undo or roll back changes to a previous version. Wave, on the other hand, only has the nifty but otherwise rather useless playback-feature. Period. You can playback a wave, you can see the damage being done before your very eyes, but there’s no ‘undo’, there’s no rollback.
So a fellow waver messes up your darling wave and you undid the damage by hand, deleting the garbage and copy/pasting your own undoubtedly valuable content back in. And off course you want to remove the vandal from your wave and … that is not possible. There currently is no means to “kickban” a malicious participant from your wave.
And to finish things up; once you and your fellow wavers finished collaborating and have something that outside world should see, there’s no way to publish that content for non-Wavers. You’ll have to resort to old-fashioned copy/paste to allow others to access your content.
So to summarize; once you add people to your wave, you’re completely at their mercy! There’s no permissions, no workflow and no versioning. And oh, you can’t make your content available for the whole world to see either. But hey, Google makes that lack of basic content management functionality sure look sexy, don’t they?

As found on the web (November 5th)

googlereader (feed #38)
facebook (feed #40)
Frank heeft nog 1 google wave invite over. wie overtuigt hem dat hij/zij zoooo graag wilt waven? :-p.
googlereader (feed #38)
googlereader (feed #38)
googlereader (feed #38)
googlereader (feed #38)
youtube (feed #48)
facebook (feed #40)
Frank is een vermoeide maar voldane powerpoint-ridder.
googlereader (feed #38)
googlereader (feed #38)
youtube (feed #48)
Liked 2 videos.
blog (feed #46)
googlereader (feed #38)
youtube (feed #48)
Liked 3 videos.
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googlereader (feed #38)
googlereader (feed #38)

Liefde voor vers geperste Pomplamoose

Daar zit ge, op een maandagochtend op het werk en tussen Powerpoint en presentatie zijt ge wat aan het kloten aan een blogpost waarin Queen een rolletje speelt en ge vraagt U af of iemand op YouTube Brian May op ukelele doet, want een ukelele is altijd leuk (vraag maar aan spekvriend). Zo komt ge dan op een leuke cover van “Best friend” door YouTube-wonder Julia Nunes, ge klikt wat rond langs haar naïef bevallige covers en ziet dat haar nieuw album geproducet is door Pomplamoose. Tiens, grappige naam, klik-klik-klik dus en ge luistert naar wat die Californische citrusvruchten te bieden hebben en -om een lang verhaal kort te maken- ge geraakt daar niet meer weg.
Pomplamoose

SEPTEMBER!!! by Earth Wind and Fire

Man man man, ik moet gewoon iets van Pomplamoose in m’n presentatie verwerken!