Ik probeerde me de afgelopen dagen bewust af te sluiten van de niet aflatende stroom aan informatie over het verschrikkelijke busongeval in Zwitserland. Dat is niet makkelijk, want met elk toevallig meegepikt beeldfragment voel ik me opnieuw meegezogen in een emotionele draaikolk van onontkoombare betrokkenheid. Het land is in rouw, maar moet dat? Brengen de media nieuws of emotie? In welke verhouding? Voor wie? Waarom? Niet voor de slachtoffers, niet voor de familie. Tot daar de ratio. Maar een kind verliezen …
Nope, 1.0.0 wasn’t WP YouTube Lytes final destination, the train has left that station to arrive at version 1.1.0 yesterday. Main new features include:
It was time to put my money where my mouth is, or at least to give the use of a CDN a try. Based on previous tests MaxCDN seemed like a decent, dirt-cheap solution, so that’s what the js, css & images for this blog are served from now. Setting this up was very easy:
log into MaxCDN and set up a pull zone on static-cdn.blog.futtta.be with origin blog.futtta.be
create static-cdn.blog.futtta.be in the web interface of my DNS-provider (as a CNAME to the domain-name provided)
The speed difference can be huge, especially when routing to my origin VPS-server in Germany isn’t great. I’m sure my 2 overseas users and Google will approve! Bandwidth-wise, with 10MB/day, I seem to be far from the 1TB/year I’m allowed, so if you’d like me to setup a (temporary) pull zone for your blog so you can check out if this would work for you then just drop me a line.
On a blog that uses WP YouTube Lyte which I happened to stumble across, the following warning was displayed:
Hey! If you’re browsing in Firefox, there’s a very good chance that you won’t see youtube / video embeds.
As I really don’t like bugs but couldn’t reproduce any issue myself, I contacted the blog’s owner to find out what was happening. The description of the problem was pretty confusing:
The still shot/first frame of the video is there with the play icon, so things look hopeful, but when you click on the play icon the entire video disappears from the page. Page structure / layout does not change, but you are left staring at a blank white box where the embed should be.
A white div of death, really … Anyway, to cut a long story short, the misbehavior was caused by “Karma Blocker“. This Firefox addon “blocks resources based on their karma”, using a ruleset that scores behavior to blocks banners, trackers and also WP YouTube Lyte (or rather, the YouTube iFrame). Apparently the combination of the bad karma of JavaScript and the iFrame triggered the blocking mechanism. I couldn’t code around Karma Blocker and chances are small the default configuration will give YouTube iFrames better karma, but the next version of WP YouTube Lyte (1.1.0, to be available soon) will display a simple message kindly letting users know they might want to adapt their Karma Blocker’s weightings. But why is karma punishing me?
To be honest, Opera Mobile 12 doesn’t shine in the JavaScript performance benchmarks (2843,6ms for Sunspider, 463 on the Google V8 test, both of which at least Firefox Mobile does a better job at), but with the upcoming Firefox Mobile 12 and the (Android 4-only) Chrome Mobile beta the mobile browser “wars” have certainly shifted into a -much- higher gear. Let’s hope Microsoft (and Apple, but Safari Mobile isn’t too far behind yet) follows suit.
Although browser addons such as NoScript and Ghostery (which is cross-browser with some limitations) provide great protection against tracking, some people prefer not to have to install plugins. Firefox does have configuration options to somewhat limit what trackers can do. You can follow the knowledge base article here to learn how to disable 3rd party cookies (the default setting in Safari, which Google was caught circumventing). If you’re up to it, you also simply open up the almighty “about:config” and tinker with the following settings (some of which aren’t available in the browser UI):
network.cookie.cookieBehavior with values:
“0”: allow all cookies (default)
“1”: don’t allow 3rd party cookies
“2”: don’t allow any cookies
network.cookie.thirdparty.lifetimePolicy with values:
“0”: keep cookies for as long as the server asks
“1”: ask the user on each and every cookie set (try it out if only for fun, you’d be surprise how much cookies are set)
“2”: cookie gets deleted when you close your browser (i.e. at the end of the session)
network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly: set to “true” or “false”
privacy.donottrackheader.enabled: set to “false” (default) or “true”, which gently asks sites not to track you
Setting “network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly” to “true” is a low-impact change which should stop tracking-companies (think Media6degrees or Quantcast) from following you around the web. If you want to stop Facebook, Google & Co to stop tracking you around the web as well, the above setting will not suffice. You should either log out of their sites as soon as you’ve done your business there or set “network.cookie.cookieBehavior” to “1” (which will break their “social widgets”). Or you can install Ghostery or NoScript, off course.
