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Er, yeah. I didn’t know what FCrDNS was either… Forward Confirmed Reverse DNS. [And if you don't know what DNS is then you might want to go read something else because this will bore you rigid]. In a nutshell…

• DNS: Maps a domain name to an IP address e.g. commonagency.com -> 94.136.61.118
  This is fundamental to every day use of the web in that it ensures when someone enters a domain name they get routed to the server from which that domain is served.
• Reverse DNS: Maps an IP address to a domain name e.g. 94.136.61.118 -> commonagency.com
  This is frequently used by email servers to validate that emails received from another email server IP address can be matched with a domain name that appears to correlate with the sender’s address [that's actually not exactly true but it's a simplistic explanation].
• FCrDNS: RDNS lookup followed by a DNS lookup e.g. 94.136.61.118 -> commonagency.com -> 94.136.61.118
  This is apparently the best approach and is now used by many email servers.

Why care? Well hopefully you won’t ever need to, but when a client calls to say that they can’t get emails through to one of their customers, these are the kind of things you learn. Usually you’ll have set-up your DNS/RDNS in such a way that FCrDNS works by default, and if not you can usually do it quite quickly. There’s a great tool at http://ipadmin.junkemailfilter.com/rdns.php which helps with testing. Basically, if you know that your RDNS is set-up correctly and that you’ve got some appropriate SPF records set-up too but you’re still finding some emails get blocked, check out your FCrDNS. And if nothing else, it’s another acronym that you didn’t know you didn’t know, but now do.

Hopefully no major surprises to web designers and developers in this 10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit, except that one which I think is often ignored these days is maintaining a visual indicator for links that have already been visited. Often, from a visual perspective, having unvisited and visited text links appear in two different colours can look slightly untidy but it’s a valid point that the usability issue of not recognising that you’ve visited a link previously has a potentially greater negative impact on the user experience than the different colours.

With general opinion being that Apple [iPhone] has the mobile market wrapped up and that Google [Android] might, if they’re lucky, come in a distant second, it was with some interest that I attended the Nokia Ovi event on Tuesday night in Leeds. It’s widely recognised that Nokia are on the back foot at the moment, slipping [rapidly?] both in terms of market share and consumer appeal. However, from a developer perspective, four positive things things struck me about Ovi by Nokia:

1. Due to leveraging the web and Flash technologies that Nokia have been trying hard to integrate into all their handsets for some time, Ovi offers a speed of development for ‘low level’ apps that isn’t currently as easy on iPhone/Android. Whilst both those platforms also offer ‘packaged web applications’ as an alternative to full software development, neither is yet as feature rich as the Ovi options.
2. Ovi is available on Nokia Series 40 as well as Series 60 phones. What this means is that Nokia Ovi enables developers to reach the mass middle market phones rather than just the high-end smartphones. Naturally, this position will change quite rapidly, with cut-down iPhone/Android devices always being rumoured and with ‘mid-range’ users rapidly migrating upgrading to ‘high-end’ year on year anyway.
3. Nokia were keen to stress that they really really want to help us [to help them]. It would be too bold to suggest they were ‘desperate’ to help, but there did seem a genuine acknowledgement that to make Ovi anywhere near as successful as the Apple App Store, Nokia would have to leverage their massive existing developer community by making themselves genuinely available, so that things get moving before it’s too late.
4. And lastly, I was inspired to feel that they are still, after all, Nokia. It seems crazy to hear so frequently how Nokia are “down and out”, despite being a company that have understood and dominated mobile for so long. They certainly do have a battle on their hands, but being in the same space as the handful of guys representing Ovi certainly demonstrated that their absolute core business is mobile. Whether that’s enough, only time will tell.

Anyway, we’ll let you know how we get on but you can expect us to be visible on Ovi some time in the near future.

From Wordcamp Seattle, Eric Amundson’s 5 Free Ways to Bulletproof Your WordPress Site provides a great 5-minute video overview of areas to strengthen your Wordpress site, including security, usability and user experience. We’re already using many of his techniques but two new plugins I now have to investigate are WP Super Cache to enable cached HTML pages to be served instead of server-greedy dynamic ones, and Relevanssi which allows for relevance-based search results instead of the default chronological results that Wordpress generates by default.

We’ve found recently that generating convincing dummy data early in the process of a web development project can catch issues a lot sooner than just using lots of test@test.com and lorem ipsum dummy data. Additionally it also allows you to start with a sizeable amount of data from the start, and to identify performance issues relating to database design and data relationships. The Generate Data website is an excellent tool to help create your dummy data “for use in testing software, populating databases and scoring with girls”, though we’ve seen no evidence as yet that it does actually fulfil the third requirement.

Slightly more niche post than usual but when you’re working on a Friday night and pulling what limited hair you have out then surely it’s worth it. For much of today I found that if I clicked in some empty space in Textmate then instead of the cursor jumping to the last valid space - usually the end of line - it would just stay where I had clicked. Unless you’ve experienced this it is indescribable just how infuriating and unproductive this is. [If you don't believe me and actually want to experience it then follow the same steps as my 'solution' below]. Anyway, it turns out I’d somehow enabled ‘Freehand Mode’. This can be toggled on and off by going to Edit -> Mode -> Freehand Editing. Should you ever have this problem, look there first. Ideally before you pull all your hair out.

I enjoyed reading this 15 CSS Tricks That Must be Learned post and think it’s a valuable resource. Whilst I agree with some of the comments that none of the tricks are anything new [nor does the author claim them to be], there are so many CSS workarounds that experienced developers use daily, some of which are incrementally developed over time, that it’s often handy to have a visual refresher such as this  to remind ourselves why we apply such tricks. And any young pups out there for whom the tricks are still new could do a lot worse than to start with this set of essential but well-explained suite.

As WordPress developers, we’ve all come across the same situation when starting out on a site build… the default WordPress theme sometimes just isn’t barebones enough. Well, the obvious approach is to install a theme which is designed to be a blank canvas from which to start, and Starkers: The completely naked theme for WordPress appears to offer just that. We’ll be giving it a bash it in the near future I expect.

We’re on the brink of finishing our first ‘full’ iPhone application to be distributed through the Apple App Store, and as such have been trying to learn more about the obvious pitfalls to avoid in terms of having an app accepted. We’ve already had some excellent word of mouth advice, and general rule of thumb seems to be “follow Apple’s guidelines like a bible!”. The following sites seem a good start for your checlist too… Avoiding iPhone app rejection from Apple offers a good starting point for the things to run through, with a round-up of comments/replies. Unsurprisingly, Stackoverflow always has excellent developer advice and discussion, and they too are a good starting point for successful AppStore submission.

Obviously we’ll update our own experiences in a few weeks once we’ve been through the process ourselves.

The Guardian’s recent availability of most it’s data via API was a pretty big announcement and is in itself an excellent demonstration of a on a large media entity embracing future platforms. Even better, in a matter of weeks it seems that the examples and tools to help you get up and running have been vastly developed and the Guardian Data Store is now an amazing resource even just to browse or to get tips from, let alone to actually use their data.

Looking forward to seeing whether the Adobe® BrowserLab cross browser testing solution works in real-time. Browsershots is an excellent tool for final browser checks before roll-out but tends to be a “last minute check” due to the time delay before seeing the results. BrowserLab could potentially fill this gap if it’s real time.

The Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco is a chance for the outside world to see some of the exciting stuff that Google has on the horizon. Google’s reach is so broad that there will be something to excite everyone, but two notable developments that caught our eye are Google Wave and Google’s increasing support for HTML5.

Google Wave is an attempt to unify communication and collaboration on the web, and has been created by the original team behind Google Maps, as described in this Mashable article.

HTML5 on the other hand is clearly not a Google product but something that’s been on the horizon for web developers for sometime. Personally I’d prioritise cross-browser support for CSS3 over implementation of HTML5 support, but it’s clear that HTML5 does offer greater flexibility and power to web developers. The current example demo’ed by Google is the use of HTML5 to render video directly in the browser using the new <pre><video></pre> tag as opposed to needing an intermediary plugin [usually Flash]. You’ll need an HTML 5 capable browser to get the full benefit of this demo page on Youtube, though viewing the source [in any browser] demonstrates the different approach of using HTML5 markup.

Before anyone cries “Mashups are sooo 2008″, check out the Mashable post listing five Flickr/Twitter mashups - all of which are highly enjoyable. If nothing else, it demonstrates what can be achieved with such a mass of accurately tagged/keyworded content - Flickr in the form of an engaged and committed tagging community and Twitter by merit of Tweets being so short that they can mostly be used as a bunch of keywords. Using this model, Flittr adds visual detail to tweets by taking the last tweet from a user and adding a mosaic of 16 Flickr pictures, usually with very apt results.

Looks like when Adobe offered to supply the $699 software package for free to developers who could prove they were currently unemployed they may not have expected to have to withdraw the offer so quickly. Cynics might suggest however that Adobe fully expected the deal to be snapped up and now they can sit back, happy to have rapidly expanded their Flex community by another 15,000 developers. Either way, it is often the case that innovation and creativity are increased during hard times so let’s hope this paves the way for yet more exciting new Flash developments. At least with Flex we’re unlikely to see 15,000 new ’skip intro’ sites!

With Wordpress having generally excellent documentation in their codex it’s not often we use other sources as general Wordpress reference material but DBS Interactive have produced a particularly nicely formatted and highly usable Wordpress template tag function list, a worthy alternative to the official Wordpress documentation for template tags.

The Quirksmode Compatibility Master Table is so handy that it often gets overlooked as blog-worthy, maybe because it’s assumed that it’s already in everyone’s CSS toolkit and daily practice. Along with A List Apart, these are two CSS resources that are almost everyday visits when CSS coding. However, an interesting new service might help minimise some of the reasons for visiting those two essentials. The IE6Fixer offers the ability to automatically analyse your CSS and provide known fixes that should help with IE6 compatibility. The site clearly states that it’s not a one-stop fix, but might be of help in short-cutting the often similar steps we have to go through to make things work properly in IE6.

We’ve blogged about this before but having adopted the 960 grid system for the majority of our web designs for some time, the resources at 960 Grid System look invaluable. To have ready-to-go templates for Fireworks, Inkscape and OmniGraffle is excellent and ensures the consistency needed to move between design apps effectively, followed by easy transition into  development using the supplied CSS.

Not to be outdone by recent publicity regarding the iPhone v.3.0 release later this year, Google has just announced the availability of the SDK for developing for Android 1.5. It’s not the final release of the v.1.5 SDK but apparently is pretty close. From a development perspective it will help with developing for multiple Android versions and introduces some important changes to the SDK/OS structure. In terms of features, some key stuff in v.1.5 are soft keyboards, home screen widgets and speech recognition.

Anyone who’s developed mobile internet sites will know that one of the biggest issues affecting the download experience is the latency often experienced when communicating via the operator gateway. This often means that no matter how fast the connection, device or the server, a noticeable and often unavoidable delay is created. However, a method using Base64 encoding could be used to circumvent this problem by, in simple terms, defining what would have been an external resource [requiring a request] in the form of a text string that can be embedded within a single file [such as a CSS stylesheet] and subsequently understood and decoded by the browser. As is often the case of course, any such trick often leads to other side-effects to be wary of  - one such effect in this case being that of the browser cache limitations. However, in many scenarios, this method could introduce potentially significant experience enhancements to the overall page request time.

Here at Common we’re no strangers to Wordpress. In fact, it’s our blog and indeed CMS of choice for many small/medium site requirements. However, it’s often hard to keep up with the rapidly developing options regarding theming so some of the examples covered in fresh trends in Wordpress themes are worth checking out just to see the breadth of experience that can be created beyond the simple blog.

Highly pertinent in the current financial climate, this article on technical debt offers an interesting means of defining technical shortcomings as types of debt. Whether used to help discuss development issues with a client or as a means of assessing and ratifying development issues internally, with money on everyone’s mind it’s a very tangible means of comparing the scale and type of technical issue.

I know ‘modern’ web developers are meant to have this deeply ingrained in their pysche by now but I sometimes still find it helpful to refer to the W3 page on CSS selectors occasionally and invariably when I do it reminds me that there is always more than one way to do something [the unconsidered option so often being better too].

We’ve been exploring the options for easily adding code examples to a forthcoming new section on commonagency.com and CodeColorer definitely seems the most complete of all the available ones. We required a means of presenting various languages including AS3 and PHP, syntax colouring, line numbering, minimal admin effort and decent markup in the output, all in a plugin that must still be in active development but not in alpha/beta! Nearly all the examples tested used the Geshi underlying code but CodeColorer seems to be the best solution so far.

• CodeColorer - our preferred option so far.
• Chili Code Highlighter [still in beta]
• CodeHighlighter [seems good but couldn't tell if it supports AS3]
• FV Code Highlighter [didn't appear to support AS3 and not tested with v.2.7]
• Code Snippet [seems to be one of the original options but no longer in active development]
• Dojox Wordpress Syntax Highlighter [sounds quite good but limited documentation and not in English!]

…and lots more on wordpress.org.

Whilst it’s not usually an issue, sometimes the dotted outline that is applied to links in their active state [e.g. the point when they're clicked] looks visually untidy - especially if you’re also using lots of padding or text-indent tricks to hide HTML text. The following article about removing the dotted outline is a great summary of how to overwrite this behaviour whilst also maintaining accessibility [a key reason for the active state in the first place].

OK, so Sweden brought us IKEA but Norway knows how to deliver what we [as web developers] really want… the death of IE6! What started out as a series of Norwegian websites declaring war on IE 6 has begun to spread a lot further, even gaining support from Microsoft itself. Now there’s just the n million machines on backward corporate IT networks to crack.

Font-replacement methods for substituting text on-the-fly with a non web-safe font are widely used now. However, having had a few run-ins with the very popular Flash-based SIFR recently - either due to small glitches [especially Mac related] or simply due to it’s limitations in certain contexts [especially when used over backgrounds that are not solid colour] - we’ve been looking at other options. As a lightweight solution, PCDTR seems to be one of the best image-based alternatives due to it being purely PHP and CSS based [e.g. no Javascript] and we’ll be putting this through it’s paces in a forthcoming project.

The rather well thought of ‘Future Of Web Apps’ conferences are on tour this year and are coming our way [e.g. up to Leeds] in May, whilst also visiting Cambridge, Edinburgh and Bristol.

I had a quick need to try some CSS styled bar charts to demonstrate a very rough prototype idea and this article on 8 CSS Techniques for Charting Data came in very handy. I can’t vouch for the long-term effectiveness, robustness or flexibility of any of the techniques but as a starting point for your own methods it’s a helpful start [if not rocket science by any means].

Twitter led me to notice this article about five cool ways to support the W3C, and it made me think that perhaps the W3C isn’t this ‘far off’ organisation that we as a small agency may feel it to be. Perhaps the issue, as the article suggests, is that the wider and in particular lower level web design/development community don’t get involved enough other than [hopefully] using the excellent validation tools.

This simple CSS Shorthand Guide produced by Dustin Diaz is an invaluable resource and makes for good practice in streamlining your CSS code.

MooTools is our preferred JavaScript effects/extension library, not least because of it’s easy extensibility - as demonstrated by a wealth of 3rd party extension scripts that are available. We haven’t used all these but this round-up is a handy starter.

Intersquash.com offers a straightforward way of translating your website content into an iPhone optimised webpage. The resulting page offers little more than a generic iPhone skinned version of a site’s RSS feed, but it appears to be a quick and easy way of optimising any content for the iPhone that’s already available via RSS.

The Blueprint framework seems to be fast becoming the preferred method of quickly desploying a grid-based design to a CSS based layout.