More MySQL tips

Nice list of yet more MySQL tips here courtesy of Fabulous Entertainment (entertaining indeed!) who cites a talk on Google Video by Jay Pipes which I must look at...

Scrolling and the page fold: data!

Nice data illustrating users' scrolling behaviour from ClickTale on their blog. It helps to dispel the myth that users don't scroll (but Nielsen himself reported this in his 1997 Changes in Web Usability Since 1994). I love the histograms -- it's great to see data (plus they look like meteorological Talagrand diagrams, aka rank histograms, which I used to work on!) Interesting... plus the software uses JavaScript (it's client-side after all).

Firefox grunges RSS feed display

Just trying to adapt an RSS feed with an XSLT stylesheet: Works fine in IE6 :-) but lo! Firefox ignores the XSLT and renders the feed itself :-(

Seems I'm not the only one (but at least a year behind the rest!): Bugzilla #338621 includes the following suggestion (and a lot of discussion!)

The emerging workaround for this problem (which isn't new to us, since we're using the same heuristic that IE7 betas have been using for months) is to put in a comment ranting about the evils of sniffing web content and overriding the desires of web developers which is long enough to move "<rss" or "<feed" out of the first 512 bytes, since that's all we sniff.

There's no way we can tell the difference between XSLT intended to style a feed into something that's not a feed, like yours, and XSLT intended to just keep people with earlier browsers from having to look at raw XML, so I think this is WONTFIX. With more than 99% of the feeds with stylesheets just trying to do what we're doing, but without the knowledge of what aggregators the user actually uses and without the chrome privileges to subscribe them, not using our transformation on feeds that have a stylesheet would just make for a worse and less consistent experience for our users.

BTW, pasting that text into a comment in the XSLT after the XML prolog works ;-)