Open University exam solutions

The most visited page on justfigures.co.uk for October was the new page The Open University exam solutions – must of just been in time for the exam revision – hope you all found it useful. Apparently there is no official website for students to download exam solutions for revision purposes. Hopefully this is a start in that direction. Courses covered so far are: MST209, MS221, M263, M336, M337, MT365 – more courses covered in the future I hope including M208. Also contains some exam papers not now covered by copyright.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking – everyone’s doing it apparently. So I thought I had better join in and enable that functionality. Experimented with Bookmarkify from gara.com. Seems to be originally designed for use with WordPress but is suppose to work okay on any php enabled site – uses php. You upload everything you need to your own domain so you have complete control. Does require however that you enter each page name and the page url as parameters in a function call from the page. Could be tedious.

Therefore decided on using AddThis from addthis.com. This requires JavaScript, so not ideal. Main advantage is that the it uses the same code on every page. Hence, place that into an include file that most likely you already have set up on your site and within 10 seconds you have social bookmarking functionality on every page – job done.

Mathematical musings – that justfigures

Apparently if you wish to cut your potential audience by 99% then just include the word ‘mathematical’ in any title. If you wish to cut the potential audience by 1% then include an undefined and confusing descriptive word such as ‘musings’ in any title.

If there is anybody left still reading this then welcome to my
Mathematical oriented musings page. (Apparently the word ‘oriented’ is one of the most misspelt words entered in search engines.)

Google maps

“How to embed Google maps in a web page” was the most visited page on justfigures.co.uk during September by far. Thank you to all those that visited and I hope you found that page useful.

Growing finite web

According to news.netcraft.com their Web Server Survey for June 2009 received a total of 238,027,855 responses an increase of 2,137,329 from the previous month. That’s potentially 7000 new websites per day or 300 an hour or… Note the word potentially.

Does this mean amateur hour is over just as it is beginning?

Lists with everything.

Is a list just a table by another name?

Tell me where nesting individual list items in an unordered list is any different from nesting table rows within a table? A list is a set of items that share a related or common theme. Does that not also constitute the necessary criteria for the content of a table?

I will tell you the answers. It is down to correct use of semantic elements, for example a set of navigation links is a traditional list? It is also down to the current wide range of CSS styles available for lists.

I still feel unhappy with the increasing trend towards lists with everything.

Keep those division elements to a minimum.

The ubiquitous, omnipresent and universal <div> element temps us with its ease of use and compatibility with the other elements. But beware the overuse of the <div> element and remember that the other block-level elements such as headers and paragraphs can give a web page structure without resorting to assigning id or class.

Tables are nearly dead.

Yes, tables are only nearly dead and occasionally when faced with a problem that is trivially easy to solve with tables I will resort to using them. Tables should however only be used for related information that needs to be presented tabularly and never for general layout. The trouble is what constitutes ‘related information’ is open to debate.

W3C validator

The automatic validation of the current web page with the W3C using ‘http://validator.w3.org/check/referer’ is unreliable and should be replaced with ‘http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://…’ where … is the domain and path of the web page to be validated.

Google code prettify

Google code prettify requires files ‘prettify.js’ and ‘prettify.css’ when colouring html/xhtml markup.

Google code prettify requires an extra file called ‘lang-css.js’ when colouring CSS embedded in a <style> block.

However, remember to also make reference to the ‘lang-css’ class when colouring stand-alone CSS. That is CSS not embedded in html or xhtml markup.

Example here is a page showing the source code for a web page template on justfigures.co.uk and an example of how xhtml and CSS should look when coloured correctly.

In all situations with CSS ensure there is a space between the  property and the value, for example: background-color: #FF3366;