Barklund.org

Today we launched a new website for one of the major Danish mortgage provider, Totalkredit. They are known by all Danes due to their tv-ads (produced by TBWA\Copenhagen), that everyone either hates or loves. This is a very big client, and thus they require a very big website. But as they are for the people and tries to communicate directly with the common man, the website need not be corporate, but must be rich with content, easy to use and with many features that will create returning visitors.

Well, all this I did not have much to do with, that concerns the concept department. But concretising, technically verifying and realizing this concept is very much my job. The project has taken many months but it is now finally complete. Or well, such is never complete, but the first version has been launched at least. And this site is (technically) amazing if I should describe it. The amount of JavaScript used is huge and much of it uses MochiKit heavily. The JavaScript is used to enliven the page in a very interesting way.

The whole page works without JavaScript in the classical fashion (clicking links, reloading the whole page with the new page), but with JavaScript enabled, all links are caught and handle via Ajax instead. This technique was introduced to me by Jeremy Keith and his somewhat cute term Hijax. In order to do this, but not combine markup with content, large portions of the HTML (very large in fact) are built in JavaScript. For this need MochiKit.DOM is really handy.

Other features of the site, that makes this a very satisfying job to have completed:

• It is of course search engine optimized (Hijax preserves this)
• It uses a very concise, readable markup and works as mentioned without JavaScript (the properties of Progressive Enhancement)
• The URL is modified on every major page change using fragments in order to allow deep-linking and bookmarking (this is partly self-developed, partly borrowed from SWFAddress)
• And given the above, that “back” and “forward” buttons of the browser works (unlike many other full-Ajax websites)
• The site includes Google Maps (you can’t go wrong with that!)
• The site is tested and optimized for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 as well as Firefox 2 (and friends).

Enough talking, here is the site: http://www.totalkredit.dk – “unfortunately” most of the site is in Danish except for a small investor-part.

Google Maps Street View is pretty amazing. The detail, the 360 view, the small increments between images. Just see these poor guys driving down Park Drive N. Google is quite amazing. This new street view has mapped 5 cities in the US.

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It is now official. Flash On The Beach will return in 2007 with a longer schedule and even more impressive sessions than last time.

And the full burito is only £249 if you’re fast. See you there?

It took me quite a while, but I finally managed.

On IRC, the Danish Wikipedia channel on freenode, we have a bot running (built on Linky again built on PircBot). This bot’s primary purpose is to extend socalled wikilinks. That is, when someone writes Someone wrote silly stuff in the [[USA]] article again the bot replies http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA - it expands the bracket-style links to proper URL’s.

The problem was the character encodings. Some use UTF-8 in this channel and others use ISO 8859-1. And how can you make the bot expand links for the Danish term [[Kødpålæg]] when written in either of the two encodings? The correct URL for this word is K%C3%B8dp%C3%A5l%C3%A6g The built-in UTF-8-decoder in Java will replace the “bad characters” with the Unicode replacement character U+FFFD, and thus the previous term written sent by a ISO 8859-1 client with Linky in UTF-8 mode would become K%EF%BF%BDdp%EF%BF%BDl%EF%BF%BDg, and in the reverse situation with Linky in ISO 8859-1 mode, the UTF-8 clients messages would be interpreted to K%C3%83%C2%B8dp%C3%83%C2%A5l%C3%83%C2%A6g. Both are very wrong.

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We are always hiring bright minds and now more than ever. Thus I wanted to post this plea from my CEO:

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Not Leo’s silly movie, but Flash on the Beach 2006.

I got many interesting contacts, talked to many interesting people and in particular told Branden Hall, that his ancient Flash 5 add-ons (including string.as) is still in use in some of our old Flash 5 projects still being updated.
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I won’t be the one Flashing though, but I’ll very much enjoy the many speakers at this years Flash on the Beach in Brighton early December 2006.
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Adobe representative, Phillip Miller, recently guested Copenhagen, and during his visit he gave further insights into the upcoming client, Apollo.

When first introduced at MAX 2005, Kevin Lynch talked about Apollo being a browser substitute for offline browsing of HTML and Flash. Since the merger with Adobe, Acrobat Reader has of course been introduced into this project. Philip Millers recent talk about this stated, that it would be available for all platforms (Win, Mac and *nix), and that a beta was to come within the next year.
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Since I’ve lived about a year or more in my current apartment, it is about time to throw a housewarming. Of course, the housewarming is held together with my roommate, Mads Jørgensen.

Anyone can come, as long as they call me (having my number is thus a prerequisite) and inform me of this. And please see the image on the left. It contains all other necessary information.

Is now over. I came home late last night by train after having attended FlashVision 2006. My presentation went very well – I think. Later a video of the entire conference/award show will be posted on the website. I hope to have a segment of it (the part featuring me) posted here. Also, both my collegue, Morten Reinholdt, and the hosts took a lot of pictures – some of which I will post here as well.
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