I'm building a GWT application that looks great. At the end of the page I'd like to include a WordPress blog that I'm developing. In order to do that I want to use a com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.Frame so that an IFrame gets created, and the Wordpress just gets seamlessly embedded.
I've built this and it seems to work, although there's a problem with the size of the IFrame. I'm not sure how it's getting sized, but it's too small so that scrollbars are thrown onto it. This makes the the embedding not so seamless.
What should I be doing so that this second webiste can be seamlessly embedded into my GWT app?
The easiest solution is to make iframe as big as possible, and hope that there will be no unexpected scrollbars.
Also there is another way, if you have access to the innerDocument of iframe (if SOP doesn't stop you from doing this), you can compare its size against the size of iframe, and increase iframe height/width if necessary.
If blog is in another domain, you might try to use cross-document messaging to retrieve information about the size of document(this will not work in IE7,IE6 and you will have to put some additional JS on your blog).
Also you can include information from your blog without using iframes. You can simply pull RSS of your blog, parse it and display it in any way you like it.
Related
What I am trying to do is to load a webpage into in a UIWebView. The problem is that I need to do some preprocessing on the html before displaying it in the web view.
The UIWebview loadHTMLString is quiet slow when the html is big. I don't need to display the full page therefore i am trying to remove some html nodes before displaying it in the web view to speed up the loading time.
I don't think using regex for that is a wise idea. I checked out NSXMLParser and TFHPPLE but I couldn't find any way to remove nodes from the html tree using an XPath or something.
I know I could do that using Javascript but that won't solve my problem. I also don't have no control on the website so I can't edit in the webpage itself.
Is there something as easy as deleteNodeUsingXPath or something :)
Cheers and thanks a lot for your help in advance.
One possibility solution: do a proxy website which strips out unwanted stuff. The iphone accesses the proxy website URL. The proxy website loads from the original website, strips out unwanted stuff, and replies with the remaining stuff.
There is a tool called Objective-C-HTML-Parser that will do what you are looking for. The documentation is thorough, and the implementation is pretty straight-forward.
Basically, you take your HTML string and make an HTMLParser object that you can then manipulate however you want. It is a very powerful library that basically lets you do whatever you want with HTML with easy-to-use Objective-C APIs.
Good luck!
The setup: I have a Blogger blog set up on a domain name as blog.mydomain.com. The main site site at mydomain.com is running Umbraco CMS.
The problem: I need to have the navigation from the CMS transported to Blogger somehow, so that making a change on the main website doesn't require the extra step of modifying the navigation inside Blogger.
Generating the navigation data on the CMS side in what ever format it needs to be (XML, unordered list, JSON, etc) is not a problem. The problem is getting the data from Umbraco to Blogger after it is generated.
I'm not yet willing to use Javascript, as this would seriously impair the website for users browsing without Javascript. (Too bad because AJAX would be a very workable solution.)
I've tossed around the idea of using an iFrame. How would this work for a navigation system including sub-menus? Creating and deleting multiple iframes is out of the picture, since I don't want to use Javascript. I could use one large iframe to allow for the sub-menus, but then it would cover content at the top of the content area, rendering it unclickable.
I'm thinking about how you could do this, but while I do - in this day-and-age javascript has become very common. Most users are going to have it, and those with it disabled really shouldn't be on the web. Is this the only reason you don't want to use javascript? Around 2% according to YDN have js disabled, and that's lower from other countries. As time goes on that 2% should get lower, I don't see that as an issue. However if you absolutely can't use javascript, I'll keep thinking. I might have an idea, I'll need to test it though.
It's not possible to use IFrame, cause of same origin policy. Both sites are on different domains, when user click menu item inside IFrame, there is no way to call parent window.
There are few ways how this can be done.
1) Javascript solution. Use json rpc, or another cross-domain calls. Load menu from your CMS and render it. Yes, this requires javsascript, but, seriously, show me the site, which does not use javascript.
2) Direct server communication.
Is it possible to perform http call from blogger ? If so, just perform http call to your CMS from Blogger, get data and render it.
3) Mixed flash/javascript solution. Flash can perform http call regardless of same origin policy. Get data with flash, use ExternalInterface to call Javascript function to render data.
There is no another way to do it. I suggest you to use javascript solution
You could build an HTML skeleton of empty ULs in Blogger (the max that you might need) to hold your navigation contents, and then link to an Umbraco-generated external stylesheet.
This stylesheet could fill those LIs with CSS generated content using the :before and :after pseudo-elements, and hiding unused LIs with CSS display: none.
An example of this is at: http://jsfiddle.net/5bXja/1/
This works in IE8+ so depending on your clients, this may-or-may-not be more widely supported than Javascript. Likely not. ;-)
I have a page with 20 articles, and for each article, I have a Facebook Like Button, implemented using the tag.
Because of this, my site is greatly slowed down as Firefox makes a query in the background for each of the like button.
Is there anything I can do to reduce this load?
In my experience, all the extra IFRAMES are actually faster than using the JavaScript SDK, even though the Like icons are supposed to load asynchonously. I have a page with about 18 like buttons on it, and at least the IFRAME approach doesn't result in a perceived slowdown for users like the JS version does - the only downside is that the Like buttons "pop" into the page a little late in IFRAMES.
I assume you're using iframe to display your like buttons. Performance is the downside of using iframes. If you've got 20 iframes, then it's equivalent to loading 20 web pages (with 20 independent http requests). As browsers have connection limits per domain, it can take a while for this many iframes to load. This is especially true in older browsers, where connection limit is only 2 per domain, which means that only 2 iframes can load at a time. iframe can also have the negative side effect of blocking other downloads, which makes the problem even worse. You can read all about iframe performance problems here:
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/06/03/using-iframes-sparingly/
If possible, you may want to consider using xfbml like button instead of iframe. Unfortunately, this means that you'll need to load Facebook's JavaScript SDK, but with 20 like buttons, you should see an overall performance boost.
As an alternative, if you're not keen on the idea of xfbml, you could try a service like OpenLike: http://openlike.org/
From their docs:
A widget is created by first loading the OpenLike javascript and then calling OPENLIKE.Widget(). Multiple widgets can be embedded in the same page, each with different options.
I ended up going with something similar to this solution Lots of XFBML Facebook Like buttons are slow? with JQuery Sonar. It seems to do the trick for me. I'd prefer a single call that loads all the buttons but it's outside of my control.
If I had more time what I'd do is use the facebook API to get the count and make my own buttons (perhaps load the real button on hover if i wanted their functionality but iirc you can just call the "share" function directly). I don't currently have time to massage facebook that much so this is a sorta makeshift hack that I don't think has too many downsides and it seems to be used by a number of different sites.
I've just noticed that the long, convoluted Facebook URLs that we're used to now look like this:
http://www.facebook.com/example.profile#!/pages/Another-Page/123456789012345
As far as I can recall, earlier this year it was just a normal URL-fragment-like string (starting with #), without the exclamation mark. But now it's a shebang or hashbang (#!), which I've previously only seen in shell scripts and Perl scripts.
The new Twitter URLs now also feature the #! symbols. A Twitter profile URL, for example, now looks like this:
http://twitter.com/#!/BoltClock
Does #! now play some special role in URLs, like for a certain Ajax framework or something since the new Facebook and Twitter interfaces are now largely Ajaxified?
Would using this in my URLs benefit my Web application in any way?
This technique is now deprecated.
This used to tell Google how to index the page.
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/
This technique has mostly been supplanted by the ability to use the JavaScript History API that was introduced alongside HTML5. For a URL like www.example.com/ajax.html#!key=value, Google will check the URL www.example.com/ajax.html?_escaped_fragment_=key=value to fetch a non-AJAX version of the contents.
The octothorpe/number-sign/hashmark has a special significance in an URL, it normally identifies the name of a section of a document. The precise term is that the text following the hash is the anchor portion of an URL. If you use Wikipedia, you will see that most pages have a table of contents and you can jump to sections within the document with an anchor, such as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Early_computers_and_the_Turing_test
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing identifies the page and Early_computers_and_the_Turing_test is the anchor. The reason that Facebook and other Javascript-driven applications (like my own Wood & Stones) use anchors is that they want to make pages bookmarkable (as suggested by a comment on that answer) or support the back button without reloading the entire page from the server.
In order to support bookmarking and the back button, you need to change the URL. However, if you change the page portion (with something like window.location = 'http://raganwald.com';) to a different URL or without specifying an anchor, the browser will load the entire page from the URL. Try this in Firebug or Safari's Javascript console. Load http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald. Now in the Javascript console, type:
window.location = 'http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald';
You will see the page refresh from the server. Now type:
window.location = 'http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald#try_this';
Aha! No page refresh! Type:
window.location = 'http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald#and_this';
Still no refresh. Use the back button to see that these URLs are in the browser history. The browser notices that we are on the same page but just changing the anchor, so it doesn't reload. Thanks to this behaviour, we can have a single Javascript application that appears to the browser to be on one 'page' but to have many bookmarkable sections that respect the back button. The application must change the anchor when a user enters different 'states', and likewise if a user uses the back button or a bookmark or a link to load the application with an anchor included, the application must restore the appropriate state.
So there you have it: Anchors provide Javascript programmers with a mechanism for making bookmarkable, indexable, and back-button-friendly applications. This technique has a name: It is a Single Page Interface.
p.s. There is a fourth benefit to this technique: Loading page content through AJAX and then injecting it into the current DOM can be much faster than loading a new page. In addition to the speed increase, further tricks like loading certain portions in the background can be performed under the programmer's control.
p.p.s. Given all of that, the 'bang' or exclamation mark is a further hint to Google's web crawler that the exact same page can be loaded from the server at a slightly different URL. See Ajax Crawling. Another technique is to make each link point to a server-accessible URL and then use unobtrusive Javascript to change it into an SPI with an anchor.
Here's the key link again: The Single Page Interface Manifesto
First of all: I'm the author of the The Single Page Interface Manifesto cited by raganwald
As raganwald has explained very well, the most important aspect of the Single Page Interface (SPI) approach used in FaceBook and Twitter is the use of hash # in URLs
The character ! is added only for Google purposes, this notation is a Google "standard" for crawling web sites intensive on AJAX (in the extreme Single Page Interface web sites). When Google's crawler finds an URL with #! it knows that an alternative conventional URL exists providing the same page "state" but in this case on load time.
In spite of #! combination is very interesting for SEO, is only supported by Google (as far I know), with some JavaScript tricks you can build SPI web sites SEO compatible for any web crawler (Yahoo, Bing...).
The SPI Manifesto and demos do not use Google's format of ! in hashes, this notation could be easily added and SPI crawling could be even easier (UPDATE: now ! notation is used and remains compatible with other search engines).
Take a look to this tutorial, is an example of a simple ItsNat SPI site but you can pick some ideas for other frameworks, this example is SEO compatible for any web crawler.
The hard problem is to generate any (or selected) "AJAX page state" as plain HTML for SEO, in ItsNat is very easy and automatic, the same site is in the same time SPI or page based for SEO (or when JavaScript is disabled for accessibility). With other web frameworks you can ever follow the double site approach, one site is SPI based and another page based for SEO, for instance Twitter uses this "double site" technique.
I would be very careful if you are considering adopting this hashbang convention.
Once you hashbang, you can’t go back. This is probably the stickiest issue. Ben’s post put forward the point that when pushState is more widely adopted then we can leave hashbangs behind and return to traditional URLs. Well, fact is, you can’t. Earlier I stated that URLs are forever, they get indexed and archived and generally kept around. To add to that, cool URLs don’t change. We don’t want to disconnect ourselves from all the valuable links to our content. If you’ve implemented hashbang URLs at any point then want to change them without breaking links the only way you can do it is by running some JavaScript on the root document of your domain. Forever. It’s in no way temporary, you are stuck with it.
You really want to use pushState instead of hashbangs, because making your URLs ugly and possibly broken -- forever -- is a colossal and permanent downside to hashbangs.
To have a good follow-up about all this, Twitter - one of the pioneers of hashbang URL's and single-page-interface - admitted that the hashbang system was slow in the long run and that they have actually started reversing the decision and returning to old-school links.
Article about this is here.
I always assumed the ! just indicated that the hash fragment that followed corresponded to a URL, with ! taking the place of the site root or domain. It could be anything, in theory, but it seems the Google AJAX Crawling API likes it this way.
The hash, of course, just indicates that no real page reload is occurring, so yes, it’s for AJAX purposes. Edit: Raganwald does a lovely job explaining this in more detail.
A client is asking me to insert a Floodlight tag into an Objective-C programmed iPhone app that is ready for submission to the App Store.
I did some Googling, and couldn't find anything about how to do this (it seems like you can you only add Floodlight tags via Javascript, but I'm not too sure). Can you do this, and, if so, how?
If nothing else, you can create an offscreen UIWebView and invoke the appropriate javascript with stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString. Not a good solution, but if javascript is required it may be your only choice.
Instead of embedding a UIWebView right off the bat for this, you could try using NSURLConnection to request the URL normally inserted with the Floodlight iframe. It seems that unless the contents of the iframe (which should just be a transparent GIF) need to interact with the host page, simply performing and receiving the request should fulfill the purposes of tracking. Check the ToS, though, to see if they have any stipulations about this.