BANJAX Web Design, Belfast, Northern Ireland

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Banjax is a small web engineering firm specialising in highly usable web applications and consultancy; Banjax is based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

About Banjax

Banjax design and create wonderful websites that make people really happy. We're experts in web design and the processes around it.

We also have our own projects that we think will change the world… at least a little bit.

Our Services & Expertise

  • Web application design & build
  • E-commerce build & integration
  • Video for the web
  • Usability & accessibility expertise
  • Ruby, Perl, Rails, LAMP based

Want to work with us?

Why not send us an email or give us a call on +44 28 9033 2697, we're more than happy to talk shop.

Or simply drop in and see us in person, there's an address and map at the bottom of the page.

The Banjax Weblog

Mapping the A List Apart survey

Stephen "suggested" that I take the 2008 A List Apart survey data released by Eric Meyer and put it on a map. Remembering that the Google Charts API has an option for maps, which I'd never used, I decided to throw the data at that. The results are shown below, in maps for both the USA, by state, and the world, by country. We'll have a look at the world first.

I first fired the data onto a map using a simple total of responses for each country, scaling them to fit within the values the Google Chart API accepts. This resulted in a map which highlights the fact that over 50% of the responses came from the US, but which drowns out all of the other countries.

Responses by country

In order to resolve the issue, and to make the map give a clearer idea of the relative number of responses from each country, I changed to a logarithmic scale. I simply counted the number of responses from each country, as before, and then calculated the natural logarithm of each before applying the results. The new map, seen below, brings out the differences between countries in a more informative way.

Responses by country (logarithmic

Having finished work on the world map I decided to try doing something similar for the US States. I used the zip code lookup provided by Nate Walton in the comments of the original Eric Meyer post and, after tidying the data up and learning about the US zipcode, I applied the logarithmic approach and ended up with a map which didn't tell me all that much.

Responses by US state(logarithmic

I decided to see how the map would look if I tried my original approach. I felt that it might work in this case due to the smaller range of values. I was right, the result is an improvment. The map shows the spread of responses in more subtle way than the logarithmic method.

Responses by US state

Out of the 13978 responses from the US my script ignored 11 due to them not being in a format I recognised as a zipcode. Some were too short, some too long, some were multiples. I also excluded two entries which referred to the Armed Forces overseas, as I couldn't put them on the map.

by Steve Rushe
25-Sep-08

HTML5 Reading Material

The HTML5 specification is being implemented piecemeal as areas of the specification become stable; with all of the major browser manufacturers involved in one or both of the two working groups (W3C and WHATWG) HTML5 will be becoming a bigger part of our day to day work.

Currently all browsers support the HTML5 doctype, which triggers standards mode in browsers, so as an exercise we're trying out HTML5 on banjax.com:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
 <head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Banjax Web Design</title>
    ...

If you try banjax.com on the HTML5 Outliner you should see it breaks down into a nice neat 'Table of Contents' like outline, albeit without using the new section or footer elements (HTML5 is backward compatible).

You can also try validator.nu with the Banjax.com url, can't guarantee it's valid because as the spec changes so does validator.nu and we may be a little behind—though at the minute we're not doing anything too advanced so there shouldn't be a problem.

There is a lot of material on HTML5 out there, articles, presentations, tools and wikis. I thought I might try and bring together some of the good stuff:

A couple of really quick HTML5 previews:

XTECH '08 HTML5 Lightning Talk
by Anne van Kesteren of Opera Software ASA
How HTML5 can be used today
by Simon Pieters of of Opera Software ASA

A couple of much longer articles on HTML5:

A Preview of HTML 5
by Lachlan Hunt of Opera Software ASA
New elements in HTML 5: Structure and semantics
by Elliotte Rusty Harold

Useful Resources:

HTML5 Validator
by Henri Sivonen & Mozilla (go to Henri's site, read the articles, acquire knowledge!)
HTML5 FAQ
from the WHATWG Wiki
HTML5 Elements List
by Simon Pieters
HTML5 Differences from HTML4
from the WHATWG Wiki
HTML vrs. XHTML
from the WHATWG Wiki
HTML5 Outliner
by James Graham

by Stephen Stewart
7-Aug-08

Notes & Links

Short notes from the field. (Some taken from the Banjax Twitter feed).

© 2008 Banjax Ltd.
49 Botanic Avenue, Belfast, Northern Ireland BT7 1JL
Telephone: +44 28 9033 2697