Monthly Archives: August 2007

Friday Afternoon Skweezer Update

Posted by on August 3, 2007 Comments Off

Skweezer LogoWe just updated Skweezer again this afternoon with a few minor stability fixes and improvements. Among them:

  • Once you log in, you now remain logged in for two weeks.
  • For more modern phones Skweezer now allows limited CSS information which should make many pages look nicer and less bare. If you have a nice big color display, you should be able to use it. Of course, this means the page is not as small as before, but we want to push the limits of your phone’s browser.
  • We’ve corrected HTML entity decoding errors that prevented some pages with foreign characters to display correctly.
  • Device recognition has had an overhaul so that we can match unknown devices much better and we’re more likely to underestimate your device capabilities than overestimate them, if we can’t determine the device make and model.
  • For desktop browsers, the images are not as overly compressed as they were. We’ll see how this works with our CPU and bandwidth.

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The Future of The Mobile Web

Posted by on August 1, 2007 2 comments

In his article The Analyst, The iPhone, And The Future Of The Mobile Web, Dan Frommer recaps a discussion regarding the pros/cons of iPhone-style powerful mobile browsers that access anything which “signals the beginning of the end for the mobile Web as we know it today” vs. the utility of mobile-specific websites. After conceding that mobile browsers suck, he goes on (emphasis added):

But even if someday everyone has a browser as powerful as the iPhone’s Safari, that doesn’t fix the screen-size problem [...] even if developers use proper Web coding standards, “normal” Web sites will always be crippled on iPhones and similar mobile devices.

Anyone who has used the iPhone on AT&T’s pokey EDGE data connection also knows that the bandwidth just isn’t there yet to browse hi-fi Web sites and actually enjoy it. And for the foreseeable future, there are things you can do with a computer that you simply can’t do with phones, such as hovering a mouse cursor over part of a Web site, browsing with Java-based navigation, right-clicking on links and elegantly using multiple browser windows.

The near future of the Internet is going to look a lot like it did in the last decade, when content creators made separate sites for broadband and dialup users. The “real” Web will continue to get more and more multimedia-heavy, with Java, Flash, and video offerings designed for broadband connections. And the mobile Web should continue as a separate entity, accounting for smaller displays, and focusing on faster-loading, lo-fi content and simple navigation with fat fingers in mind.

Live long and prosperI sadly agree that is what will probably happen for large corporate sites or web-only businesses (like Facebook), but I would like to add that Skweezer will bridge the gap for the rest of the web which I believe will remain in the majority. Anyone who thinks there will be both desktop and mobile versions of every site is deluding themselves. Remember the early days of Firefox when IE-specific sites would warn you to download IE in order to log in? Few sites responded with separate versions (or even separate stylesheets) for each browser, but the standard accepted practice is to make your site work on all major browsers. By using good web standards, XHTML and CSS and graceful fallbacks (like specifying onclick AND href for your A tags), web authors can be sure their sites will live long and prosper.

The importance of good DNS

Posted by on August 1, 2007 Comments Off

We have reached a resolution regarding our DNS problem with BulkRegister. Meetings were had, apologies were offered and promises made. In the end, no system can 100% guard against human error, and they assure us that was the root problem here. We’re now faced with the choice of staying with BulkRegister, who now promises never to turn off skweezer.net again, or find another company whose trustworthiness has yet to be tested. For our part, we feel that now that our account has been admitted into BulkRegister’s theoretical gold club it’s worth staying with them and fostering this relationship.

Question: if someone claims {choose: (ask/yahoo/google/microsoft).com} is a fraudulent site, are they automatically disabled? I think not. What does it take to get in this club? Why is there a club in the first place?
We have learned that DNS is really an unavoidable single point of failure for a web company and deserves equal security attention/planning as network, hardware, and power. This saga also demonstrates how going after the registrar and not the ISP or hosting company of phishers is most effective; it really cuts a site off at the knees. For my part, I am tired of being on the wrong end of the digilantes who don’t understand that Skweezer is a mobilizing web proxy service, not a copyright infringer or phishing portal. That’s partly why I have this blog, so that one of these posts will be one of the top search results for “skweezer phishing” or “skweezer is stealing my content!” For all of you who got here and still are wondering: No, it’s not.