Novell Groupwise is the third biggest player in the corporate email market behind Outlook Exchange and Notes. A while ago we heard from a Groupwise product manager at Novell, Alex Evans, who wanted to test against our email acid test. We sent Alex the email, and he soon had some great news for us.

Novell Groupwise, in it’s current version 7, renders the acid test perfectly, which puts it right up with Apple Mail and Yahoo Mail in terms of support for modern HTML and CSS.

This is for the Windows version of Groupwise. The excellent result also applies to the WebAccess version, and although the testing has not been completed, Linux and OSX version are also expected to meet the same levels.

Great job Novell team! We appreciate your efforts in building your product, and also in being prepared to test your client against our emails. We look forward to similar results for some other email clients in the not too distant future!

Whereas emails sent to Yahoo! webmail subscribers in the past were appearing fine, recently it seemed like the rendering had changed. Paragraph spacing was now totally removed from many emails.

Diana ran some tests and was able to confirm that the spacing did disappear in both Yahoo! classic and the new version:

This is how paragraphs will now be spaced by default.

Fortunately, this is a simple one to fix. All you need to do is add a margin-bottom of 1em (either inline or in your stylesheet) and the spacing is back.

With the addition of a 1em margin, all is well.

It’s unclear at this stage why the change has been made, but it is a timely reminder that you can’t always rely on email client default settings – if it is important to your design, it’s always best to explicitly apply styles to each element.

Thanks to everyone who reported this to us, and to Diana for doing the testing.

We needed a PHP and jQuery image upload and crop tool and came up with the following. Hope it helps!

Before you start, ensure you have the following:

• PHP 4 or Higher (It has been tested on Version 5)
• Safe mode must be off! – A number of users have reported issues when safe mode is on.
• PHP GD Library
• jQuery ver 1.2.3 or Higher
• Image Area Select plugin by Michal Wojciechowski

Read more …

The following information came from webalizer quick help, however the terminology applies to other statistics such as awstats as well.

Main Headings

Hits represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given time period (month, day, hour etc..).

Files represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers cache.

Tip: By looking at the difference between hits and files, you can get a rough indication of repeat visitors, as the greater the difference between the two, the more people are requesting pages they already have cached (have viewed already).

Sites is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to the server. Care should be taken when using this metric for anything other than that. Many users can appear to come from a single site, and they can also appear to come from many ip addresses so it should be used simply as a rough guage as to the number of visitors to your server.

Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.

Pages are those URLs that would be considered the actual page being requested, and not all of the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips). Some people call this metric page views or page impressions, and defaults to any URL that has an extension of .htm, .html or .cgi.

A KByte (KB) is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). Used to show the amount of data that was transfered between the server and the remote machine, based on the data found in the server log.

Common Definitions

A Site is a remote machine that makes requests to your server, and is based on the remote machines IP Address/Hostname.

URL – Uniform Resource Locator. All requests made to a web server need to request something. A URL is that something, and represents an object somewhere on your server, that is accessable to the remote user, or results in an error (ie: 404 – Not found). URLs can be of any type (HTML, Audio, Graphics, etc…).

Referrers are those URLs that lead a user to your site or caused the browser to request something from your server. The vast majority of requests are made from your own URLs, since most HTML pages contain links to other objects such as graphics files. If one of your HTML pages contains links to 10 graphic images, then each request for the HTML page will produce 10 more hits with the referrer specified as the URL of your own HTML page.

Search Strings are obtained from examining the referrer string and looking for known patterns from various search engines. The search engines and the patterns to look for can be specified by the user within a configuration file. The default will catch most of the major ones.

Note: Only available if that information is contained in the server logs.

User Agents are a fancy name for browsers. Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, etc.. are all User Agents, and each reports itself in a unique way to your server. Keep in mind however, that many browsers allow the user to change it’s reported name, so you might see some obvious fake names in the listing.

Note: Only available if that information is contained in the server logs.

Entry/Exit pages are those pages that were the first requested in a visit (Entry), and the last requested (Exit). These pages are calculated using the Visits logic above. When a visit is first triggered, the requested page is counted as an Entry page, and whatever the last requested URL was, is counted as an Exit page.

Countries are determined based on the top level domain of the requesting site. This is somewhat questionable however, as there is no longer strong enforcement of domains as there was in the past. A .COM domain may reside in the US, or somewhere else. An .IL domain may actually be in Isreal, however it may also be located in the US or elsewhere. The most common domains seen are .COM (US Commercial), .NET (Network), .ORG (Non-profit Organization) and .EDU (Educational). A large percentage may also be shown as Unresolved/Unknown, as a fairly large percentage of dialup and other customer access points do not resolve to a name and are left as an IP address.

Response Codes are defined as part of the HTTP/1.1 protocol (RFC 2068; See Chapter 10). These codes are generated by the web server and indicate the completion status of each request made to it.