8 Ways to Sunday

Update (4/3/2007): Over 2,900 people have visited this page in the last two weeks, looking for information about the recent pet food recall. Several have posted questions, which I’ve done my best to answer. The original blog post has nothing to do with the recall, but you may find answers to your questions in the comments. Please read all the existing comments before making a new one.

To avoid any confusion, here are a few points I want to make clear from the beginning:

1. I do not work for Purina, the makers of Fancy Feast cat food.
2. I’m not a veterinarian, I’m a website developer and graphic designer.
3. If you want to make absolutely certain your pet’s diet is safe, you should talk to your veterinarian about it.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope the information in the comments is helpful to you. Also, feel free to roam around the rest of the site. I write on a wide variety of topics here, and you may find something else that interests you.

According to PetAlert, this is the cat version of the Heimlich Maneuver. Color me incredulous.

I feed Riley from Purina’s Fancy Feast line — a supposedly “gourmet” brand of cat food — because just about every other wet food seems to make him puke. Overall it’s a very good product, but tonight as I was dishing out his diner of “Flaked Fish & Shrimp Feast” I noticed something wrong.

Mixed in with the mashed-up fish and actual tiny shrimps (this is premium shit, I tell ya) were a bunch of fish bones. Some were little hair-fine bones of the type you can never really remove, but there were at least three big hard chokers in there. I won’t be getting this particular flavor again. Just a heads-up for the other cat parents out there.

The re-designed 8 Ways to Sunday is now live, and everything seems to be working as it should. This is the third complete revision of this site’s appearance and function, and it’s the first that I’ve coded myself from the ground up.

There are a few things which still need to be done. For example the “About” page still has the old appearance, and the contact page has been taken offline because the URL was mysteriously landing me back on the home page. I’ll be getting to those things as I have time. Meanwhile, if you have any problems with the revamped site please leave a comment to this entry.

Hope you enjoy the new site. Have a look around, and don’t be bashful about telling me what you think.

Update: The time stamp was screwy on this post. Probably a server-level issue. Anyway, I changed it to reflect the actual post time.

The new theme is about to go live. Things might look weird for a moment.

Now if only I could make it to the party.

Important Update: Since this tip was posted, Microsoft has released a required patch for Internet Explorer that forces web users to “click to activate” Active-X objects such as Flash. This was done to comply with the ridiculous patent infringement suit from Eolas Technologies, and it will cause your sIFR text to display confusing behavior if you’ve compressed the JavaScript with Packer.

The reason this happens: Packer uses JavaScript’s eval() function to parse the complex regular expression that represents your condensed script, then execute the un-packed script code. Something about the use of eval() causes the patched Internet Explorer to display the “click to activate” message, which has the effect of making your sIFRed text look like a link.

Whether this represents a bug in the Eolas patch or not is still up in the air until word comes down from Microsoft. The eval() function is used for more than just Packer, however, so I hope this will be fixed soon. Meanwhile, don’t follow the advice given below.

You can keep up with this issue, and others involving sIFR, in the sIFR forum or by following the sIFR category of Mark Wubben’s weblog.

Although the JavaScript source code for the sIFR font replacement technique is already stripped-down and compacted by its creator, it still adds a hefty 9 KB download to the first page on your site that a visitor sees (after that, it’s cached). While 9 KB is nothing to those of us lucky enough to have a broadband Internet connection, for the 45% of Americans still on dial-up modems every kilobyte counts. Dean Edwards’s JavaScript packer can help make sIFR a lighter load for your dial-up visitors.

Packer is simple to use, and produces fully-functional, but completely obfuscated, JavaScript code. The full, uncompacted sIFR source can be found as sifr.js in the folder titled “uncompressed js source (do not use)” from the official sIFR 2.0 RC 4 download.

Run the contents of this file through Packer by pasting it into the bottom textarea and clicking the “Pack” button. Be sure that “Encoding” is set to Normal and that the “Fast Decode” checkbox is ticked.

The 19.3 KB script will shrink down to 7.8 KB, versus the 9 KB of the compacted source that comes with the download. Better still, the latest version of Dean’s packer doesn’t require high ASCII characters, so you probably won’t have to worry about what character set it gets served up in.

Click the “Save” button to save the compressed JavaScript as sifr.js, then upload it to your site in place of the existing sIFR script. Congratulations, you’ve just saved 45% of your audience a little bit of time.