Simon Willison’s Weblog

Clearing out my tabs

I’ve inadvertantly discovered a flaw in the tabbed browsing model—if you’re not disciplined about them you can quickly end up lost in a see of tabs. Right now I have 6 Phoenix windows open with a total of 57 tabs between them. This is the result of about a week’s accumulated browsing, leaving me unable to even think about shutting down or rebooting my computer without clearing them all out first. The fact that Mandrake is churning along happily without any noticable slowdown (despite me having several other applications running as well) doesn’t help at all as it gives me even less impetus to tidy everything up.

This post exists mainly to clear out interesting tabs.

• PXTL— the Python XML Templating Language—a proposal and specification in progress (by Andrew Clover).
• The horror of blimps—file under “funny”.
• A Specter is Haunting Gaming—the games industry is suffering from extreme lack of innovation.
• mod_rewrite: A Beginner’s Guide to URL Rewriting—SitePoint’s invaluable guide to the hideously complicated (but awesomely powerful) mod_rewrite Apache module.
• Onyx RSS—ReadingEd’s PHP RSS parser.
• PHP Application Tools—a whole bunch of useful looking object oriented PHP scripts, including template and XML rendering libraries.
• The Tyranny of Email—advice on preventing email from killing your productivity.
• Craig Saila praises Macromedia for actively responding to feedback from their controversial new redesign.
• Building Communities with Software—Joel explains the design decisions behind his site’s forum software, and points out that as in real life it’s the small details of community software that influence the kind of community that develops there.
• SitePoint Newsletter Quick Tip describing a method for highlighting links that will open in a new window using a custom user stylesheet.
• Browser Innovation, Gecko and the Mozilla Project—Mitchell Baker’s essay, as linked to by the rest of the blogging world.
• Advogato virus—the first “virus” I’ve ever seen that spreads itself around within a site-with-login-system using embedded hostile javascript.
• A blogger is a stalker’s dream—good title, but basically a rant about dull my-life-sucks style blogs.
• ImageMagick convert documentation for command line conversion of images.
• PHP frontend to ImageMagick—the reason I was reading the above.
• Issues Arising From Arbitrary-Element Hover—I was hoping this article would cover sites that set a hover style for all a elements and forget to close their <a name="something"> elements (resulting in most of the text on the page changing colour on hover) but it didn’t.

I really need to get myself a linkroll.