Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Friday, 12th July 2002

Smarty at OSCON

Smarty at OSCON: Andrei Zmievski and Sterling Hughes will be presenting a tutorial titled “Template Architectures with Smarty” at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego, July 22-26, 2002. Further details are available here. Smarty is a powerful template engine for PHP which combines a highly versatile templating language with excellent performance gained through template compilation.

[... 69 words]

Blogroll etiquette

Jordon Cooper on Blogroll Etiquette. I haven’t made it on to many blog rolls yet but it’s always nice to spot a new site in my referrals. The problem with having a blogroll powered by blo.gs is that you can only blogroll blogs that ping either blo.gs or weblogs.com. I have actually gone as far as emailing several bloggers who’s blog I admire but am unable to link to due to their absence from these useful central repositories—the responses I’ve had have been positive so I’m hoping to add them again shortly.

[... 97 words]

Blog birthday

This blog is one month old today :) According to my category statistics page I’ve posted 185 entries covering 23 different topics. Quite frankly, that statistic scares me...

[... 29 words]

Busy day

Quiet blogging day today, but I’ve been busy behind the scenes. Firstly I’ve been playing around with TaviWiki (an excellent PHP Wiki engine), using it as a proof of concept for a Wiki-driven small website content management system. I’ve looked at several PHP Wiki’s in the past and TaviWiki is the best by far, with rock solid features and a well organised code base. My only criticism is that the script relies on globals a bit too much, making it quite hard to figure out what is going on at times. I’ve also been working on IncDirectory, the open source sequel to my aging links directory script ssLinks. Add to that a new CSS experiment and preliminary work on rewriting this blog to use mySQL and today has been my most productive in quite some time.

[... 155 words]

DVB-HTML

New article on Evolt: DVB-HTML a new standard?. The article describes DVB-HTML, a new standard being developed to allow the next wave of digital televisions to access internet content. The good news is that DVB-HTML complies with the W3C’s XHTML modularisation requirement, and supports XHTML, CSS and the DOM. As I understand it, this means that if you author your pages in validated XHTML they will be ready for viewing on digital TVs. Web Standards at work.

[... 119 words]