June 2002
June 12, 2002
Blogging aint easy
Blogging isn’t nearly as easy as it looks. After several days hacking around in PHP (I’m far too proud to use an off the shelf solution) I find myself confronted with a blank slate, and writers block has taken hold. The toughest thing is working out what style to use in blog entries—my previous writing for the web has been primarily on forums (where posts do not have to stand on their own) or news sites where a formal, unopinionated tone is required. A blog should be informal but informative, with each post hopefully adding a new angle to the topic in hand. I’m sure it will get easier as I go along...
Todo list
Weblog TODO List
I’ve got the bare bones of a weblog up and running now— essentially the ability to add entries which are categorised and archived in a permanent location. Still to come...- An edit function
- A comments system (probably similar to Jonathan Delacour’s)
- RSS feeds for individual categories
- Referral tracking (as seen on diveintomark)
- A better form of overall statistics tracking than that provided by the University
- A system for storing more permanent feature articles
- An XML-RPC API for posting with an accompanying PythonCard application
- An interface for editing my Blog Roll
- Allow visitors to include/exclude categories via cookies
- A preview post feature
- A link directory that accumulates links automatically by parsing blog entries
- Dancing monkeys—definitely dancing monkeys
Netscape 4 is 5 years old
Netscape 4 hit 5 years old yesterday. Scott Andrew celebrated this monumental occasion with a poetic tombstone tribute, entitled "1997—2002". The challenge now is to make this dream a reality—NS4 still has a stronghold in many corporate and institutional IT departments, as Zeldman bemoans in the first "opinion" of the new Web Standards project. An opinion that is notable in its absence of a permalink ;)
Webdesign-L ablaze!
The Webdesign-L mailing list is ablaze with a huge, rambling, flamey thread about the relaunched Web Standards project. As with so many flames it has become quite difficut to work out what is being argued over and why (an issue compounded by the emergence of sub threads on everything from US law to how to upset a Canadian). I would provide links, but the list does not maintain a web accessible archive.
[... 248 words]Day 3: Bill
Day 3: Bill—Mark Pilgrim’s “30 days to a more accessible weblog” series continues with the story of Bill, a retired military officer with a physical disability who surfs the web on an old Linux laptop and runs a mailing list on Veteran’s rights. The piece also clarifies that the characters profiled are fictional (call me naive but I wasn’t sure if they were based on real people or not). I can’t wait to see where Mark is going with this—3 days in and he has already built up some beautifully observed case studies and it will be fascinating to see what he does with them. I’m also intrigued as to how he can make his blog any more accessible—his current accessibility statement demonstrates a far higher level of understanding than any other site I’ve yet seen on the web.
June 13, 2002
Charity and Amazon
Spotted over at FuzzyBlog: If I Was Jeff Bezos of Amazon and I wanted to do the Right Thing, Here’s What I’d Do. In a nutshell, Scott Johnson suggests that Amazon set up a free (or very low cost) system for charities to gather donations through Amazon’s payment system—a charitable version of PayPal. Why Amazon? They have a good reputation, a well implemented payment system and a massive user base. The more convenient the system the more likely people are to donate.
[... 133 words]Tree from unordered list
The amazing tree generator (via webgraphics, who in turn got it from CSS Discuss). This is just the kind of DHTML I really like. Place a simple nested unordered list in your document and this external javascript can use the DOM to convert the list in to a hierarchical outline style tree, with each node expandable to show the child members. It looks great and works in both IE and Mozilla—I haven’t tested it in other browsers but it should degrade gracefully, leaving them with a static nested list.
Mozilla alpha
Mozilla 1.1 Alpha was released yesterday, and after reading Scott Andrew’s recommendation (especially with respect to the mail client) I decided to give it a go. I found the ability to turn off images in mail eventually—it’s hidden away in Edit->Preferences->Privacy & Security->Images as opposed to Mail & News preferences where I looked for it first.
[... 211 words]Hixie on WaSP
Hixie has been poking around the new Web Standards Project site, and he is not impressed. His analysis of the site makes interesting reading, with complaints including CSS colour and background not being set at the same time and the content-type of the document being set as “text/html” rather than the more correct “text/xml” required for XHTML documents.
[... 169 words]Hixie replies
Hixie has replied to my previous post (and provided my first ever link in the process).
[... 209 words]More FuzzyBlog stuff
More FuzzyBlog stuff. Scott runs one of my favourite blogs—constantly updated, plenty of interesting new content and most of it fits the areas I am interested in. Today’s items that caught my eye are Why Do I Blog So Much? and Very, Very Practical Tips for the Busy Person : Part 2 (actually posted on Monday, find Part 1 here.). I particularly liked the following quote from “Why Do I Blog So Much?”:
[... 151 words]June 14, 2002
Hixie replies again
Hixie has answered my question. Judging by how long it took IE to support CSS1, he estimates 6 years until XHTML is ready for main stream use. He’s almost certainly right, but I’m going to try to stick with XHTML any way (bandwagon jumping can be fun). He also points out that this site does not validate—I checked the original template but it seems that several of the entries I have added have inadvertantly invalidated the page, mainly through unescaped ampersands and the like. Time to add an automatic “validation” system to my administrative tools—it’s a shame the W3 validator isn’t available as a web service.
[... 124 words]Zend Engine 2 alpha
I don’t know how I missed this, but the PHP group have released an alpha version of PHP with the Zend Engine 2 (tarball / Windows binary). This is exciting stuff—the new scripting engine has vastly improved object support and brand new exception handling, something I’ve wanted in PHP for a long time. The CHANGELOG lists the new features and provides sample code. Here’s a summary:
[... 248 words]Day 4: Lillian
Mark Pilgrim’s set of case studies is beginning to shape together. I’ve been following responses to it through his “Further reading on today’s posts” referral tracking tool—reception has been overwhelmingly positive, with almost universal praise for Mark’s decision to use the case study format to drive home his point. kcalder criticised Mark’s suggestion that colour blind users wouldn’t get much out of
images on the web, and Mark has apologised and altered the case study accordingly. SubAverage called Mark “preachy” and posted a parody (mentioned in passing by Dave Winer). All this and we’re only on day 4.
Meta weblog API
I’m itching to get an XML-RPC interface to this blog up and running so I can start playing with blogging tools (or roll my own in PythonCard). It looks like Dave Winer’s MetaWeblog API is just what I need. It describes an XML-RPC interface with 3 methods: metaWeblog.newPost, metaWeblog.editPost and metaWeblog.getPost. More importantly, the standard supports complete flexibility in the data that is sent along with the request. My entries consist of a body, an optional permalink (one is generated if none is specified), optional categories and an optional search string for a “Google It!” link if one is required. The MetaWeblog API looks ideally suited to handling this, and is fully extensible should I change the format of my entries in the future.
Mark explains all
Over at diveintomark Mark Pilgrim has explained the aims of his Accessibility series:
[... 208 words]June 15, 2002
CSS panic guide
Owen Briggs: CSS Panic Guide. Owen is the author of several excellent CSS resources (including Box Lessons and 264 font size screenshots) and this is his collection of links to CSS resources from all around the web. It covers every CSS reference worth knowing about and is an essential bookmark for anyone interested in using CSS for layouts.
Uni year ends
Well, I’ve reached the end of my first year at Bath University (studying a degree in Computer Science) and I can safely say I’ve never had 9 months go so fast. I’ve had a fantastic time—I met the girl of my dreams, made a whole bunch of great friends, did loads of cool things and spent far too much money. Today I move out of halls (a terrifying prospect when you live on the ninth floor and the lift is playing up). As an aside, I also lose my lovely fast net connection and return to the trauma of 56K. Thank goodness for Mozilla and tab based browsing.
[... 144 words]Google already
This site has been here for less than four days yet it already shows up as the top result if you search for simon willison on Google—and I never even submitted the URL. In fact, asking Google to list pages that link to me currently turns up zero results. Spooky.
Meg on blogging
Meg Hourihan: What We’re Doing When We Blog. It’s a curious fact of blogdom that many bloggers blog blogging—why they do it, what it is and why it’s so important. I feel Meg has nailed it with this article—blogging is defined by the format, not by the subject matter. She also makes some insightful comments about why the blogging format works so well:
[... 105 words]Python iterators
Via Daily Python-URL (which appears not to provide permalinks): Introduction to Python iterators. This is an extract from Deitel & Deitel’s “Python How To Program” and includes extensive code samples. Iterators are very cool—as I see it, they allow you to overload an object ready for use with Python’s powerful for ... in ... syntax (as well as other looping methods). This blog is implemented as an object in PHP—had I used Python I could display the whole blog using for entry in blog: print entry.
Learning from smart tags
Scott Andrew LePera in a mail to Webdesign-L (sent on the 12th of June, I’m catching up on my mailing list folders):
[... 196 words]Pure CSS popups
New example on Eric Meyer’s css/edge: Pure CSS Menus. This is very impressive stuff—it’s an implementation of those dropdown menus where you hover over an item and a new menu pops up, but it’s done in pure CSS without a line of javascript. Even better, the markup for the menu is a nested unordered list, so browsers that don’t support the advanced CSS needed will still display the menu in a meaningful way.
[... 113 words]JSRS 2.1 released
Brent Ashley: JSRS2.1 Released (from June 10th—Internet Archive copy). JSRS is Javascript Remote Scripting, an incredibly powerful javascript library that allows DHTML pages to communicate with a web server without having to reload the page. This latest version fixes POST suport for Mozilla. The library opens the way for a whole host of interactive web applications without the normal limitations caused by the request-and-response nature of the web. Best of all, JSRS is cross platform (at least for Mozilla, NS4+ and IE4+).
[... 151 words]The nature of blogging
Meg Hourihan’s explanation of blogging (which I linked to and praised earlier) is stirring up something of a storm. Meg’s suggestion that the key to blogging is the format has been ripped to pieces by the likes of BurningBird, Jonathan Delacour and Stavros. Jonathan uses photography as an analogy—some photographers are excellent technically and concentrate on taking the perfect photograph while losing sight of the art of the medium. I hope I’m not overquoting, but Jonathan clinched his argument for me with the following:
[... 331 words]