June 2002
June 19, 2002
Advogato rant
Interesting rant on Advogato (from June 11th): Professional Programmers. The author complains that the industry is infested with programmers who don’t really know anything more than how to write Visual Basic macros, and HR departments who hiee them over “real programmers” because they have more VB experience. The article makes some good points but the resulting thread is where the truly worth-while content is. My hope is that the abundance of VB programmers will make it easier for serious programmers (which I’m hoping will be me) to get more highly paid jobs. Time will tell.
djc on Kuro5hin
djc (formerly of evolt) has posted his views on the recent Kuro5hin problems. His take on things can be summarised as “don’t quit your day job until you’re sure your hobby can pay for itself”.
Free books
I like free books (who doesn’t?), so when a story on Slashdot asked for book recommendations I started a thread asking for links to free technical books available online. Here’s a list compiled from the thread:
[... 377 words]Day 8: page titles
Day 8: Constructing meaningful page titles—the accessibility tips are flying thick and fast now. I’ve always been conscientious of my page titles (after all, they’re all you get when when you use your browser’s history feature) but it seems I was not quite conscientious enough. My titles now all carry a reference to the name of the blog in addition to a description of the page.
Slashdot threads
A couple of interesting threads on Slashdot today: Content Management Software—Build or Buy? and Properly Testing Your Code.
SitePoint graphic design resources
I’ve never been any good at graphic design, but today I discovered a fantastic resource for Photoshop tutorials and general inspiration. This list of resources highlights the most useful threads of the past year over on the SitePoint Graphic Design forum.
June 20, 2002
XFML
XFML—eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language (via Guide to ease). Now this is interesting. It’s an open XML format designed to facilitiate the publication and distribution of metadata—it uses a load of terms that are currently way over my head (hierarchical and faceted taxonomiest, topicmaps?) but the general principle looks fantastic. I wrote a metadata system last year that used a relational database and it was something of a nightmare—XFML looks like it solves some of the problems I faced, although my biggest challenge was how to grab and present usable information from the huge amounts of metadata collected which is a problem that falls outside the scope of XFML. XFML is best summarised by the following quote:
[... 307 words]OOP and XP
There’s an interesting rambling thread on SitePoint at the moment which started off talking about coding standards but has moved on now to discussing OOP and eXtreme Programming. In it, I try to explain inheritance and the difference between -> and :: while Vincent Oostindië explains the principle of refactoring from eXtreme Programming.
Apple rant
John C. Dvorak: E-Mac, i-Mac, No Mac. This is so poor I just had to link to it. John claims that the Mac is on it’s last legs and deserves to be put down, which is a complete contradiction to almost verything I’ve read about Macs in the past siz months. I’ve never had a Mac and I’ve had few chances to use one, but I would jump at the chance to own one at the moment. Why? Simple, OS X. Apple have taken a truly world class operating system (FreeBSD) and added a truly world class GUI—a combination that I don’t think is matched anywhere else in the computing world. They’re innovating like never before—AirPort and the i-series of software are great examples. John completely fails to back up his viewpoint at any point in his article—in fact the worst he does is to criticise Apple management of running Apple “like a tire company”.
[... 251 words]Mozilla versions
Peter-Paul Koch on evolt: One browser, many names—an invaluable guide to the many different version numbers and user-agent strings resulting from the Mozilla project.
RSS XML stylesheet
This is clever. The RSS feed for the World Wide Web Consortium uses an XML stylesheet to render visually in both Mozilla and IE. It’s a shame the links don’t work but it’s still a nice idea.
Additional navigational links
Today’s accessibility tip: Providing additional navigation aids. Mark explains the concept of “relative” links using the <link> tag, which can be used to provide shortcuts to the next and previous page in a sequence as well as links to a site’s homepage. He also provides instructions for implementing them in Moveable Type, and asks for suggestions as to how it could be done in Radio. These links are not rendered in the actual body of a page but can be used by many browsers to provide additional navigation aids. My blog has these already but only as shortcuts to my categories and a link back to the home page—I haven’t yet implemented them for next/previous buttons while browsing the archives (which is arguably their most useful ability). Time to get hacking...
Next-Prev implemented
I’ve implemented the next/previous additional aids options in the archives. It ended up being quite an ugly hack, but it works.
Amazon’s hairy feet
Elegant Hack: Today Amazon introduced the soon-to-be standard dancing tab with hairy feet.
June 21, 2002
Presenting your content first
Mark’s accessibility tips are getting harder. Today we are advised to Present our main content first in our source code. This benefits both text based browsers and search engines such as Google. Mark points out the ingenious table trick which allows table based layouts to present the main content before the left hand menu in the source code and provides tips on implementation. Thanks to the benefits of CSS layout my blog only needed a small alteration—I was presenting the div containing the navigation in the source code before the div containing the main content. A quick switch of the order of the divs and the CSS did the rest for me without any further alteration.
June 22, 2002
NPR again
More on BoingBoing about NPR’s link policy. It seems NPR are reconsidering their policy, but in the mean time they have posted a defence of it which Cory Doctorow criticises at length.
Building a semantic website
XML.com: Building a Semantic Web Site. A top down guide to RSS and associated metadata concepts, including Dublin Core and Topic Maps.
VillainSupply.com
Via Slashdot: VillainSupply.com—for all your world domination needs. Product categories include Superweapons, Lairs and Miscellaneous Evil.
Two things about Mozilla
New project in the works—details to follow soon. In developing it I’ve learnt two new things about Mozilla:
Comments added
I’ve added a comments feature to this blog, in preparation for tomorrow’s big story (hinted at below).
June 24, 2002
The Pickle Jar theory
A List Apart: Time Management—The Pickle Jar Theory. I like this concept—it’s simple, doesn’t involve long words or complex charts and makes good sense. The basic idea is that you should schedule only your high priority tasks for the day and leave the gaps in between for less important activities (email, browsing and so forth). This is supported by the analogy of a pickle jar, where you can fit more in the jar if you add large pebbles first before pouring in smaller pebbles and sand (rather than adding the largest pebbles last when they will be unlikely to fit). Jeremy Wright, the author of the article, is a regular over on the SitePoint forums.
Glastonbury Flash
I’m headed off to Glastonbury on Thursday and I’ve been checking out the offical festival website. It’s pretty good—the information I wanted was all there, it was easy to find and the site has a pleasant enough look to it. Then I tried the interactive flash map (warning: spawns popup). Running on my Dad’s brand new Pentium 4 1.8 GHz desktop, the opening intro animation ran like an absolute dog and took over a minute to finish. There was no “skip intro” option and no way to turn off the irritating music until the intro had finished. Once it had loaded the map was quite useful—you can overlay paths, information points and other bits and pieces straight on to the map which is a decent enough reason to use flash. Unfortunately the pointless, jerky 3D intro meant I very nearly gave up in disgust before I got to the good stuff.
[... 223 words]Mozilla page info
I’ve been playing around with Mozilla’s “Page Info” feature, available in the View menu, the right-click context menu and through the Ctrl+I shortcut. I’d never really lookd at it before, but the information it provides is invaluable, especially if you are interested in web development. The info window is divided in to five tabs:
[... 234 words]Skipping over navigation
Day 11’s accessibility tip is Skipping over navigation links, which suggests a compromise for people who did not or could not comply with Presenting your content first. I altered my template to present content first on Friday, but before then I was using a skip-navigation link. I now have a skip-content-to-access-navigation link instead, a technique I borrwed from Mark’s site but which he does not mention in today’s tip.
Some Python advocacy
I just engaged in some basic Python advocacy, during which I rolled out my all time favourite Python advocacy link: Why Python? by Eric Raymond.
PHP string tip
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve posted this PHP tip on a forum somewhere, so I may as well blog it:
[... 86 words]Installing PHP and XSL on Windows
I’m currently reinstalling PHP on my Windows machine, and in doing so I came across this tutorial: Installing XSL and PHP on Windows. The tutorial provides all the necessary files and instructions to get XSL working with minimum hassle. I’ve been meaning to play with XSL for some time, and this has provided me with just the boost I needed to give it a go.
An IA process
Anders Ramsay: How I work as an Information Architect (via Guide to Ease). An interesting overview of Information Architecture, including what it involves and how it can be aproached. The article also touches on Software Engineering related concepts such as project management and system design.
June 25, 2002
Dot leaders in CSS
Via Brett Merkey on CSS Discuss: Dot Leaders without Tables. Dot Leaders is a publishing term that describes the rows of dots frequently used in tables of contents to connect a chapter title with its relevant page number on the other side of the page. Brett’s CSS solution resizes elegantly to fit the page, and there isn’t a table in sight. Brett’s site provides an assortment of other useful CSS resources, including a very handy CSS cheat sheet.