November 2002
Nov. 9, 2002
PHP tips and tricks from Rasmus
Rasmus Lerdorf has published a PHP Tips and Tricks PDF based on a presentation given at the recent PHPCon2002. The file is a veritable goldmine of useful information, covering topics including optimisation, sessions, security, dynamic image/flash/PDF generation and using Squid and MySQL replication to increase the performance of a high traffic site. Spotted on PHPDeveloper.org.
More geek books
A £5 Amazon gift voucher combined with Amazon.co.uk offering free shipping on orders over £39 has lead me to order 3 more books: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Don’t Make Me Think! and The Elements of Style. They should arrive on Monday. I wonder if All Consuming can pick up on links to isbn.nu?
Nov. 12, 2002
Macromedia Contribute
Macromedia Contribute is a cut-down version of DreamWeaver designed for end content providers to add and edit content on a static website without fear of breaking the design. Coverage by Jeffrey Zeldman, Ordinary Life, web-graphics and Aaron Swartz, who asks if this is a return to Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of a web where contributing is as easy as browsing.
DOM inspector tutorial
An Introduction to the DOM Inspector (via Scott Andrew). The DOM inspector is a powerful but little-known tool that comes packaged with Mozilla and can be used to interactively browse through the DOM of both Mozilla interface components and any web page. The article mainly discusses using the inspector to investigate Mozilla internals, but as a web developer I frequently use it to analyse pages and see how they work. It is also great for tweaking other people’s sites in my browser (see my post covering Jeffrey Zeldman’s redesign for an example of this).
Patterns for web sites
Patterns for Personal Web Sites (via Peter)—a fun and (as far as I know) original concept.
Nov. 13, 2002
Opera 7 Beta
Opera have released the first public beta of their new browser, Opera 7. The new version promises to be smaller, faster and have better DOM support than Opera 6. My observations so far:
[... 230 words]Open source web editing
While reading the thread discussing Macromedia’s Contribute over on 37signals I realised something: the web could really do with an open source Contribute style application. Editing full documents is best done in an application—there’s only so much you can do with browser based editing tools (even if you take advantage of IE’s contendEditable or use Flash to build an editor applet). When people are using Word they hit Ctrl+S to instantly save what they working on—show me a browser based editor with the same functionality.
[... 277 words]Nov. 16, 2002
High end CMS vendors in trouble
Licenses Down, Services Up is a fascinating article discussing the commoditising effect of open source software which uses the high-end Content Management market (such as Interwoven, BroadVision and Vignette) to demonstrate how open source is causing real problems for companies that rely on ludicrously high license fees as their main revenue stream. The conclusion?
[... 105 words]Funky caching explained
I didn’t take much notice of “funky caching” while reading through Rasmus Lerdorf’s PHP tips and tricks presentation—I saw that it was talking about using custom 404 pages to serve up dynamic content depending on the URL and wrote it off as a hack that, while useful, was fundamentally flawed in that it would add an error log entry whenever a page was served.
[... 208 words]Usability Views
Usability Views (via Zeldman) lists articles from a number of Usability related sites in a variety of different ways, including order-by-most-popular. Popularity appears to be judged by the number of links to that article around the web—I doubt the site is indexing the whole web so could this be another (very clever) application of the Google Web API? Grabbing the number of results for a Google link: query should be easy enough, and would be a great way of judging the popularity of external content. Here’s hoping Usability Views adds a “how this works” page in the near future to satisfy my inner geek.
Douglas Bowman goes it alone
Douglas Bowman has left Wired, and is striking out on his own with Stop Design, his one man consultancy business. With the Wired redesign Douglas gave a massive and long-awaited boost to the web standards movement by demonstrating once and for all that a large, high traffic site could make the transition to structural markup and standards compliant code. I wish him the best of luck in his new venture, and I look forward to keeping up with further developments via his excellent weblog.
Nov. 19, 2002
Structured procrastination
Thanks to Morbus, I have finally found a time management system that looks like it could work for me: Structured Procrastination.
[... 158 words]Microsoft will be around for a very long time...
This story on the BBC describing how Microsoft lost £112 million on the Xbox has been getting a lot of attention later. Here’s a depressing thought: With 40 billion dollars in the bank they could sustain that rate of loss for 85 years without running out of cash. Scary.
Nov. 20, 2002
A royalty free web
Stuart points out that the W3C are seeking public approval for their recently published last-call draft of their patent policy. The email address is www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org. Show them your support for a royalty-free web.
OmniWeb CSS hack
The hack we’ve all been waiting for: How to hide CSS from OmniWeb. OmniWeb is a Mac browser which understands the @import rule but horribly mangles CSS layouts beyond all repair. Thanks to this hack CSS sites with a noticeable percentage of OmniWeb users (and anyone else who cares) can give OmniWeb the same treatment normally reserved for Netscape 4.
Condiment Clothing goodness
Thanks to CafeShops, pretty much anyone can set up a store to flog their own branded merchandise. Long time a favourite obscure site of mine, the Condiment Packet Museum now has their own line of goods. Dig those boxer shorts :)
A plea for sense
Peter Van Dijck: We need some sense in the naming of XML feed buttons.
. I couldn’t agree more—in this day of syndication formats left, right and center the orange XML button could mean just about anything. Speaking of which, I’ve finally got around to adding a pretty blue RSS button to this site.
Content inventory tips
Peter has been blogging the progress of a 3828 page content inventory he is working on. Day Two describes his method of working with Excel, Day Three provides three useful inventory tips. Christina Wodtke’s Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web has a nice overview of the content inventory process which recommends a dual monitor setup and links (well, footnotes) to these tips by Noel Franus. Peter has also commented on my decision to go with the blue RSS button in favour of the standard orange XML button—I’ve posted my reasons in a comment attached to his post.
Syndicated further reading recommendations
I frequently find myself reading something on someone elses blog and thinking “that’s interesting, and it fits in well with XXX that I read the other day”. I often end up blogging a link to both just to satisfy my need for completeness. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was some standard for formalising this kind of further reading recommendation? I’m not sure exactly how it would work (it would almost certainly be XML based but I don’t know if it would require a new format or integrate with an existing one) but it could be an interesting avenue to explore. I think it’s a significantly different problem to the ones solved by XFML (external shared metadata) and Pingback for it to be worth committing some thought cycles to. Any ideas?
Nov. 21, 2002
Different browsers different DOMs
Hixie has put together a fascinating article describing how the Mozilla, Opera 7 beta and IE6 DOMs deal with incorrectly nested HTML tags. Internet Explorer goes as far as creating a malformed tree just to represent badly formed HTML!
Search engines don’t care!
I’ve suspected this for ages, but finally it can be categorically announced that search engines just don’t care about the meta keywords attribute. The only major engine that still notices it is Inktomi, and even they treat it as a very low priority. Finally something concrete to refer people who still demand meta tags to. The description tag is still occasionally worth adding though.
Changing backgrounds
Via Adrian Holovaty, Matt Jones points out an innovative new feature of the BBC’s new home page—background colours that adapt to your browsing preferences. Interesting stuff.
Nov. 22, 2002
Mark’s tinkerings
Mark’s back, and he’s been tinkering. In addition to a whole bunch of changes made yesterday in response to Hixie’s markup critique, Mark now boasts php.net style shortcut URLs, an RDF powered about page and an automatically generated list of acronyms (in a semantically correct definition list). I use a similar technique (extracting structural markup tags using regular expressions) in my personal course notes—there’s something very rewarding about being able to extract information from a properly marked up document.
Interesting but ultimately useless
Via Stuart, Tantek has an intriguing new (valid) hack for adding HTML documentation to an external javascript file. The hack uses some clever multi-language comments to hide the HTML in the file from the script interpreter, while ensuring that the documentation remains readable when the file is interpreted as HTML. Unfortunately the trick does not work in Mozilla, as that browser respects the Content-Type served with the document (whereas IE “guesses” the content is HTML from clues in the document).
Nov. 23, 2002
Aquari-gone-ics
Aquarionics is Gone (well, not entirely—the old site can still be found here). Aquarion has committed to building his new blogging system, Epistula 2, and vowed not to add any more entries until the new system is capable of taking them. Development of the new system will continue in the open at playground.aquarionics.com, which is currently throwing an HTTP 500 error but is likely to be an interesting place to watch in the next few days.
RESTLog
Joe Gregorio’s RESTLog is a fascinating piece of technology and a great example of the RESTian model of web service in action. Everything is built on XML and HTTP—new blog entries are POSTed to the index page as RSS 2.0 item elements, edits are done with the little-used HTTP PUT method and the DELETE method can be used to delete items. Content negotiation is in effect, so browsers recieve HTML while aggregators theoretically get RSS (though in practise existing aggregators fail to send a content negotiation header so an alternative URL scheme must be used). It’s very clever stuff. Further techie details are being posted on a regular basis, but a good overview can be had by reading RESTLog Overview and RESTLog Interface. The system was inspired by the RESTWiki’s RestidyingBlogger.