October 2002
Oct. 27, 2002
Shiny
It’s probably a good idea to keep axes and Jack Daniels away from Jason Kottke for the next few days...
Tidakada redesign
tidakada has redesigned, with a funky new 4 column CSS layout and a brand new blog o’ links.
Oct. 28, 2002
Comment spammers
I suppose it was only a matter of time. Phil Ringnalda reports on a spam attack on his blog in which a spammer used a script to systematically spam the comments section of every entry, using a piece of code targetted at Moveable Type. Phil cut the spammer off after only 120 spams (and used mySQL to wipe out the spam in a few seconds) but this is still a very worrying precedent. Back in August I blogged a spamming company that targetted simple web based bulletin boards like WWWBoard—it looks like they (or someone like them) have discovered blogs.
[... 154 words]Validator web service please
Scott Andrew calls for an XML-RPC or SOAP interface to the new W3C HTML Validator (currently in beta). I’ve been hoping for something for this like ages—if the W3C don’t do it it would be great if someone else set this up (the validator is open source but the bandwidth required for such an undertaking would probably be pretty high).
Cache-22
I haven’t been checking my referrer logs recently, so it was a nice surprise to see that Richard from Incutio has finished redesigning his blog and is now back to updating it frequently. He also has Pingback (implemented using IXR) and is pinging blo.gs when he updates.
Apple Internet Developer
Apple have an excellent site called Internet Developer, with articles covering a wide range of web development topics from HTML and CSS right through to Using SOAP with PHP.
W3C validator web service
Earlier today I mentioned how useful a web service interface to the new W3C validator would be. Tom Gilder pointed out in the comments that the validator now has an XML interface:
[... 419 words]Oct. 29, 2002
PHP at Yahoo
Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo! (via Jeremy Zawodny) looks like it was a great presentation. The slides include the reasons PHP was chosen over ASP, ColdFusion, JSP and Perl and has some interesting details on the history of Yahoo’s server side technologies. Jeremy has extensive coverage of PHPcon so be sure to flick through some of his recent entries while you are there.
Software Engineering practises for PHP
Scott Johnson’s presentation on Software Engineering Practices for Large Scale PHP Projects is fantastic—lots of excellent practical advice for professional development with PHP. It’s a shame the presentation slides require Internet Explorer (due to being exported from Power Point) but it was more than worth firing up IE to view them.
Cashets
Roll on the micropayment revolution! Cashets are designed specifically for the small purchases—$1 (or less)—that you ordinarily can’t make on the Internet because sellers have a minimum
. The smallest amount you can charge using the system is 2 cents, of which 1 cent will go to Cashets and 1 cent will go to you, the seller. The 1 cent is a flat rate for sales up the a dollar, then it’s 2 cents for sales up to 2 dollars and so on up the maxiumum charge of 5 dollars. The company is owned by MasterCard founder Michael Phillips and two unnamed partners who are “computer professionals”. The site is atrocious (the text on the front page is a big gif with no alt text ffs) but the business model looks like it could just be the thing small-to-medium web sites have been waiting for.
Validator warning
As Scott Andrew has noted, the W3C’s beta validator is now returning the following warning as part of it’s XML output:
[... 85 words]Comment spam and game theory
Mark Pilgrim has posted another of his signature in depth explanations, this time concerning the recent worries over blog comment spam. He points out that all of the proposed solutions are Club solutions, not Lojack solutions, meaning they directly help those who implement them, possibly at the expense of others who do not
. He then ties this in to game theory and the classic Prioner’s Dilemma problem.
ebook rants
Dorothea has posted two more excellent rants on the subject of ebooks, archiving and the importance of a single standard for master files (as opposed to a single standard for end user files which is a lot less important).
Oct. 30, 2002
Disadvantages of TMTOWTDI
Slashdot have a story up linking to the Yahoo PHP presentation (mentioned earlier). The comments are pretty much an all out lanuage holy war, but the following comment explaining why Perl’s “There’s more than one way to do it” is a disadvantage when trying to write maintainable code caught my eye:
[... 102 words]Trade by Bumbers
Craig Saila has launched his latest project, Trade by Numbers, which uses valid code and (Netscape 4 friendly) CSS for layout. The CSS code is worth looking over for the intelligent use of browser hacks, all commented. Writing Netscape 4 compatible CSS is still something of a mysterious art form, but documentation is steadily increasing with useful resources such as Craig’s list of NS4 CSS layouts and Mark Newhouse’s Real World Style. The tips on NS4 compatibility in Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation are also invaluable for anyone who is serious about CSS but still has to support legacy browsers. I have yet to produce a NS4 compatible CSS layout but I’m beginning to realise that it’s not quite as impossible as many people make out.
Oct. 31, 2002
CSS roundup
Jeffrey Zeldman has resolved his niggling CSS bugs, and posted the workarounds for all to see. What’s amazing and unprecedented about CSS layout is that it’s completely abstracted from the data it presents.
he muses. Dorothea Salo points out that the publishing industry has been doing this for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, Todd Dominey has overhauled his CSS to get rid of the javascript browser detection and Mark Pilgrim and Scott Andrew have both posted funky Halloween CSS makeovers.
RSS validator uses my CSS
I just noticed that the RSS validator is using my numbered code listing CSS experiment :)
Pull quotes and page titles
Adrian Holovaty has followed up his discussion of page titles on news article pages with a look at the oft-abused pull-quote. Adrian points out how pull quotes can lead to poor accessibility for text browsers and screen readers, and suggests that providing a “skip quote” link could help improve things. Adrian’s comments section attracts a number of professional web deverlopers working on all kinds of news sites so the discussion is likely to be well worth watching over the next few days.
Linux Gazette Python articles
Linux Gazette has a couple of interesting Python articles at the moment. Dealing with User Input in Python is a beginners guide to validating user input, while Pl/Python and Cursors in Pl/Pgsql for PostgreSQL explains how Python can be used to write stored procedures in PostgreSQL.
Phoenix usurps Mozilla
Phoenix 0.4 is out, and it’s so good it has replaced Mozilla as my default browser. Type Ahead Find makes browsing links and searching pages a dream (I’ve really come round to it after my initial whinge) but my favourite feature is the Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” integration built right in to the address bar. Type in a single word and Phoenix will try word.com (and possible word.org/word.net) before passing it on to Google and redirecting to the first search result. Type in multiple words and I’m Feeling Lucky is invoked straight away. Normal Google searches can be run from the smaller Google field to the right of the address bar. It all adds up to a virtually seamless browsing experience, especially now that I’ve memorised the Google URLs of most of my favourite sites.