Sunday, 3rd August 2003
Minor comment system improvements
I should have made these a long time ago: thanks Nat for reminding me ;) Comments no longer require an email address, and provide a proper error page with the comment intact if you forget to enter your name. They also now add http:// on to your site URL for you if you forget to enter it yourself. I added the last feature in the code that displays the comments, so it should fix all of the older comments with invalid URLs as well.
[... 116 words]Excellent PHP 5 Overview
HarryF’s PHP5: Coming Soon to a Webserver Near You is the most detailed overview of the features we can expect from the next major PHP release that I’ve seen yet.
[... 34 words]XHTML for future-proof content
Don Park questions the benefits of emitting XHTML. In one sense, Don is right; publishing a whole site using XHTML in this day and age brings very little benefit and can cause a great deal of grief. But just because XHTML doesn’t provide advantages when publishing whole sites does not mean it should be written off entirely. As I’ve said on this blog many times before, XHTML offers an excellent format for future-proofing site content, especially chunks of content kept in a database. Keith D. Robinson makes some excellent points along the same lines in his latest essay, Standards, Semantic Markup, Distributed Authorship and Knowledge Management:
[... 299 words]Marketing Firebird
Blake Ross has published a page on Marketing Firebird. He makes an interesting comparison between Firebird and Kazaa, pointing out that Kazaa has over 3.1 million downloads a week with promotion only via word-of-mouth:
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