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CSS Feedback
My rambling post on CSS yesterday has had some excellent feedback, including some insightful comments on the weaknesses of CSS layouts. My call for a new bookmarklet drew responses (and implementations) from both Stuart Langridge and Jesse Ruderman! Both are well worth installing.
Wiki Wiki Blogroll
Dave Winer has launched an experimental “open” blogroll. It looks a bit too open to abuse for my liking (Wikis are protected to a certain extent by their revision historys) but the interface for changing the order of entries is one of the most elegant non-javascript solutions I’ve seen.
Comment Notification
Keith is calling for bloggers to implement a “notify me of any replies” feature for their comments systems:
[... 135 words]What the F* Happened?
What the *F* happened to the internet? is a rambling but entertaining description of how big business stole the ’net, and how it doesn’t really matter (via Paul Hammond’s links blog).
MD5 in Javascript
One of the things that has always bugged me about creating login forms for web based applications is that the password is passed in clear text when the user logs in. Even if you then set a session cookie of some sort for future access the password has stilled been transmitted unencrypted at least once.
[... 235 words]Python Roundup
No blogging for a while; I’m getting stuck in to a whole load of University coursework. In the meantime though here are some Python links I’ve been hoarding for a few days on my private wiki:
Interview with the Blogging MP
Via Tom Watson himself, a short interview with Tom, the UK’s first blogging MP:
[... 220 words]Last 40 Comments Page
Last 40 comments, more for my use than anything else (I keep missing comments posted on older entries).
The technology of the Matrix
Wired have a fascinating article on the technology being used for The Matrix Reloaded. They’ve apparently achieved photo-realistic CGI humans using a technique called “image-based rendering” based on taking a huge number of high resolution photos from different angles and using them to generate the 3D geometry of a scene.
[... 124 words]Easy Python Cryptography
Via Garth Kidd’s Python cryptography roundup, ezPyCrypto is a cryptography API so simple even I can use it. Unfortunately the example code is only available in the download archive (not on the web site) but here’s an overview of how it works:
[... 205 words]Artima Weblogs
Artima.com recently started hosting weblogs, with membership by invitation only. With people like Guido van Rossum and Ward Cunningham already signed up Artima looks set to become a very interesting corner of the blogging world.
Home Improvements
Phil Ringnalda posted a rant about sites that don’t tell you how their comments system works—like this one. I’ve been meaning to add instructions for ages but never got round to it; now I have. Hopefully this will mean less comments with no line breaks or links that don’t work.
The Dullest Blog in the World
There’s something almost Zen-like about the dullest blog in the world.
Opera 7 for Linux
Opera 7.10 is out, and includes the first Opera 7 beta release for Linux. I’ll have to try this out when I get home.
Creating a Collage
As someone with virtually no graphic design skills, Create A Collage With Fireworks on SitePoint is the kind of article I’d love to see more of.
CSS Layout Generators
A tool for generating 3 column CSS layouts that appears to use Big John’s Source Ordered Columns technique. CSS generating tools are a thoroughly excellent idea and I’m surprised no one has done one before; the CSS community is at a point now where there are some well understood, solid layout techniques available and some kind of tool that helps generate frameworks for new designers could really help speed up CSS adoption.
[... 134 words]GNU Utilities for Win32
Via Leonard, GNU utilities for Win32 provides a whole bunch of useful utilities in Windows friendly binaries, without the need for external libraries such as Cygwin, including gzip, tar, flex, bison, make, grep and the ever useful wget. The package also includes diff, which makes me feel a lot more comfortable about using it from within PHP scripts as portability to Windows will no longer be an issue.
Google Accusations Analysed
Search Engine Watch (with a nice new design but horrible markup) have an extensive analysis of the recent “Big Brother” accusations that have been levelled at Google.
Yahoo Search uses CSS
In all the fuss about Yahoo’s new search interface over the past few days, the extensive use of CSS in the results pages was almost completely overlooked, probably because the page still contains a small layout table for the top and bottom navigation. The results themselves are served up as a styled ordered list, at least for modern browsers (thanks to a server side browser sniffer). More information in this message from Yahoo’s Brian Ghidinelli, who is seeking feedback.
CSS Support Charts
Time to update bookmarks: The Web Review CSS Support Charts, which went offline several weeks ago, are back at a new home on Netscape DevEdge. Despite not having been signiicantly updated since 2001 they still are still an excellent reference to refer to for CSS browser compatibility issues. More information from Eric Meyer.
PHP SOAP Documentation
Finally some good documentation on using SOAP with PHP: PEAR::SOAP Client Fast Start and Extending PEAR::SOAP WSDL, both from the excellent phpPatterns.
Lots of RSS Aggregators
Via Ed Tech Dev (and others), an RSS Feed Reader / News Aggregators directory and an RSS Readers wiki page.
PHP5 and Questioning OOP
An Interview with Sterling Hughes on PHP5 from the PHP-Con site:
[... 353 words]Verbose Regular Expressions
Ned Batchelder describes Verbose Python regular expressions. This is one of the things I’ve known about (as in known that they exist) for ages but have never got around to using. I’ve been working with some pretty heavy regular expressions recently that could really do with the clarity of being defined in verbose format with comments.
[... 96 words]Isolating Crashing Bugs
CodeBitch’s tips on isolating “crashing” bugs in CSS are mostly common sense, but are well worth reading in any case. Her methods could easily be adapted to help track down less serious bugs as well.
Accessibility and DRM
Via Accessify, Joe Clark’s analysis of Accessibility implications of digital rights management. Also, the new issue of Made For All includes an interview with Joe Clark which focusses on web accessibility.
HEML
Via Ed Tech Dev, HEML, the Historical Event Event Markup and Linking project, looks like a really interesting concept. It defines an XML format for marking up historical events, along with tools based on Java and XSLT that can convert Heml data in to SVG timelines and other useful representations.
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