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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.
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.
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]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.
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.
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).
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]Tidakada redesign
tidakada has redesigned, with a funky new 4 column CSS layout and a brand new blog o’ links.
Shiny
It’s probably a good idea to keep axes and Jack Daniels away from Jason Kottke for the next few days...
Tweaking sites for readability
Jeffrey Zeldman’s new design continues to develop, but remains virtually unreadable on my monitor (without extensive tweaking of the settings). I’m not griping though as this was an ideal opportunity to play with Mozilla’s DOM inspector. This handy tool allows you to load up a page and browser through the DOM of the page, tweaking as you go. More importantly, it lets you modify the CSS rules for each individual element. It took a matter of seconds to fire up the inspector, browse down to the CSS rules for the body element and change the colour setting to rgb(255, 255, 255)—not particularly pretty but a lot more readable on this monitor than the default black. Of course, a bookmarklet to do the same thing would be much more convenient...
Office goes XML
Co-Inventor of XML Says Office 11 is “A Huge Step Forward for Microsoft” (via Slashdot). The comments are full of speculation over why Microsoft would open up their file format in this way having gained so much from having an obfuscated format.
[... 221 words]The Web Style Guide
Spotted in Ordinary Life’s new bookmarks, the Web Style Guide is a full online book covering all kinds of different aspects of web design. I’ve only glanced through it so far but it appears to have some excellent material on the design process, typography and editorial style. There is a good focus on usability and accessibility but web standards don’t really get much coverage, and CSS for layout is discouraged in favour of tables for reasons of browser support.
Lots of iCal links
I’m writing a simple events calendar system at the moment, and since I always seem to end up making things more complicated than they should actually be I’ve been investigating using the iCal standard as the file format for storing events (I need a flat-file format due to hosting requirements). I’m particularly interested in the XML flavour of iCal, although it seems to be a lot less popular than the semicolon deliminated original standard. Mainly for my own reference, here are the sites I’ve trawled through this afternoon:
Mozilla small screen rendering
Yesterday I blogged Opera’s impressive looking small screen rendering technology. Now take a look at this (via Blogzilla). Daniel Glazman has created a Mozilla bookmarklet that does everything Opera’s implementation claims to achieve using a combination of a custom style sheet and the DOM, and the results are impressively similar to Opera’s demonstration. The difference?
[... 104 words]Blogrolled
Via Adrian Holovaty I discover Craig Saila has an excellent weblog, and is now pinging blo.gs whenever he updates. A welcome addition to my blogroll.
Validation on the fly
Douglas Bowman’s weblog is making very interesting reading at the moment. Douglas is responsible for Wired’s exciting new design and since the launch has been updating with observations and lessons learnt from the new look. On Friday he described how changing a problem with a design element took less than 60 seconds (thanks to global CSS files), but the post that caught my attention was this one:
[... 266 words]Qube
Qube looks pretty cool—it’s an open source first person shooter engine (and simple deathmatch game) designed specifically for mod developers. The client runs on both Windows and Linux, but the game server is Linux/BSD only. Spotted via this article on the O’Reilly network.
More CSS layouts
I’m not sure when it happened, but Opera.com has been redesigned (since the last time I checked the site). The new layout is done with valid XHTML and CSS but is decidedly tabular in appearance, demonstrating that using CSS does not (as some people have claimed) make it impossible to achieve the same kinds of layouts as table coders have been creating for years. It also degrades quite nicely in Netscape 4 (losing most of the layout but maintaining a crisp look and feel). In related news, Jeffrey Zeldman is currently redesigning The Daily Report with CSS (replacing his old transitional tables/CSS layout). No menu yet, but it displays in Netscape 4 almost exactly the same as Mozilla and IE.
Advanced PHP resources
HarryF on the SitePoint forums has compiled a fantastic list of Advanced PHP Resources, with links to sites covering object orientation, general application design, n-tier layering and using PHP with XML.
Terminal Services vs WinVNC
Joel Spolsky explains why Microsoft’s Terminal Services performs far better than the open source WinVNC. Stuart points out that simple economics can make VNC a far more viable option in many situations.