September 2002
Sept. 1, 2002
A better trackback
A discussion on Aquarionics nails why TrackBack isn’t quite there yet (emphasis mine):
[... 102 words]Font size bookmarklet
Scott Johnson (and others) has been waging war against Font Bitches, aka people who use fixed (pixel) fonts on their sites making the text unresizable in Internet Explorer. Here’s a new bookmarklet that can help alleviate the problem:
[... 94 words]Joel on platforms
Joel Spolsky: Platforms. Plenty of food for thought. Dave Winer responds with a pointer to his 1996 article The Perfect Parent which touches on the reasons Groove can’t count on making it as a platform.
PHP XML-RPC
I’ve been playing with XML-RPC and PHP today. I ended up using Keith Devin’s pleasantly straight forward library thanks to PHP’s built in (and completely undocumented) XML-RPC support conflicting with the function names used by Useful Inc’s partially object oriented library. I’ve been messing around with Stuart’s idea for a trackback alternative and things are looking pretty promising.
Grabbing web pages with Perl and PHP
Web Basics with LWP (via Scott) is an excellent tutorial on Perl’s LWP, a powerful set of modules which make it easy to retrieve content from the web. I’ve been using the excellent Snoopy class for PHP for the same purpose, but I have to admit it isn’t half as comprehensive as LWP. I’ve also written my own simple function safeGet for more light weight tasks—it grabs and returns the contents of a web page but limits both the size of the page and the maximum time it can take to download it.
Sept. 2, 2002
A new XML-RPC library for PHP
I spent most of yesterday messing around with XML-RPC. There are a variety of XMl-RPC libraries available for PHP but none of them felt right for what I needed. So, I’ve written my own.
[... 115 words]Pingback implemented
I’ve implemented PingBack on my blog. PingBack is a system for tracking who is linking to your blog in a controlled way, based on a post by Stuart a few months ago. The idea is that when you link to a PingBack enabled blog you (or your blogging tool) should send an XML-RPC “ping” to that blog’s PingBack server telling it where you have linked to and where you linked from. The PingBack server can then grab your page, check that the link is there and extract a title and short description from the blog. The system is an alternative to (and was inspired by) MoveableType’s TrackBack feature. Stuart and I are actively developing the idea and will be releasing code and documentation to help other people experiment with the system in the near future.
More on Pingback
More on PingBack. PingBack can be seen in effect on this blog and in this entry on kryogenix.org. If you wish to ping my blog you can do so using the following XML-RPC details:
[... 158 words]And then there were eight
According to XML-RPC.com’s Implementations page there are now 8 PHP implementations of XML-RPC! Looks like I wasn’t the only person with an itch to scratch :)
Two Towers not available
Matt Drudge: The Two Towers is available on the Internet. Dorothea Salo: This is bogus. Aren’t rumours fun?
JellyBath
JellyBath (via Aquarionics). It turns your bath water in to Jelly. From the FAQ:
[... 52 words]The missing docs
Yet more XML-RPC goodness. The documentation for the suggested introspection methods throws a 404, but Google’s cache doesn’t:
[... 56 words]Sept. 3, 2002
Beta feeds from the Beeb
The BBC are running a set of beta RSS feeds for their news service, covering the front page, World news, UK news and Technology news. The feeds provide the article title and the short sub-heading as a description. More information courtesy of Matt Jones.
Short guide to digital photography
Rob Tougher: My Guide To Digital Photography. A short but informative article on using Linux and Python to manage a collection of digital photographs.
Top of the crops
Via Stuart: Top of the Crops 2002—the highlights of the UK Crop Circle season. Some of these are just awe inspiring.
Sept. 4, 2002
The css-discuss Wiki
The css-discuss Wiki has gone live—but only to list members. If you are on the list you will have received an email with instructions for accessing it. The Wiki should go live to non list members in a few days time.
New IXR soon
I was up most of the night working on a new version of my XML-RPC library (newly named IXR, for Incutio XML-RPC). I should have it ready for release some time today—it implements most of the extensions I’ve linked to over the past few days and has a much cleaner object structure than the first version, while maintaining the ability to implement a server or client in as little code as possible.
[... 118 words]Browser based rich text editing
Scott wants a rich text editor for Mozilla. What’s more, he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is and organise a fund drive to give developers a real incentive to do a good job.
[... 483 words]Pingback specification
Stuart has published the first draught of the PingBack specification, detailing how PingBack works and how it should be implemented. PingBack is brilliant—it just works. What could be simpler than just quietly telling someone’s blog that you’ve linked to them?
New version of IXR
Announcing beta 1.5 of IXR, the Incutio XML-PRC Library for PHP. The library has undergone a complete restructuring and has a much cleaner design as a result. It also has a huge stack of new features, including:
[... 96 words]Sept. 5, 2002
Two new web services
I’ve implemented two example web services to demonstrate the Incutio PHP XML-RPC library’s capabilities. The services allow you to search and retrieve articles from FOLDOC and the Jargon File, two popular freely available online dictionaries.
[... 349 words]