September 2002
Sept. 5, 2002
IXR forum
The Incutio XML-RPC Library for PHP (IXR to its friends) now has a forum. The forum is powered by incForum, Incutio’s very own forum software written by my colleague Tim.
Sept. 6, 2002
geoIP
Adrian Holovaty in a blogite thread about features that can be added to blogs:
[... 151 words]Leonard’s Mozilla links
Leonard Lin has blogged a whole bunch of useful Mozilla links. He also has this to say about mouse gestures:
[... 109 words]Why Scott needs Mozilla
Judging by the screenshot on this page, Scott really needs Mozilla :) I’m currently running Windows XP on a Pentium II with 128 MB of RAM but thanks to Mozilla’s tabbed browsing I have over 20 web pages open and my machine isn’t breaking a sweat (and that’s in addition to Eudora and mySQLFront). Best of all, my task bar stays nice and tidy as it only shows one instance of Mozilla. I know Scott’s itching to switch already so I’ll teasingly remind him that Mozilla can have multiple windows each with multiple tabs—so you can have a single window with a collection of sites for each item you are currently researching. More tabbed browsing advocacy from Dave Hyatt right here.
Mark blogs RSS
There’s enough RSS discussion floating about right now to make one’s head spin. Thank Goodness then for Mark Pilgrim, who yesterday posted an excellent explanation of RSS 2.0, and today followed it up with both a hugely informative History of the RSS Fork and a concise summary of the cases for deprecating some of the existing RSS 0.94 elements in the upgrade to RSS 2.0, which seems to be one of the biggest talking points in the RSS community at the moment. I can’t say I’ve quite figured RSS out yet but thanks to Mark’s tireless commentary I fell a lot more informed than I was yesterday morning.
Sept. 7, 2002
Javascript Google highlighting
Stuart has outdone himself with his latest piece of javascript wizzardry. searchhi will highlight search terms when someone visits your page from a link on Google—all using the DOM and all without you having to do anything more than add a <script> element to the top of your page!
Python RSS tutorials
Spotted on Python owns us: Fredrik Lundh is building an RSS newsreader in Python, and writing Python tutorials on the project as he goes along. The first tutorial, Fetching RSS Files, is available now and covers (in detail) retrieving RSS files over the web, including an excellent explanation of asynchronous HTTP requests.
Hehe RSS3
Forget about RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0, Aaron Schwartz has released a spec for RSS 3.0 :)
[... 168 words]Pingback server code
The source code for my PingBack server, including the code I use to grab an extract from the page linking to my site, is now available here.
Solution to the timezone problem
Hixie has a brilliant solution to the time zone problem in the form of a clever piece of XBL by Nicolás Lichtmier. The small script can be bound to an element containing a date in UTC and will quietly replace it with the time in the user’s current timezone using Mozilla’s built in UTC handling functions. Naturally it only works in Mozilla, but I imagine the script could be emulated using Internet Explorer behaviors.
Excellent RSS tutorial
The RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters is a great read if you haven’t figured out the difference between RSS 0.9x (Really Simple Syndication), RSS 1.0 (RDF Site Summary) and RDF (a web standard for meta data which is used within RSS).
Sept. 9, 2002
New Hosting
If you were wondering why this blog went quiet all of a sudden, here’s the reason. I’ve moved to a new host, and in the process completely rewritten the engine that powers this weblog from the ground up. Entries, comments and other bits and pieces are now served from a mySQL database as opposed to the flat files I was using before hand, and all pages are dynamically generated rather than being built as flat HTML files. The design remains pretty much the same, but comments and pingbacks are now displayed on the same page as blog entries rather than having their own popup windows. I am also no longer restricted by the previous hosting’s bizzare limit on the size of POSTed form variables, leaving me free to write longer blog entries (and you free to write longer comments).
Sept. 10, 2002
Hixie on XHTML
Ian Hickson: Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful. Ian makes an excellent case for sticking with HTML 4.01 rather than upgrading to XHTML. Here’s the killer point (at least for me):
[... 193 words]Thrown the switch
I’ve flicked the switch and redirected my old blog to this new site. Unfortunately the Bath University web server appears not to obey .htaccess directives so I am currently having trouble redirecting old archive pages to their new homes on this site. I should have that issue fixed shortly, but in the meantime permalinks to pages on my old site will throw an unsightly 404 error page.
Labels.js
Spotted on youngpup: Labels.js: A Re-Introduction to DHTML (from December 2001).
[... 183 words]Pingback spec
I just realised I haven’t linked to the Pingback specification yet, so here it is. The spec has been carefully assembled by Ian Hickson and, although it is still a working draught, should be the first stop for anyone who wishes to create a Pingback implementation.
Sept. 11, 2002
Testing Pingback client
This post exists partly to list the blogs I know of that support PingBack, but mostly to help test my new PingBack client implementation.
[... 68 words]RSS feeds coming soon
A quick note concerning RSS feeds. I have not yet implemented them on my new blog, but I plan to do so in the next few days. On the advice of Chris Coome and Bill Kearney (both of whom replied to my question on [rss-dev]) I will be providing feeds in both RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.91 formats, and I plan to provide individual feeds for the various categories on the site. I also have an idea for a feature that will allow people to “build their own” RSS feed consisting of the categories they are most interested in. As always, watch this space :)
Disable CSS bookmarklet
A handy bookmarklet courtesy of Rick on the MACCAWS mailing list:
[... 20 words]Remind me why people still use IE
The Register: IE 6 SP1 omits fixes for 20 outstanding flaws:
[... 166 words]effnews part two
Fetching and Parsing RSS Data is the second installment of the effnews project, a series of tutorials on creating an RSS news reader in Python. This time topics covered include exception handling and event based XML parsing using xmllib.
Flash applications
Flash MX and the Bigger Picture: Lightweight Internet Applications:
[... 231 words]RSS 1.0 feed now available
I’ve set up my first new syndication feed using RSS 1.0. I’ve checked the feed against this RSS validator and it seems to pass, but throws a warning that item descriptions are meant to be between 0 and 500 characters in length. As I want to provide the full contents of my entries in the feed (for people using aggregators such as AmphetaDesk) I’ve decided to ignore the warning and leave it as it is.
New form of spam protection
I’ve had an idea for a new way of hiding email addresses from spam harvesters—shield the address behind a form that must be submitted via POST. Site visitors can now click a button on my Contact page to reveal my email address. Spammers could always circumvent the system by writing a harvester that parses HTML pages for forms and submits every single one, but I’m hoping they won’t bother.
Sept. 12, 2002
Wining and Dining
Kevin Burton: My Dinner with Dave Winer. Something tells me this won’t be linked from Scripting News.