Sunday, 6th April 2003
HttpClient PHP class
I’ve been working in quite a roundabout fashion recently. My principle target is to build a collaborative blogging system. As part of this, I needed an RSS aggregator to allow a single blog to show the most recent entries from a number of other, related blogs. Then I needed a way of downloading RSS feeds from external sites. While thinking about this (although to be fair it’s pretty much a solved problem) I was inspired to build something that could cache whole sites. And that lead me to need a PHP HTTP client class for retriving information from the web. So I wrote one of those :)
[... 381 words]Lots and lots of CSS buttons
The alternative W3C buttons on AntiPixel are great. Jamie Zawinsky suggested recreating them in CSS. Stuart Langridge, Marek Prokop, Nick Boalch and Eric Meyer all had a go. Eric even did the Raging Platypus ones as well.
Archive woes
Mike Golding has some interesting thoughts on Archive Navigation in blogs. He uses mine as an example of what not to do. I agree—the archives on this site leave an awful lot to be desired. I’ve got a few ideas to improve them (mostly inspired by Mark Pilgrim’s excellent calendar navigation) but I can’t really do anything until I’ve been through and added titles to every single entry :/
HTMLCleaner class for PHP
htmlcleaner is a PHP class which claims to be able to clean up the revolting HTML generated by Micrsoft’s HTML libraries, in particular the one that is used for browser embedded WYSIWYG editors. We’re using HTML Tidy for this with excellent results, but for people who can’t run HTML Tody this could be a useful solution. Unfortunately the class is hosted on PHP Classes which still insists on making you log in for no apparent reason.
UltraEdit and the clipboard
UltraEdit tip (discovered just now): If you keep trying to copy and paste between UltraEdit and other applications and it just doesn’t work, the chances are that you’ve accidentally hit Ctrl + 1 through 9, which is the UltraEdit shortcut for selecting a custom clipboard. Hit Ctrl + 0 to get back to the Windows system clipboard and have everything behave as it should again. I suppose this feature could be useful, but I’ve got ridiculously fast at hitting Ctrl + Windows Key and typing “notepad” whenever I want to dump my current clipboard contents somewhere temporary without losing it.
Onyx Relicensed
Ed Swindelles has relicensed his Onyx RSS Parser under the MIT License, meaning it can now be used without risk for building commercial software. I haven’t decided which license to place HttpClient under, but that one looks like a pretty good bet. I’ll work it out in the morning.