April 2003
April 13, 2003
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.
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.
April 14, 2003
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]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 caleld “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]Last 40 Comments Page
Last 40 comments, more for my use than anything else (I keep missing comments posted on older entries).
April 15, 2003
Interview with the Blogging MP
Via Tom Watson himself, a short interview with Tom, the UK’s first blogging MP:
[... 220 words]April 17, 2003
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:
April 20, 2003
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]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).
April 21, 2003
Comment Notification
Keith is calling for bloggers to implement a “notify me of any replies” feature for their comments systems:
[... 135 words]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.
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.
April 22, 2003
Credit where credit’s due
Credit where credit’s due: It turns out the interface for re-ordering items I praised yesterday was designed by Bryan Bell.
Smarty Links
I’m using Smarty in a project at Uni at the moment, mainly as a tool to allow team members to modify different parts of the codebase without stepping on each other’s toes. I’ve seen some good arguments against templating solutions such as Smarty, based around the point that PHP is already a templating engine so the extra layer of abstraction just isn’t necessary. Never-the-less, I’ve been finding that Smarty dramatically improves my productivity even when I’m working on my own. Here are the links I’ve provided for my team members to help get them up to scratch on how it can be used:
Entry Titles
As promised many times, I’ve finally implemented titles on my blog entries. I’m in the transitional stage at the moment—new posts will have them, old posts won’t. At some point in the near future I’m going to trawl through the archives (all 938 entries) and add titles to everything. Once I’ve done that I can look at changing other stuff like the RSS feeds, and maybe even get around to re-implementing some kind of search engine. Then there’s the new hierarchical category system, a whole bunch of accessibility improvements, better archives, comment email-alerts...
[... 114 words]April 23, 2003
Supporting Conditional GET in PHP
This site’s RSS feeds now support Conditional GET. Since the feeds are dynamically generated on every request, adding support took a bit of hacking around with PHP. Here’s the function I came up with (based on the excellent description provided by Charles Miller in the article linked above):
[... 398 words]Acrobot
Ian Lloyd has a very neat new tool on Accessify: Acrobot, an abbreviation and acronym generator. It takes a chunk of text and wraps any recognised abbreviations or acronyms in the appropriate tag, with the expanded term as the title (it can also optionally just use IE friendly acronyms). It shames me to say that after a good 6 months of using these tags I’m still doing them by hand, so Acrobot is just what I need (at least until I get something similar working in my blogging system). Registered Accessify members can expand the tool’s dictionary, so maybe I’ll have to bite the bullet and sign up for yet another web site account...
[... 185 words]Big news from Six Apart.
Ben Hammersley reports on SixApart’s (creators of Moveable Type) new venture, TypePad:
[... 166 words]Python 2.2 Quick Reference
The Python 2.2 Quick Reference, via Michael Twomey. All the essential bits of Python on a single (if quite long) HTML page. Magic.
Titles all the way
I’ve added titles to every single one of my archived blog entries; nearly a thousand of them. It took just over an hour, thanks mainly to my decision a long time ago to use camelCase for my permalinks. I put together a simple tool that displayed un-titled entries, ten at a time, with a suggested title based on the permalink (split in to words and sensibly capitalised). This probably knocked a good 75% off my workload.
[... 155 words]Show Computed Styles (yet again)
By jove I think they’ve cracked it: Show applicable styles from Stuart and List computed (cascaded) styles from Pixy. Talk about being spoiled for choice :)
April 25, 2003
Site search finally available
I’ve finally got around to adding a search page to this site. It uses MySQL’s full text indexing, which is extremely fast and provides good results but comes at the expense of flexibility. Search terms less than 4 letters long are ignored, and multi-word searches are handled using OR rather than AND. This nearly put me off using it, but the relevancy algorithm is excellent which I think outweighs the disadvantage of not being able to use pure AND queries.
[... 138 words]Experimental feature: Related entries
I’m experimenting with using MySQL full text indexing to generate a list of “related entries” for each entry (click on an item’s permalink to see it in action). It works by concatenating the item’s title and entry body together and running a full text search on it, which sounds horendously inefficient but seems to work surpsingly quickly. If I decide to keep the feature I’ll probably cache the results somewhere to reduce the overhead, but for the moment it’s fast enough.
[... 141 words]position:fixed in IE, no Javascript required
Via Craig Saila, a method for getting IE to apply position: fixed without resorting to Javascript. It uses a conditional comment (slightly ugly but perfectly valid HTML) and works a treat. Kudos to Eric Bednarz for clearing up another of those niggling CSS problems.
April 28, 2003
Phoenix / Firebird nightlies hotting up
Word on the street is that Phoenix 0.6 (or Firebird or Mozilla Firebird or Mozilla Browser or whatever else you want to call it) could be out within the next week or so. I’m using the 28th April nightly build and it really is a big improvement on Phoenix 0.5, which is a very respectable browser in its own right. The new preferences panel (shown below) has been in the nightlies for quite a while now and really does add to the overall feel of the browser, and new features from Mozilla such as an editable about:config screen are handy as well.
More fun with Search
While browsing around my phoenix/ directory I spotted a sub-directory called searchplugins, which appears to control the list of search engines available in the very useful search box at the top right corner of the browser. A bit of digging later and it turns out that adding new search engines to Mozilla based browsers is remarkably easy: The Mozilla Search Project.
CSS Headings
Via Craig Saila, Christopher Schmitt’s 50 CSS Headings. Free CSS code snippets is definitely an idea who’s time has come—there are hundreds of copy-and-paste javascript sites out there but hardly any for CSS (discounting the many excellent full layout sites). Mark Newhouse’s extremely popular CSS Design: Taming Lists article does the same thing for lists but other than that this kind of resource is extremely rare. Web developers not interested in moving to CSS completely can still benefit hugely from using it in their current sites in place of nested formatting tables and presentational tags used to give the visual appearance of headings, so the more of this kind of thing out there the better.