June 2005
June 3, 2005
Google Blog: Webmaster-friendly. Google Sitemaps are XML files that webmasters can use to ensure pages on their site are crawled.
Drip: IE Leak Detector. Fantastic!
Stuart’s book
I meant to mention this earlier, but Stuart’s book, DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM, has been published. I worked as a technical editor on the book, and I’m proud to have been associated with it. Don’t worry about the hairy title (apparently you have to have DHTML in it or bookshops won’t know where to put it / people won’t know what it’s about), the inside is pure gold. In their usual style, SitePoint have posted the first four chapters online for your perusal so you don’t have to take my word for it, you can try it out for yourself.
Staying social
June is finals month, but the call of @media 2005 is hard to resist. I won’t be attending the actual conference (sadly my student budget doesn’t stretch that far) but I’ll be in London on Saturday the 11th to ride on the coat-tails of the conference.
[... 174 words]June 4, 2005
Principles of visibility and human friendliness. Tantek makes an excellent argument that visible metadata works better than invisible metadata.
June 6, 2005
Tweaking Wikipedia
Does anyone know why Wikipedia displays a redirected page at the same URL rather than using a proper HTTP redirect? Case in point: Topics in human-computer interaction actually displays the content from List of human-computer interaction topics (that’s my next exam topic)—the same content appears at two different URLs. Yuck. Here’s a Greasemonkey script to fix it: wikipedia-redirect.user.js.
[... 125 words]June 7, 2005
The WebKit Open Source Project (via) The Safari team’s full CVS history, and more. Should hopefully improve their relationship with KTHML.
June 9, 2005
Google Maps takedown notice (via) Why can’t all takedown notices be this polite?
Google Maps Make Demographics Come Alive (via) Great photo of Adrian lurking behind his laptop.
BBC 1 listings in CSV. Listings for the next two weeks
CSV channel listings. Each number is the name of a .dat file containing listings for that channel.
This week’s UK television. Includes unofficial XML feeds scraped from various sources.
Bookmarklets to User Scripts. A user script to turn bookmarklets in to user scripts.
The BBC News website—under the bonnet (via) SSIs, Apache, Linux (and Solaris) and two server farms.
Workplace absuridities as phone support for a DSL ISP. Greasemonkey used to fix web application leads to misguided Firefox ban.
Baby Weasel. Unfeasibly adorable. There is no reason for this post.
Magic Microformat Forms Redux, Now with GreaseMonkey! Les Orchard gets in to Greasemonkey—with accompanying screencast.
June 10, 2005
Ruby on Rails, and the Rails Beta Book. The comments include a good discussion of the pros and cons of Rails’ code-in-templates approach.
June 11, 2005
No New Command Line for Longhorn (via) There goes the only remaining Longhorn feature I was interested in.
June 12, 2005
Financial Times Using Link Spam. Google should publically drop them from their index, then reinstate them when the link spam is removed.
June 13, 2005
Walcot Nation Day 2005. My photos from Bath’s annual eccentric street festival.
June 14, 2005
@Media 2005 report (via) Mike Davies (Isofarro) has some great @media session notes.
Joe Clark: @media2005. Comprehensive notes on all(?) the sessions.
Rendering Web Page To Images in Gecko. New feature involving the canvas API, coming soon. Tons of potential.
del.icio.us: casting the net wider. system: tags are a really neat way of adding specialised tag features.
The trouble with PHP. This is a good rebuttal to a recent “PHP’s simplicity beats Rails” piece.
blo.gs has been acquired by yahoo! (via) That’s a relief.
June 16, 2005
Over 600,000 mp3 downloads of BBC Radio 3’s Beethoven programmes. Note the bit at the end about how much internal buzz this is generating.
June 17, 2005
Updates from code.google.com: We’re Expanding the Summer of Code... That’s 2 million dollars instead of 1.
Python programming job at Columbia University. Ignore the jargon—a little birdie tells me this is a Python job.