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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 :)
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]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.
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]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.
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.
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.
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]A better trackback
A discussion on Aquarionics nails why TrackBack isn’t quite there yet (emphasis mine):
[... 102 words]30 days to becoming an Opera Lover
Tim Luoma: 30 Days to becoming an Opera Lover. Advocacy doesn’t get much more serious than this :) The series has reached day 5 and so far Tim has covered reasons you should try Opera, how to install it and touched on customisation. I’ve been meaning to write a Mozilla advocacy/tutorial piece for some time now and I am sorely tempted to steal Tim’s format (which he himself borrowed from Mark Pilgrim).
File naming conventions
What Do I Know is hosting an interesting discussion on File Naming and Organization Methods for helping manage web development clients.
Semantic web 1-2-3
The Semantic Web: 1-2-3 is an invaluable collection of links to semantic web resources, compiled by Morbus Iff. Morbis is the author of Amphetadesk, an excellent news aggregator which was reviewed favourably by Ben Hammersley in the Gaurdian just the other day.
PHP generated PDFs
R&OS PDF PHP classes (via tidak ada). This is the most useful PHP library I’ve seen in a long time. It allows dynamic generation of PDF files without needing any additional modules installed on the server (although GD is required if you want to add images to your PDFs). It is extremely easy to use and has an impressive set of features, including PDF drawing tools, built in page number support and excellent documentation. On the topic of PDFs, Yes You Can advocates their use for presentations and touches on a method of generating them using Python.
ICANN schmicann
IMS/ISC out of the ICANN Running, apparently because their proposal didn’t include enough block diagrams. ICANNWatch have some great conspiracy theories as to the real reason.
How the wayback machine works
How the Wayback Machine Works is a must read for anyone geeky enough to be interested in cheap clustered databases on a huge scale. The interview includes some fascinating details on the cost effectiveness of Linux clusters:
[... 132 words]External link icons in CSS
Stuart has put together a nice demonstration of how Mozilla’s CSS3 selectors can be used to automatically add icons to external links, in response to Mark Pilgrim’s guide to achieving the same effect using Moveable Type macros.
Phil says goodbye to the popups
Phil Ringnalda has done the decent thing and rid himself of comment popups (the comments attached to his post make interesting reading). I haven’t got round to doing this yet, which is especially silly considering I open my own comments links in new tabs to avoid the popups myself. The main problem I have is that I want people to permalink to each entry within the context of the day it was posted—comments without a popup would need each entry to have its own comments page which could lead to people linking to the wrong place. My options so far are either to trust people to link to the permalink rather than the entry comments page or to go with a “show comments on the page” feature, possibly using a hidden div or even an external comment loader script as demonstrated by kryogenix a few weeks ago.
Trackback roundup
Plenty of action on the TrackBack front. Michel V is adding TrackBack support to b2, Moveable Type have released a standalone Perl implementation of TrackBack under the Artistic license, MetaFilter have added TrackBack support and Matt Kingston has published a full blown Homebrew TrackBack Tutorial for people who want to roll TrackBack support in to their own home grown blogs. Yet another thing to add to the todo list...
Zeldman gems
Two gems from Jeffrey Zeldman: Show, don’t sell and Table Layouts, Revisited. An extract from the former:
[... 91 words]DOM-Drag
youngpup’s DOM-drag is a cross browser library for creating draggable interfaces in DHTML. I had previously been looking at using Glen Murphy’s dragdiv for this kind of thing but DOM-Drag looks like a more mature implementation.