Entries
Filters: Sorted by date
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.
Big news from Six Apart.
Ben Hammersley reports on SixApart’s (creators of Moveable Type) new venture, TypePad:
[... 166 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]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]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]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:
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.
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.
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.
Comment Notification
Keith is calling for bloggers to implement a “notify me of any replies” feature for their comments systems:
[... 135 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).
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]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:
Interview with the Blogging MP
Via Tom Watson himself, a short interview with Tom, the UK’s first blogging MP:
[... 220 words]Last 40 Comments Page
Last 40 comments, more for my use than anything else (I keep missing comments posted on older entries).
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 called “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]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]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.
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.
The Dullest Blog in the World
There’s something almost Zen-like about the dullest blog in the world.
Opera 7 for Linux
Opera 7.10 is out, and includes the first Opera 7 beta release for Linux. I’ll have to try this out when I get home.
Creating a Collage
As someone with virtually no graphic design skills, Create A Collage With Fireworks on SitePoint is the kind of article I’d love to see more of.
CSS Layout Generators
A tool for generating 3 column CSS layouts that appears to use Big John’s Source Ordered Columns technique. CSS generating tools are a thoroughly excellent idea and I’m surprised no one has done one before; the CSS community is at a point now where there are some well understood, solid layout techniques available and some kind of tool that helps generate frameworks for new designers could really help speed up CSS adoption.
[... 134 words]GNU Utilities for Win32
Via Leonard, GNU utilities for Win32 provides a whole bunch of useful utilities in Windows friendly binaries, without the need for external libraries such as Cygwin, including gzip, tar, flex, bison, make, grep and the ever useful wget. The package also includes diff, which makes me feel a lot more comfortable about using it from within PHP scripts as portability to Windows will no longer be an issue.
Google Accusations Analysed
Search Engine Watch (with a nice new design but horrible markup) have an extensive analysis of the recent “Big Brother” accusations that have been levelled at Google.
Yahoo Search uses CSS
In all the fuss about Yahoo’s new search interface over the past few days, the extensive use of CSS in the results pages was almost completely overlooked, probably because the page still contains a small layout table for the top and bottom navigation. The results themselves are served up as a styled ordered list, at least for modern browsers (thanks to a server side browser sniffer). More information in this message from Yahoo’s Brian Ghidinelli, who is seeking feedback.