Sam Foster, Web Dev.

AIR command line arguments

2009-04-09T04:01:00.002-05:00

I've been working on the next release of the Dojo Toolbox - which is an Adobe AIR app, using the Dojo Toolkit. I'm taking a TDD kind of approach to get on a better footing for evolving this thing, and needed a quick way to run a particular set of unit tests. I wanted to be able to do something like this: $ adl runTests.xml testModule=toolbox.tests.SomeThing Getting command line arguments in

A rhino prompt

2009-02-27T17:05:00.002-06:00

I'm tinkering with another ill-conceived friday night project that may or may not see the light of day. But in the meantime, I just put together this little snippet that illustrates a lot of what's to like about rhino: var getInput = function() { var br = new java.io.BufferedReader( new java.io.InputStreamReader(java.lang.System["in"]) ); return br.readLine(); }; var greetUser =

Setting up Rhino

2009-01-08T15:28:00.004-06:00

I've been using the Rhino engine more and more to run command-line scripts, fiddle and try things out. But my setup has taken shape slowly, and it wasn't much fun to be honest when I first got started. I'm on a mac (Leopard), and here's how I've got it now: Download the Rhino .jar file, you'll find it inside the latest (binary) release. Drop it in your {user}/Library/java/Extensions folder

Barcamp Liverpool

2008-12-08T04:47:00.002-06:00

I took in the first day of BarCamp Liverpool. It was Liverpool's first, and my second, and went off well I thought. I learnt some things, saw some new and familiar stuff and felt it was time extremely well spent. It was great to see people coming out of the woodwork and talking about what they are doing. There was much talk of iPhone apps, and the economic opportunities (or not) that presents

String repetition in javascript

2008-11-06T17:06:00.003-06:00

This is about a little snippet I came up with the other month, while a colleague and I were talking about string building and its performance in javascript. I was looking for a neat way to front-pad or indent a string, and missing the x operator in perl. It turns out there is a succinct, one-line idiom: var indent = new Array(10).join(" ") That gets you a 9-spaces-long string. Using the formal

BarCampLeeds 08

2008-08-16T17:41:00.004-05:00

What a day. Who knew that Leeds was this nascent tech hub. I had a hunch of course (and followed it by moving back here), but there's enery and talent oozing out the edges here, and its surely only a matter of time before it reaches critical mass and becomes a real tech ecosystem. What'd I learn? I started the day with an into to geocaching. Which I'd of course heard of, but somehow had lumped

doh.robot

2008-08-12T04:51:00.003-05:00

New automated UI testing goodies just landed in dojo, and I'm moved to blog about them. Getting test coverage of the messy stuff - user interactions, mouse-movement, clicks, drags - has always been an achiles heel of testing web UIs. Any kind of automated testing is better than none (provided you are testing the right things and keeping a good testing/developing balance), but for UI testing so

dijit.byNode and firebug fun

2008-03-07T08:31:00.002-06:00

Here's a little tip if you're working with dojo widgets. In firebug you can select an element in the HTML view. Back in the firebug console, your selected node is available as $1 So, $1.tagName shows you the element name, etc. If you've got dojo on your page you can use anything dojo has provided in the console, and if you're using dijit, you also have that stuff too. So, in the HTML view click

Restoring SVN repositories from disk - a story

2008-02-22T23:03:00.006-06:00

I recently had to move off a company laptop I'd been using for a while, and (thanks to the flu) didnt have much time to do it. So, I backed up those directories I knew had any personal projects and data in and crossed-fingers I'd be able to get what I needed out of there when the time came. One of the directories I got housed my subversion respositories (I'd been using the flat-file db option).

A Parable

2008-01-15T12:45:00.000-06:00

A man was asked to do some renovation on a house. He worked steadily at it for several weeks and finally called his client to come take a look around. He said, "I was able to keep a lot of the original flooring. I got a good match for the wood and finish where I had to patch and extend the floor. I'm nearly done. I just need to pick up my offcuts and sweep up." "Oh good" said the client. "So

dijit.Declaration and its mixins

2008-01-14T16:23:00.000-06:00

I love the dijit.Declaration widget introduced into the dojo toolkit around version 0.9+. It lets you declare a new widget class inline in your html - which can be very useful, especially when you want the widget templateString to be dynamic output from the server. Just a little tip - I had been getting a m._findMixin is not a function error when instantiating widgets from my Declaration. If

Regexp to match only html filenames and directory names

2007-11-30T11:42:00.000-06:00

I've been working on a script to create filtered directory tree listings. It can be configured with both include conditions, and exclude conditions. If something passes the include filters, it then checks to see if its explicitly excluded. For example, I want to exclude cgi-bin, but include all other directories and files. So its useful to have a good catch-all pattern for including only the

Simple Clocks with the Dojo Toolkit

2007-11-28T01:47:00.000-06:00

Something I was playing with - this page shows a couple of javascript clock/countdown treatments. None are as whizzy as the dojox.gfx (vector graphics) clock you might have seen around, or your various dashboard widgets - but this is just dojo core + 6k (uncompressed) of code.

string.replace with substitution by function

2007-11-27T23:57:00.000-06:00

It may or may not be news to you that in Javascript you can do: someString.replace( /\w+/g, function(match) { return "blah" } ); Which in this case turns "the original string" into "blah blah blah". Your function is passed the match, and you return whatever you want. That's pretty handy, as you can run the match through transformations, or even use it to lookup or generate some

TAE keynote and CSS layout

2007-10-24T08:25:00.000-05:00

the Ajaxian folks are doing their little summary of the past year or so as pertains to Ajax. One of the "trends" or opportunities they observe is doing layout using javascript. CSS got a panning. Now I understand that CSS layout is complex - no argument there. But doing layout in javascript is hardly new and proven to be a dead-end - at least with current browsers. In Dojo 0.9 the widget and

Sortable list with dojo 0.9

2007-09-06T20:34:00.000-05:00

This is a quick proof of concept of a sortable, data-store backed list (using dojo 0.9). The store (a dojo.data.ItemFileReadStore instance) does the sorting. Each list-item has an id, that is mapped to the store item identifier. So when the re-sorted list comes back I just look up the list-item node and appendChild it to move it in the list. The store has 52 items (its a list of states) and

Adobe AIR tour

2007-07-21T03:12:00.000-05:00

I made a quick trip to Dallas to catch the Adobe AIR bus tour there. You know, it was pretty interesting. I was braced for a 4 hour long vendor sales demo, and it kind of was that, but with enough hands-on detail to keep my attention. Plus, it looks like a sweet product. A few misunderstandings that got cleared up for me: AIR is specifically the runtime. Think the .NET runtime - its a

Moving your Firefox profile

2007-07-11T15:34:00.000-05:00

Little tip. You can easily move your FF profile directory to another local drive/directory e.g. thumb drive, or a backed-up directory. In my case it was to a directory that doesn't have every read/write scanned by anti-virus software. (I can see how this might be prudent and all, but it was making for a very slow browsing experience on my pc.)

RefreshAustin is 1yr Old

2007-02-22T08:33:00.000-06:00

I'm prompted to post because almost a year after we disbanded the Austin Web Standards Meetup, and merged with RefreshAustin I'm still getting email from meetup.com with people signing up for future web standards meetups in Austin. Folks, the group is alive and well, we meet at least monthly, but we now fly a "Refresh" banner instead of the web standards meetup one. The Refresh format is simple

Terminal funkiness with ActiveState perl

2007-01-12T10:32:00.000-06:00

I just finally got on top of an annoyance I've had for a while: on my work machine I use MKS Toolkit - which provides a lot of the common unix tools for developers using windows. It provides its own Perl build, but I've been using ActiveState's for a while, and didnt want to complicate synchronizing my work across the different machines I use perl on. An unhappy side-effect of installing MKS

Javascript shell with Rhino

2006-10-19T16:11:00.000-05:00

The Rhino javascript interpreter (from Mozilla, sister to SpiderMonkey) has an interactive mode: C:\dojo\buildscripts>java -jar lib/js.jar Rhino 1.5 release 3 2002 01 27 js> print('boo'); boo js> The Rhino jar is a part of the dojo distribution, so if you've got dojo (from SVN, not the pre-built releases) you already have it. The Scripting Java page from Mozilla has these and other details.

Soft-wrapping long words

2006-09-01T16:19:00.000-05:00

The issue of long, non-breaking words like urls has been around for a while on the web - and the impact this can have on layouts and other places where width is constrained for whatever reason. I've been going back and forth on this, and dug up and old test page on No-wrapping and Soft-wrapping. This has some test cases using , and the soft-hyphen character . The results aren't

Re: Has accessibility been taken too far?

2006-08-28T13:08:00.000-05:00

(Jeff Croft posted this provocative article which seemed to tap a common feeling that accessibility is a pain in the ass, strictly optional and web designers should be cut some slack) If you wade through the slop of the first round of comments to this post, there's actually some reasonable debate that follows. Jeff came out saying he wanted to provoke discussion and (eventually) seems to have

"Surveying OS Ajax Toolkits" article on infoworld

2006-08-17T00:20:00.000-05:00

This is well worth a read. Unlike most reviews I've seen, this author obviously spent sometime with each of the libraries he includes - enough to get a meaningful impression of the strengths and weaknesses. For me, he's right on the money with Dojo, YUI, Rico, Atlas. I differ a little on GWT, but in truth it sounds like he spent more time with it than I did. Being a dojo guy at present, I think

Krugle - open source code search engine

2006-06-23T09:33:00.000-05:00

I bumped into one of Krugle's developers at the Ajax experience conference. Looks like they just came out of beta and are open to the public. This is sweet, I can't emphasize enough how useful this is already proving. 90% of all code (I reckon) is boiler-plate, but by the time you've tracked down an implementation (and possibly ported it to your language of choice) its easier (say, 75% of the

Javascript conflicts and portlet namespaces

2006-05-16T10:00:00.000-05:00

First - javascript doesn't actually have "namespaces". But the idea is there - unless functions, objects and variables are designated otherwise, they exist in the global scope - properties of the window object. In a portal - where portlets might want to include script libraries to facilitate interaction within the portlet - there's a risk of conflicts with objects using the same name being

Playing nice with others in javascript

2006-04-26T20:50:00.000-05:00

Andrew Dupont has written a very interesting article on Prototype, and the recent $() extensions that allow things like $(someelement).hide() and so on. This is actually a really nice solution. It's syntactical sugar without actually extending the element itself. Andrew argues that as an object oriented language, its reasonable to want to be able to extend objects like HTMLElement in javascript.

WCAG 2.0 (as compared to section 508)

2006-04-24T14:50:00.000-05:00

I've been really impressed with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. This is a big improvement in the way the guidelines are presented and worded that I think will make adoption much much more likely. This here page answers the inevitable question: how does WCAG 2.0 line up against section 508? On one hand it adds specifics and details: sucess criteria and techniques for achieving success. On the other WCAG

Accessible maps at ALA

2006-04-20T20:45:00.000-05:00

This is a nice write-up of making a point-map (a map with information relating to points on that map) in a semantic and accessible manner. I read a lot of articles, and rarely feel compelled to blog them. I was impressed with this one though. It doesnt shy from diggging right into the details, and does an admirable job of working through some complexity to present a real, viable solution. So many

Object vs. View-centric apps (RoR vs. PHP)

2006-03-09T17:40:00.000-06:00

This post starts out as an account of trying out PHP and Ruby on Rails to build a simple app, and comparing the experience. The thread builds though into an interesting discussion of differing approaches to web application development, and differing needs from the framework you use.

Drupal recipes for a simple site

2006-02-16T18:17:00.000-06:00

This is a great thread that invites suggestions on how to build a simple "brochure" kind of site with Drupal - in the interest of getting people started quicker with Drupal. In amongst the meta-babble, there's some clear walkthroughs of how to achieve the goal - this is just the kind of stuff that's had me stumped these last 48 hours.

Charles HTTP Proxy

2006-01-25T09:16:00.000-06:00

Java (cross-platform) HTTP/S proxy for debugging and working with HTTP sessions. At first glance it looks to compare favorably with Fiddler in some aspects. It will do throttling for low-bandwidth emulation, act as a reverse-proxy, and has various reporting/monitoring possibilities. Shareware - giving it a whirl.

Keeping Up With The Ajax Trend

2006-01-25T09:15:00.000-06:00

This article pulls some handy resources together into one place.

Call for help from a stranded Homesite user

2005-11-29T09:48:00.000-06:00

Homesite - from Nick Bradbury, then Allaire, now Macromedia - has been my primary tool of the trade for oh many many years now. But its stalled out since Macromedia bought Allaire and starting to show its age. TopStyle Pro, Bradbury's latest offering looks great, and is hard to beat as a CSS editor, but CSS is only a part of what I do, and I'm not going to switch editor continually. It falls far

JAH demo

2005-11-28T11:07:00.000-06:00

Buried beneath the layers in any ajax framework is a simple concept: use the XMLHTTPRequest object to fetch html, and replace an element's innerHTML with the response. This is a simple demo of just that, and as good an on-ramp to learning the ajax way as I've come across.

Jad - the fast Java decompiler

2005-11-08T14:44:00.000-06:00

Bacon-saver. This just did a beautiful job of decompiling some .class files whose source I accidently deleted.

RedHanded? YAML is JSON

2005-10-28T16:04:00.000-05:00

Ha! Turns out that JSON can be used as a practical subset of YAML, so the YAML parser will seamlessly handle JSON (minus the c-style comments that *some* JSON parsers permit).

Multiple Inheritance::f(m) ECMAScript Base Class Library

2005-10-21T23:20:00.000-05:00

Very clearly written article on implementing a sort-of interface in javascript - so an object can support more than one interface (and an interface can be applied to more than one class)

Learning the Venkman JavaScript debugger

2005-09-28T21:53:00.000-05:00

Right on the mark - as the author points out "most people who program Javascript are not programmers" so there's some general debugger concepts introduced, as well as a deeper dive into Venkman's capabilities and limitations.

Accessibility - why can't we all just get along?

2005-09-13T10:50:00.000-05:00

This is the transcript from the SXSW panel of the same name earlier this year. Panelists Glenda Sims, James Craig, Derek Featherstone and Ian Lloyd discuss accessibility in web design. Its a verbatim transcription but there's some great points woven into the banter. The Umlauf Sculpture site (our entry into AIR Austin 2004) gets a couple of mentions - in the visual descriptions we added and the

wg:Breaking onload limits

2005-09-06T11:17:00.000-05:00

Interesting post and comments on the window.onload problem. Everyone seems to be moving in the same direction right now and (re)discovering the same problems. I've build a dependancyManager for a current project that I can use to fire custom "ready" or "loaded" events, by registering functions along with one or more criteria or tests that need to be true before that function is called. It keeps a

Behavior and Prototype.js extensions

2005-08-29T16:28:00.000-05:00

Here's some interesting work extending Prototype.js and Behavio(u)r: Michael Schuerig's JavaScript. He adds immensely useful functionality to Simon Willison's document.getElementsBySelector to support :first-child, child selectors, multiple class names as well as unit tests.

AJAX Apps -- Cleaner Connections, Less Bandwidth? Maybe Not.

2005-07-27T22:52:00.000-05:00

Port80 software and a blog post on AJAX Apps -- Cleaner Connections, Less Bandwidth? Maybe Not… re-raises some interesting points on the relative server load increase an ajax application might cause vs. the traditional page-by-page web app. Intuitively you might think that the net amount of data transfer would go down as less redundant data is re-sent for each page. But as this post points out,

rahji.com: going from perl to php

2005-06-13T12:57:00.000-05:00

Ah, the joy of finding what you need when you need it: rahji.com: going from perl to php

is the DOM ready yet?

2005-06-11T00:20:00.000-05:00

This post ( Order of Events @ dean.edwards.name) addresses the need for a better solution than window.onload for DOM scripting. window.onload only fires after *all* the content on a page (including images) has loaded.. which is frequently significantly after the page has appeared in the browser. Mozilla/Firefox apparenly have the little known "DOMContentLoaded" event. Very handy. Windows IE has

XML.com: Errors and AJAX

2005-06-02T13:27:00.000-05:00

Client-side script errors seem to be everywhere, and no-one either knows about them or takes them seriously enough to fix. This article (XML.com: Errors and AJAX) proposes a solution (and supplies js code and a sample perl backend) to catch and send errors back to the server. (Of course one irony is that of all things that can go wrong, an XmlHttpRequest implementation is likely to be up there.)

Test case for TBODY/THEAD/TFOOT with overflow

2005-05-26T00:05:00.000-05:00

I happenned across this test page while looking into scrollable table implementations: HTML Test Suite for UAAG 1.0 (Draft). I demonstrates how it ought to be done: you assign overflow: auto and a fixed height to the table's tbody, and you're done. Sigh.. if only it was that easy. The test does work in my Firefox 1.0.3, but then there's the horizontal scrollbar. If you add in a 16px scrollbar,

Perl Design Patterns Wiki

2005-05-05T10:29:00.000-05:00

There's a world of goodness over at the perl design patterns wiki. Take this little snippet: foreach my $i (qw(name price quantity)) { my $field = $i; *{"get_$field"} = sub { my $me = shift; return $me->{$field}; }; *{"set_$field"} = sub { my $me = shift; @_ or die "not enough arguments to set_$field, stopped"; $me->{$field} = shift; return 1;

Adobe / Macromedia

2005-04-18T09:22:00.000-05:00

Well, this is some kind of news. I'm at a loss to see how anyone but possibly some shareholders will benefit though? This is not a sector that really needs consolidation, and (assuming product lines merge) I think most designers and developers will miss the Macromedia alternative. Does it matter who makes Flash? Dunno. Dreamweaver vs. GoLive? I'd take DW, but I'm not going to pitch my tent

User defined colors (CSS property values)

2005-04-12T21:00:00.000-05:00

I learned something new today... font-family: menu. This should serve (me) as a reminder to go read the specs a little more often (or buy books, or both) as none of this is news. Anyhow, thanks for bringing them all together on one page .jeff

DotML

2005-04-04T10:11:00.000-05:00

I just saw Dot in action here at work the other day - generating flow charts in SVG on the fly from a database of screen specs and interactions/workflows. Interesting and positively plump with possibilities. Generating and maintaining these kind of documents has been an irritation for me for years - particularly as the information they capture is essentially locked up and only accessible visually

JavaScript objects@Everything2.com

2005-03-24T14:05:00.000-06:00

A good writeup on OOP in javascript. JavaScript objects@Everything2.com

XMLHttpRequest Working Examples

2005-03-10T11:31:00.000-06:00

Lots of brain food here - and enough sample code to get you in serious trouble :)

Encoding and perl IO

2005-03-01T09:47:00.000-06:00

Ahhh. Light goes on. This post shows how to open a file in perl using a particular encoding, which was a faq I guess I never read. It would explain all manner of weirdness and problems I've had with encodings, entities and so on.

XML Resume Library

2005-02-27T01:27:00.000-06:00

Knew this must exist somewhere, but didn't occur to me to look on sourceforge. Add this to my todo list - my resume markup looks like it will map pretty easily to theirs. The project is basically a DTD, with some documentation, and ready-made XSL stylesheets for transforming the XML source into plain text, RTF, HTML and FO (thence to PDF via FOP).

adaptive path - ajax: a new approach to web applications

2005-02-25T14:01:00.000-06:00

Ha! Ajax. Is that what they call it now? I'm no veteran developer of this stuff, but I've watched it emerge as a solution repeatedly. Kind of like how evolution seems to spontaneously throw up the same answer to the same problem in completely unconnected species. My amusement is just that it is the dubbing of the thing - the naming event - that makes it article-worthy (and blog-worthy). Well

XSLT FAQ. Docbook - Working with HTML

2005-02-23T12:23:00.000-06:00

This page had some answers to some of the stumbling blocks I've enountered while dealing with HTML with XML tools and processes.

Lentil 1.0 Redesign

2005-02-07T23:17:00.000-06:00

Finally I've got most of the "Lentil 1.0" redesign of Sam-I-Am.com uploaded. This blog (and the others) still need proper templates, but its 99% there otherwise. I've gone with a content-driven model, where the html I store on my server is my structured content, data and meta information all in one standardized and well known format: (x)html. Navigation is built off of an xml structure I

HTTP Status 204

2005-01-20T10:24:00.000-06:00

This was new to me. The HTTP Response header can use a status code '204 No Content'. This tells the user-agent not to expect any response content, and so to not refresh the current page. For simple interactions where you want to keep the server current on a users selections it looks useful. Here's some (old but interesting) browser test results. There's apparently some disagreement on

Telegraphics - Free ICO Format Plugin for Photoshop

2005-01-11T23:47:00.000-06:00

After a little stumbling around looking for a way to create my favicon.ico (favicon.com has withdrawn the nice service they had there for a while), I came across Telegraphics and this file format plugin. It was reportedly tested for Photoshop 4, but I just dropped it into my Plug-Ins\File Formats folder for Photoshop 7 and it worked just great - just Save As: .ico When I get back in the office

Web design process (and the "Grey Box Methodology")

2004-12-29T10:40:00.000-06:00

This is an interesting piece outlining one designer's process for coming up with web design comps. This addresses some common issues and starting in a vector format gives you some tools for accommodating different browser widths, content lengths, font/graphic proportions. I agree wholly with his point that moving into the target medium too soon (html/css) is limiting - you can easily end up

Regular expressions intro

2004-12-14T09:20:00.000-06:00

This tutorial goes a little deeper than most.. probably a good bridge between the usual 1 page overview and Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions.

PPM repositories (Perl Modules in the Windows environment )

2004-12-02T09:04:00.000-06:00

A list of 10 or so PPM repositories in addition to ActiveState's, and some pointers on using them (e.g. with PPM3).

CGI Debugging

2004-10-21T08:08:00.000-05:00

This snippet from a thread on PerlMonks: use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser); use diagnostics; local $SIG{__WARN__} = \&Carp::cluck; and this CGI Help Guide, also on PerlMonks... #!/usr/bin/perl -wT # ensure all fatals go to browser during debugging and set-up # comment this BEGIN block out on production code for security BEGIN { $|=1; print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

Whitespace - the language

2004-09-16T13:37:00.000-05:00

A programming (interpreted) language using only whitespace as its tokens: space, line-feed and tab. Here's the perl interpreter: whitespace.pl and an assembler for the squemish. No I've not tried it, but I love the idea.

WinXP SP2 crack down

2004-08-25T11:08:00.000-05:00

Whether it will do any good or not, this page outlines all the things the new service pack will object to when browsing with IE. Mostly current best-practices for pop windows have anticipated the measures MS now recommend. But some things like remote scripting might be impacted?

The Future of Common-Use Hypertext - Editorial: Ashman and Moore: JoDI

2004-07-23T10:22:00.000-05:00

This is a really intersting collection of articles on proposals for the evolution of hypertext-based information and systems. I'm making my way through and reminding myself why I got into this business in the first place (which was not to put lipstick on the corporate pig)

2004-04-02T09:39:00.000-06:00

Normal Walsh How? A blogger very much after my own heart. This page describes how his site is built and maintained - it's all about metadata.

2004-02-13T09:46:00.000-06:00

CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media Makers of MAGpie and other products for making rich media accessible.

2004-01-12T17:25:00.000-06:00

Fontifier A me too blog (spotted on Zeldman). But I was just thinking about something similar just last night. »Fontifier lets you use your own handwriting for the text you write on your computer. It turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a computer font«

2003-12-16T23:19:00.000-06:00

Update HTML Doc [72809 sourcecode] I've always been confounded as to how to update the nifty converted pod docs that are created when you install ActiveState's perl. PPM will update these pages when you install a module with it, but it seems to only know about those modules it's installed. So if you download or create your own, you are on your own. After (finally) digging around in my perl

2003-10-30T09:45:00.000-06:00

Footer Demo 1 A technique for placing a footer at the bottom of the content, or at the bottom of the viewport if the content is shorter than the viewport. Works in WinIE and Gecko based browsers only, but its v. simple and a good starting point.

2003-10-03T09:09:00.000-05:00

WWW::Meta::XML::Browser This perl module provides an interesting framework for automating http (browsing) sessions via an XML file. The xml describes the actions to take and how to handle the results, with hooks for all the transformations etc. you might want to perform at each step. Worth a further look when I get time.

2003-08-29T10:48:00.000-05:00

A CSS Haiku Help me CSS Low bandwidth, complex design You're my only hope.

2003-08-14T14:44:00.000-05:00

CSS Floated Layouts Making multi-column layouts with floats actually work: Source Ordered Columns and CSS layout, 3 columns with Header and Footer, Ordered columns, Netscape 4 compatible

2003-02-18T22:44:00.000-06:00

Combine harvester Looks like a well featured perl crawling/indexing soln, that also might be persuaded to do the task I have in mind.

2003-02-18T22:41:00.000-06:00

HTML::Index on CPAN. This is a set of (perl) modules for creating, storing and searching indexes of html files that looks like a handy starting point for my html indexer. Seems like I might be able to sub-class it to use my own parser and store the code and throw out the content. So I could search for things like which pages on site.com are still using font tags? Which call such-and-such

2003-01-23T00:05:00.000-06:00

GUI'd batch files The Wizard's Apprentice

2002-10-01T09:18:00.000-05:00

Using relative font-sizes from Dive into Acccessibility - this is a really good walkthrough of setting up a template with scalable, relative font-sizes. Uses css keywords and some css browser exclusion hacks to navigate the minefield of font-sizing (nn4 gets fixed pixel size)

2002-09-17T16:01:00.000-05:00

Website Stress-Testing Useful article including whys, how-to's and reviewing a shortlist of software to help.

2002-09-17T15:43:00.000-05:00

The quest for a 3 row "letterbox" style layout These are my notes on vertically stretchy layout tests and prototypes, written a little while back while working on the new frogdesign.com site. Later design changes made a lot of this redundant and/or overkill, but it was a great voyage of discovery for me, driven by a faith that CSS could win the day (in which I think I was vindicated).

2002-07-12T08:45:00.000-05:00

line numbered code. this is very sweet - classing the PRE tag makes a cheap and easy way to get line-numbering with a background image providing the #s. I've been using an SSI to include raw code into a XMP tag (sadly depreciated but works still in most browsers), for maintenance-free code listings and this would be a nice touch there.

2002-07-09T11:56:00.000-05:00

Representing Pronunciation IPA, International Phonetic Association How to represent pronunciation in ASCII Phonetic Fonts The World Gazetteer - Pronunciation Table The alt.usage.english FAQ

2002-06-12T00:18:00.000-05:00

Updates to this blog I've made this blog (actually the whole site) searchable - look to the leftnav. This should hopefully mitigate the problem of ephemoral content on the blog page. I see a lot of hits where people have searched for a term, and landed on my blog page - which has long since moved on to other stuff.

2002-06-01T14:39:00.000-05:00

TortoiseCVS "Enjoyable version control" - CVS right within Windows Explorer. This can only be a good thing. Thanks to David U on evolt for the pointer.

2002-05-28T13:37:00.000-05:00

Blosxom More perl-based, flat text file driven blog software. But this one looks even simpler and idiot proof-er. Downloading...

2002-05-24T23:45:00.000-05:00

Caching / Mirroring Proxies With renewed enthusiasm for a configurable (on the fly) proxy that would let me stop/start mirroring an arbitrary browsing session I went hunting again. These might be starting points w3mir - all purpose HTTP-copying and mirroring tool Caching HTTP proxy CGI module (early effort) Re: Filtering web proxy (re perl/python FilterProxy daemon)

2002-05-21T09:13:00.000-05:00

Inside the evolt.org rebuild This is from last year's evolt redesign, and I've just now read right through. It's a great treatise on how smart coding and design can keep everyone happy.

2002-05-10T10:29:00.000-05:00

inessential.com: Weblog looking for a light-weight, simple bug/issue tracking system. So was this guy, so I'll start here. perl.com: Request Tracker [Nov. 28, 2001] a list of debuggers and issue/version tracking software

2002-04-17T23:23:00.000-05:00

PLEAC-Perl Cookbook of perl solutions to common programming problems. Many qualities.

2002-04-17T00:02:00.000-05:00

Sam-I-Am.com Work: CSS Made a start on a CSS section to house some of my work and point at the great work being done by others. Right now there's the commented backslash hack to isolate and target rules for macIE5, and the overflow:auto partial solution I have that addresses some of the problems seen in that same browser.

2002-04-15T21:58:00.000-05:00

blog of francois covering some interesting web-development topics. I plan on going back into the archives, as well as keeping an eye on this page.

2002-04-10T23:48:00.000-05:00

Perl - Excel FAQ and this example: Spreadsheet::WriteExcel And there's a XML::SAXDriver::Excel, for transforming Excel to XML. or there's the win32 OLE route

2002-04-09T22:43:00.000-05:00

Perl2Exethis is a command line utility for converting perl scripts to executable files (.exe), which can then be run without a perl install. I'm looking at this as a way of making droplets to perform simples tasks on the files/folders you drop on them. There's a shareware version (flashes a command prompt with a message each time your .exe is run) or lite & pro commercial versions.

2002-04-08T23:05:00.000-05:00

ascii.com - File Conversion Software Includes a word2html product that might be worth a spin (demo avail, ~$170 single seat) Terry Morse's Myrmidon I keep running into and it still looks like one of the best tools out there. Mac-based, installs as a print driver, so you can convert to html from any application that has a print function. Need to check it out against some sample Word docs, but

2002-04-04T20:59:00.000-06:00

RTF2HTML (EasyByte Software Ltd) COMponent (not MS Office dependant) that will output fragments or whole html pages.

2002-04-03T22:33:00.000-06:00

Yahoo!... WWW > HTML Converters still looking for good MS Word to HTML tools... maybe here's a place to start.

2002-03-20T14:30:00.000-06:00

bin2hex - script to convert data files into source code arrays Handy perl script that outputs a hex string of a binary file.

2002-03-14T09:15:00.000-06:00

CGI Script.net - Browser Based WYSIWYG HTML Editor with a downloadable backend for handling save/create/etc functionality ($850). I'm informed (by WebEdit Professional) that these guys are rip-off artists and are reselling other people's code. I can't verify that but I've removed the link in case it's true... .

2002-03-07T09:30:00.000-06:00

Browser-based rich text/wysiwyg editors I went hunting again. There's lots of ideas out there but almost all require winIE (typically 5.5+) Maybe thats not such an unreasonable requirement, but I'm on a mac mostly at home and it just kills me that I can't find *anything* that will work there. Yes I know about liveconnect (script - movie/embed communication) and I know this is not available in