Yearly Archives: 2003

Texturize Finished

Design, WordPress

I just stuck a fork in Texturize and I’m ready to integrate it fully with WordPress. I’m very satisfied with the speed and functionality of this latest version. Not much in way of feature changes, except for one I think is pretty significant.

The Q tag would be great if it weren’t for Internet Explorer’s lacking in the realm of CSS generate content. (See Hixie’s scathing remarks for a critical look at IE.) Anyway this is the first automagic quote curlifier to do this (cue 15 corrections) though I’m sure Textile and SmartyPants won’t be far behind. The great thing about this technique is it lets you markup semantically meaningful quotes in your writing without losing a majority of your audience. Even better it would be trivial to put some simple browser detection and send the markup to browsers that get it. What a concept, using browser detection for good and not evil. This post is the first one where I’m using this technique. Hope the sky doesn’t fall. Update: It didn’t.

Oh Beehave

Events, Personal

Sleep? Breakfast, Emily, House of Pies. Study. School, paper. Walking through beautiful clovers. Bee sting. Study. Home and back out. Pizza, Sarah, water, sugar, driving. Study. Sarah #2, chairs. Ring ring. Josh, Diedrich’s, talk, House of Pies, talk, drive, talk. Left turn. Flashing lights. License, registration, heart beat like a humming bird. Drive home, 60 miles per hour. Study. Email, email, study. fin.

LINK Navigation

Meta, WordPress

Now I know I just gushed about Opera, but I just found another reason why Mozilla kicks butt. Back in the day a number of link types that could be used by user-agents in an additional navigation bar or pre-cache some elements “to reduce the perceived load time.” Cool, eh? There are a number of possible applications in the blog format that lend themselves well to this, and I’ve tried to put as many as possible here. Viewing the source or visiting in Mozilla is the best way to get a feel for what’s happening and how neat the application is, but some descriptions are in order nonetheless. I don’t know the default setting for the “Site Navigation Bar” is for Mozilla, but to make sure it’s on go “View > Show/Hide > Site Navigation Bar > Show Only As Needed” to make sure you’ll see what all the fuss is about.

First, it was very tricky hard to get this all working with my current setup; whenever I try something new here my immediate thought to how it can be integrated into WordPress, but the steps I had to take were so convoluted that I doubt that any of this will make it into the next release. Anyway the first useful link that came to mind would be “bookmark,” something I specify the rel attribute on my permalink tags but no current browser picks up. So for example the bookmark link for this entry would be like so:

<link rel="bookmark" href="/p620" title="LINK Navigation" />

For any index, individual, archive, or category page you look at on the journal part of this site there will be a set of bookmark links to each of the entries on the page. I have created similar links for commenting and trackbacking entries, that personally I’ve found to be an extremely efficient way to get around. Check under your “More” menu in Mozilla to see it all. Mozilla also links nicely to the alternative representations of the content, such as RSS, and though it links to the same resources on each page it really should link to the specific representation of only the content on the current page, so for example the comments page could link to its unique RSS 2 feed.

Then some basic navigation elements were in order. The logic of these should be apparent from the code, but there is a link pointing to the top page of this site, a link to the search page, the FAQ, information about myself, and finally copyright information. When you are browsing a single entry you are offered links to the previous and next entry, as well as to the very first entry. This could be expanded once date-based archives are available to allow you to browse from month to month or day to day. Once you start using it, you’ll wonder how you ever navigated any other way.

Finally I set the categories to be “sections,” though I’m not sure if I’m entirely comfortable with this. If you envision all of the text of this blog as a document, then the “index” could be the front page, but after that it’s open for interpretation. Should categories be sections or chapters? Could chapters be say, month-based archives? What if I wanted some arbitrary division of chapters, say by whatever relationship I was in at the time? Sub-sections seem ill-defined as you can’t seem to define several sub-sections as a child of a section, though I may simply need to explore this further. Also I am feeling slightly constrained by the software I use to manage everything, but it would be fascinating to see how someone without those constraints such as Tantek could do with his structure. Ideally some common set of relationships specific to the organization of a weblog—much like the goal of the Weblog Metadata Initiative (where’d they go?)—could be agreed upon and implemented by default by the authors of the most common software and templates. Several people already implement a bit of this already, for example Mark, but there is a lot of unrealized potential here.

Opera is able to use all of the standard defined links, but doesn’t catch any of the extra ones. IE of course is oblivious to it all. Mozilla gets everything. If you have any information on other browsers let me know. I should be defining the extra rel attributes in a profile document, but there are only a few hours left before I’m supposed to “wake up” for my classes tomorrow, so some sleep may be in order.

Opera Coming Along

Design

I must admit that I haven’t touched Opera for some time now, and I never really took it htat seriously as a browser. Tracking its market share is tough because out of the box it identifies as IE6 out of the box, but I always figured that there was just too much wrong with it for it to be that popular. What a surprise their latest version is! Not only is it blazingly fast like it has always been, it has what I would count as the best designed user interface I have seen thus far in a browser. IE is weak. Phoenix was better. SlimBrowser makes IE nice but puts too much clutter, and feels unpolished. Mozilla, well, good ‘ol Mozilla has become my main browser for the past couple of weeks and I can’t complain. Out of the blue comes Opera, with a interface so dandy I feel like I might be in OS X (someday…) if the garish start bar at the bottom of my screen didn’t bring me back to reality. The only thing chapping me is the banner, but I would have no problem supporting such finely done software even it wasn’t my primary browser, just to encourage its development. I can’t begin to detail all of the nice touches they’ve put into the interface, just try it out. It’s only a 3.2 MB download without Java! (And who needs Java anyways?)

Howdy

Personal

Being back in the City after the radically different environment is a strange socially organic feeling. It’s good to be home. And oh my goodness do I have some email to catch up on!

Recent Comments

Meta, Web Standards

All the cool kids are doing it, so here it is. If you put a number at the end, like comments/50, you will se the last 50 comments. Neat huh? Want to see something really fancy? After you put the number on the end, add “rss” like this. Hot damn. It’s even valid. Some feedback would be helpful, because I don’t have an aggregator to test it in on this machine. As Mike would say, “Baaaahhhh.”

The real reason I put this up in the first place is that there is some good discussion (and sometimes not) in the comments occasionally that I feel gets lost in the shuffle. Furthermore, the RSS monkeys have no idea which posts have comments already, or to know automatically if new comments have been posted since they last checked the feed, so this will give them something else to subscribe to for the closer-to-full PhotoMatt Experience. 😉

Nominations Closed

Travel

Yes it should have happened yesterday, but there was always the chance that a absolutely brilliant submission would come in under the wire of the deadline and blow all the others away, and I didn’t want to kill that chance. That was the theory at least anyway. Anyway it’s closed, though if you visit it there is some new content.

Now of course comes the task of picking which categories are the best. Rather than make it a long and arduous personal cross, I think a party of some sort is in order. (Hmmm, tagline: “Mixing metaphors since…”) Thoughts?

The Wait

Personal

Well my laptop is now in the hands of the Best Buy service people. For a little background, last time they had it I didn’t get it back for almost two months. It wasn’t so bad because I had another laptop I used as a loaner, but that’s not an option this time and it’s going to be tough. I’ve added a day counter to the sidebar to track how long this takes, thoug I truly hope they surprise me and have it back with a week or two. On the bright side, since this is the third or fourth time it’s going back there is a possibility I’ll have the option to get a new laptop, in which case I’m definitely eyeing the new Z1 series.

Farewell

Travel

The charger on my laptop has finally given out, mere weeks after it came back from its two month repair trip. I’m preparing to do a brain transplant of the hard drive right now. Hopefully this will turn out better than attempts to fix it have before. For now though I’m going to be computing primarily on my desktop, with its new motherboard, and I’m moving all my development stuff over here. I’ve forgotten how snappy a nice desktop can be, and it’s actually a relatively pleasant experience. The thing I can’t stand is being tied to a desk though, I had gotten quite acustomed to working anywhere and everywhere, bouncing from WiFi hotspot to hotspot throughout my day.

So Easy

Web Standards

For the project I mentioned in my last post I’ve also been using a fantastic class called ezSQL that really makes a lot of things an absolute piece of cake. I don’t remember exactly how I came across this class, perhaps via Simon, but at the time I wasn’t doing anything I could use it for and so I just bookmarked it and made a mental note to check it out later. After not much more than a night of using it the syntax is already very intuitive to me and I look at the documentation hardly at all; the class itself is so logically done that a quick glance at the code is just as helpful as the documentation. Of course there is some room for improvement, for example it would be nice if the errors and such were valid XHTML, but I’ll survive.

Hit Diggity!!!

Google, Meta

Click here, right now. Now I know what you’re thinking, “What is Matt making us click now? Maybe I shouldn’t, although that date thing was pretty funny…” Well to save the lazier among you some trouble, that’s the second page of Google results for “matt” and yours truly is at #13. Now before you call me the most narcissistic blogger ever in my defense I was merely vanity surfing my referrers when this popped up. Vanity surfing is not nearly as bad as vanity searching.

Anyway I’ve joked for a long time that the only reason I’m on the web is to become the #1 hit for “matt” on Google, it’s been the brass ring of my online existence. Before this latest Google dance I was somewhere toward the end of the 18th page if I remember correctly, so obviously something has been going right. Better yet, I now have a nice short hit list of people that have to go so I can make #1. 😉

I am so going to start using this at parties!