I’ve added a script that I wrote a while back to overcome a fairly simple problem I was running in to. It’s nothing spectacular, but it works pretty darn well. In other news, I’m as sick as a dog. Earlier today I was feeling moderately okay, thinking maybe I could take a nap and skirt whatever this is, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen. Any get-better-quicker suggestions would be welcome.

I finally updated to the official .61 Cafélog release, and I couldn’t be happier. I was using the CVS version for a while, but I was inconsistent in updating it so some files were older and some were bleeding edge. The posting interface has improved quite a bit, especially in terms of making the pingback and trackback features easy to use. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that my smart quotes for PHP script is included by default and can be turned on in the config file. Speaking of which, I have a new version ready that is much faster then the current one, and this is actually the second day it’s been on this site. I’m going to test it a bit more just to make sure nothing slipped by, and then I’m going to release the Movable Type version at the same time. Oh that reminds me of my new favorite feature of b2: you can “filter” nearly everything through any number of functions. How cool?

Oh yummy, another server-side language, this one claiming to be faster than both PHP and Perl. Perhaps, but does it do anything?

While browsing around two things have caught my interest. The first is a great collection of tips in PHP that has some extremely nice code in it. My only objection to anything he has is when he discusses $PATH_INFO, and gives the example:

<location "/products">
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</location>

This is a hassle because it forces you to have a file with no extension, which under most operating systems doesn’t use the same handler as .php files, and it adds a needless step. Why does it seem that no one knows you can have a file called products.php and use multiviews to access it just like you would above?

The other thing I ran into is a pretty neat little class called ezSQL that I think I’m going to use for a project I’m doing. I found out about it through an article called PHP and Working with Databases (for the Lazy Sod), which couldn’t have a better title, especially if targeting people like me. Interesting things to check out if you’re into that sort of thing.

Of course all this browsing was down to entertain me while I was trying to install Gentoo Linux, the most promising distro I’ve seen in a while. I wasn’t able to get it to work on either my desktop or laptop but I haven’t given up hope yet. If I run in to a roadblock however the problem is that I have rehearsals on Wednesdays now and wouldn’t be able to make it up to HLUG where maybe Mat could take a look at it. Worst comes to worst I’ll go to SuSE or something.

All this and I still need to clean up that mail script to send to Mike. Long day!

Of course now all this LDAP stuff is distracting me. I already use IMAP for getting to all my email so having a universally accessible contact list is quite attractive. We’ll see how that goes . . .

Michael has some very cool stuff going on at his site. If you use Cafélog or just like seeing wicked PHP code, check it out. I can’t believe I just said wicked. If I get any free time tonight I’m going to look at the regex stuff he’s doing and see what’s going on with it. Not to mention the redesign, which I think is quite groovy.

It’s just beautiful. Too often I see PHP dismissed for other more ‘mature’ languages, so having a little website with more than 1.5 billion pageviews a day and some of the smartest engineers on the web decide to use it is quite heartening.

I’m still on my eternal search for the perfect editor I’ve come across Topstyle 3 again. Topstyle has always been my favorite CSS editor by far, but I’m not sure how it would work for other things. It is from the creator of Homesite, which has been my favorite editor thus far. What has really caught my eye is the 3.1 beta includes PHP syntax highlighting, which might be the killer feature for me. Like I’ve said before, I actually really like the PHP editing in Dreamweaver, but I hate the rest of the junk that comes with using that program. I might just end up using what I do on the server, GNU/Emacs in PHP mode. Or even better yet, Pico :). Does anyone have any favorite editors? I probably spend the most time with PHP code, but I like a robust HTML editor, and long walks on the beach. Will I ever be happy?

Don’t you hate it when you read a blog or web page where there aren’t proper paragraphs, just one huge one (or none at all) with a million <br /> tags, no semantic meaning at all. Also no opportunity to implement typographic styling using CSS concerning indents or paragraph spacing, much like is done on this site (but you won’t see it without Mozilla or a similarly standards compliant browser).

Well it’s not really the fault of the person, often it’s a symptom of the publishing system. Most don’t go beyond simply converting line breaks into a break tag. Just like curly quotes, the system should take care of it. So I wrote a little function which allows you to format your text into paragraphs using only the enter key. I’ve already put this on a couple for my client’s sites where I was using straight nl2br and I’m very happy with the result. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Just had to update a site of more than three hundred static pages. I’ve done it once before using FTP and some simple find/replace dialogs, and it took me hours and hours. This change was significantly more complex than the last global one I had to make, but instead of even attempting it the old way, I decided to write a smart Perl script to apply the changes to all the files. The whole thing took about 20 minutes, saving me mind-numbing hours of work and the client hundreds of dollars. It’s the first time I’ve used Perl for much beyond the simplest things, and I must say it’s pretty handy. Pretty darn handy indeed.