What if a forum had a URI structure like a blog instead of a forum?
Category Archives: Web Standards
Voting Machines
Voting machine glitch during demo, Murphy’s law applies to elections as well. It sounds like Sequoia is trying to do the right thing. I can’t think of a single good reason not to have a hard paper copy of every vote. “Election officials say that putting printers on voting machines would create problems for poll workers if the printers break down or run out of paper, and the paper records will cause long poll lines with voters taking more time to check the record.” Oh no! People would be checking their votes! We don’t want that. I will personally donate to the paper fund if they’re really that worried they’re going to run out.
Christopher Schmitt
Christopher Schmitt, CSS guru, has begun blogging and a live redesign of his site. (I love those!) He’s rolling with WordPress.
Cool Query of the Day
To remove trailing slashes from URIs: UPDATE `blogs` SET blog_uri = LEFT(blog_uri, (LENGTH(blog_uri) - 1) ) WHERE RIGHT( blog_uri, 1 ) = '/'; Rows affected: 328,561 in 92 seconds.
The Craptastic Adventures of SES
The Craptastic Adventures of SES San Jose 2004, write HTML like it’s 1997.
CSS Font
Hide text from bots using a CSS font, the latest in our post-JS world. Hat tip: Podz on the forums.
Spammers Discover Internationalization
Got this in my inbox this morning with a Spam Assassin score of 0.1: “If yöu Ã¥sk yöursëlf “Höw cÃ¥n it bë sö chëåp?”, thë Ã¥nswër is simplë: wë buy hugë quÃ¥ntitiës dirëctly fröm thë möst fÃ¥möust PhÃ¥rmÃ¥cy Pröducërs (whërë pëöplë cÃ¥nnöt buy) thÃ¥n wë chÃ¥rgë just önë cënt për dösë. This wÃ¥y yöu gët thë bëst pricës Ã¥ll övër thë wörld Ã¥nd wë sëll much mörë thÃ¥n öur cömpëtitörs.” I wonder how long it’ll take my bayesian filters to learn this trick. And no, they weren’t using CSS or a punk band.
SQL::Translator
“SQL::Translator
is a group of Perl modules that converts vendor-specific SQL table definitions into other formats, such as other vendor-specific SQL, ER diagrams, documentation (POD and HTML), XML, and Class::DBI classes.”
A Better Image Rotator
A Better Image Rotator, much much much better. I remember reading the code for the old one and seeing the security vulnerability in the first versions and thinking “Oh my goodness, how many people have already used this?” I still recommend my version over the original rotator, but if you’re looking for fine-grained control this new one is what you should use.
MSN Joins the Party
More W3C
Another W3C blog uses WordPress, this time from “Richard Ishida, W3C Team, and Internationalization expert.” Hat tip: Karl Dubost.
Nero
The Nero site has a decent XHTML/CSS layout and is just a few hairs away from validation.
Mike on URIs
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Great Hackers
I just finished reading Great Hackers by Paul Graham. I think he hits some key points pretty well. Personally I’m very sensitive to enviroment when getting work done. As with any Graham essay, it’s as interesting to see what he took at as what he left in. View source on the page and read the HTML comments. His old essays used to have some real gems in the comments but most seem to have been scrubbed. Wish I had archives.
Manchurian
Just saw the Manchurian Candidate and it was really excellent. The end got away from me though. Does anyone know what happened there?
Color Schemes Contest
I’m very interested in seeing some alternative color schemes for the WordPress admin, so I thought I’d sponsor a mini-contest here. You don’t have to be a WordPress user or even have it installed to participate. The colors don’t have to match the logo or anything like that, I’m just interested in seeing easy-on-the-eyes color schemes people would enjoy looking at. For people who aren’t running a nightly build or not running WP at all I’ve put up two screenshots that you can use to get an idea of where the colors will go. You don’t have to be a designer to play, just play around with the colors in those images until you find some that you like and then post the results. Winners (I’ll probably pick a couple) will get prominent mention on this site and wordpress.org, a free unlimited-user copy of WordPress, and a small monetary prize via Paypal. So fame and fortune, what more could you ask for?
So to recap the important bits:
- What?
- Playing with interesting color variations for the WordPress admin sections.
- Materials?
- Screenshot one, screenshot two, and a HTML dummy page.
- How do I enter?
- Leave a comment with some way to represent your color scheme, whether it is a screenshot, CSS code, linked post, hex values, whatever you’re comfortable with. You can enter as many times as you want and win multiple times. If you don’t have time to enter, link to this entry and let other people know about it.
- Any guidelines?
- Be creative! Don’t modify the layout, just the colors.
- Deadline?
- Friday night, my time. This is a low-impact project, all you need is a color picker and about ten minutes. Submit your entry as soon as possible so no uses your colors before you do. Enter as many times as you want.
- Prizes?
- Fame, fortune, and that warm fuzzy feeling you get from contributing to open source and having your work in front of thousands of people.
When all is said and done I’ll roll this into a plugin or something so people can enjoy it. You don’t have to be a designer to enter, just put together something you like.
Update: There are a few clarifications and tips in the comments, so you might want to look over those. The big news, however, is that Aaron Epstein has donated a copy of his excellent Color Schemer Studio product to be awarded to the top winner. Downloading a 15-day trial would be a great way to put together a great entry and get a taste of what you might win.
This hasn’t been forgotten, I’m just can’t write the plugin for the winners until 1.3 is finished. Thanks for your patience.
Technorati Redesigns
Technorati redesigns and looks excellent. Is this the first search engine with completely valid HTML and CSS? Feedback: Have the cosmos link/icon in the results by the name instead of the time posted. Fonts seem a tad small for me. Footer is off-center on results pages. Congrats to Tantek and the Technorati team. (Tanteknorati, heh.) As they continue to address performance issues I can start to use the service regularly again.
W3C HTML Validator on Mac OS X
NetNewsWire Subscription Favelet
NetNewsWire Subscription Favelet that uses Mark’s excellent feed finder. Seems like a good hybrid solution. I have been less than impressed with NNW’s autodiscovery performance. In a perfect world I could take my OPML file (which only contains site URIs, not feed URIs) and it would import and autodiscover every feed. Also there seems to be no WordPress setting for weblogs. I’m new to all this, so some of this may be things I’m missing.
Mac Software
The fantastic comments keep pouring in on the Mac thread, thank you so much guys. I’m going through every single suggestion in that thread and when I’ve had time to kick the tires of everything I’ll write about what I end up with.