SxSW Interactive

Travel

So, is anyone else going to South by Southwest Interactive next week? This will be my first time and I’m incredibly excited, but also a little bit anxious since I have no idea what it’s going to be like. I’m going to be staying in Pflugerville with my wonderful sister but I suspect I’m going to spend most of my time in town.

If you’ve been before, I’d love to hear whatever tidbits of advice you have. If you’re going, definitely let me know and hopefully we can meet up. I’d love to start putting some non-Houston faces with the domain names :).

Search Updated

Events, Gallery, Meta, Web Standards

I’ve cleaned up the ht://dig search engine quite a bit, though I still have to hack it to be XHTML 1.1 compliant and fit better with the site, but after updating the index I got these interesting stats:

./htstat
htstat: Total documents: 11490
htstat: Total words: 1933258
htstat: Total unique words: 17660

The bulk of those pages are from the photolog, which is currently 5200 photos, but before the index was huge because my URLs weren’t very tidy and sometimes the same thing would have 10 different ways to access it. That’s still true a bit, but I’m working on it. Also I’ve been working very hard on a new project, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about it yet.

Just Like Mom

Humor, Tech

I’m a little late, but Evan Goer wrote a characteristically funny post and it looks like his mother left a comment that had me rolling in laughter, mostly because I could see my mom saying the exact same thing.

I followed your link to Chordiant’s home page, and I couldn’t figure out exactly what your new company does based on its self-description–other than it involves attractive women looking at computer screens. Still, I have no doubt that you will help them do it better.

I better get to sleep before this storm comes through and knocks me offline again. I have so much posting to do but it’ll have to wait until at least tomorrow. In the mean time oogle some pictures.

Spring Broken

Personal

On this delightfully dreary day I’ve decided to bundle up for a spell with some hot tea and get some serious coding done. In fact that’s much how my day has been so far: code, code, code, surf blogs, (4 hours later) code. We’ll see how this goes…

Panels Finished

Events, Personal, RSS

My last panel was yesterday at 5 PM so now I’m taking as much time as I can to catch the panels that are left and learn a few things. Speaking was more stressful than I expected but most of the feedback was good. I still need to check out the web feedback though, as people are probably more candid online than when they’re shaking your hand.

Matias Ventura, the lead of the editor focus for WordPress, has written Gutenberg, or the Ship of Theseus to talk about how Gutenberg's approach will simplify many of the most complex parts of WordPress, building pages, and theme editing. If you want a peek at some of the things coming down the line with Gutenberg, including serverless WebRTC real-time co-editing.

Mr Mailman

Personal

To the tune of Mr Sandman

Mr Mailman
Where could you be?
I’ve got to leave
Way before three
Your lousy schedule
While isn’t suprising
Is gonna make my blood pressure be rising

Mr Mailman
Give me a clue
I’ve based my day
Around the things that you do

Please get in your little Jeeeeep
Mr Mailman
Bring my mail to meeeee

Usable Security

WordPress

Usable Security is a new blog about—you guessed it—the intersection of usability and security. This comes up every few weeks since I improved the error messages on the WordPress login (and bbPress) to specify which part of the login was mistaken, the username or the password. Security folks see this as a problem because you’re revealing more information but I see making the error message more generic as premature security optimization. Plenty of systems where login names are public or easily discoverable, such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, most email systems, and so forth, seem to be doing just fine.

Books to Live By

Web Standards

Jeffrey is in good company:

In the early stages of moving I could only take a handful of books so I chose the ones that I knew I would need for my classes, the ones that I referred to often, and the ones that mean the most to me. The books, from left to right:

  • On Writing Well, William Zinsser
  • The Journey of the Mind to God, Bonaventure
  • MLA Handbook
  • Philosophy of Language, William Lycan
  • Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
  • Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard
  • Selected Poems, William Wordsworth
  • The Republic, Plato
  • Designing with Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman
  • History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
  • The Federalist
  • The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
  • Four Plays, Aristophanes
  • Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam
  • The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates
  • Utilitarianism, J. S. Mill
  • The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson

Structure Updates

MRT, Web Standards

Just to update on some of the latest changes going on around here as part of the redesign.

The biggest changes have come as part of the new “photos” section. In moving the photolog from /p/ which I consider (in hindsight) to not be the best URI I thought about what sort of photographic content I have on the site now and what I’d like to have in the future. In my mind three sections came to mind, the photolog, selected series of works, and old photos. I’ve experimented with putting older photos into the photolog but it doesn’t really work well with the reverse chronological organization of the albums. Plus as part of my moving I’ve dug up a ton of old pictures that I’d love to scan and archive online. The series idea never really developed beyond the first two I did (and it’s built on the structure of the photolog) but I really like the idea of it and I’d like to keep it around. For instance it’d be interesting to do a “Best of 2003” series at the end of the year, or something similar. (Though the thought of choosing a dozen or two from over 7,000 photos is a little intimidating.)

The re-coding of the photolog itself is actually going much better than I thought it would. Finding things in Gallery can be frustrating sometimes, but I’ve managed to get the vast majority of the program completely free of tables, simple syntax errors, and it’s now using a CSS-based design. I am using one hack to get XHTML 1.1 validation, but it’s because of a bug in PHP that I will devote an entire post to. As soon as I finish cleaning everything up for the photolog section I’m going to copy the code over and use it to power the classic photos section.

I’ve been recoding many of the titles of pages to use the new CSS image text method, and I enjoy the results. When I recently upgraded to PHP 4.3.3 something changed in the Freetype library and now the letters are rendering at what seems to be a lower weight, which is a pleasant surprise because they were a little chunky before. I have no idea why it would do this. Unless perhaps a newer version of Freetype could better understand the font file, which I suppose is the only explanation.

I changed the text image generator script to turn underscores to spaces instead of hyphens. Though I like hypenated “filenames” better the problem came in the photolog where there were actual hypens needed in the titles, so having those translated to spaces was a little funky.

Finally I’ve done a little work on the jazz quotes section of the site. Although I have been neglecting it lately, these pages account for a good fifth of the traffic to this site and it’s really the only resource of its kind on the net. For some reason before I would seperate the first and last name in the URI with a period, which messed up some simplistic traffic analysis software (what sort of extension is .Coltrane?) but it’s what I chose for whatever reason. I’ve updated all the new URIs to use hypens instead of periods, which is much cleaner in my opinion. There are so many links to these pages and so much search engine traffic that it would just be stupid to break any of the links. Of course the old URIs still work, though I haven’t set them up to serve a permanent redirect yet, they just return the page like before. This section still needs a lot more work, in its styling and also just in the backlog of submitted quotes I have to catch up with.

The Zeitgeist has been updated to no longer return script errors, but it isn’t cached so it’s very slow, and it needs to be restructured.