Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
Agile RSS Aggregator in Ruby - igvita.com Very light weight feed aggregation (tags: aggregation atom rss ruby) Home | Email Standards Project “The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.” - good to see this launching (tags: email htmlemail webstandards)
OAuth Consumer for Tiger and Leopard available « OAuth A nice addition to the toolkit (tags: macosx oauth) Doonesbury for November 27th 2007 Pandora.com gets some doonesbury attention (tags: cartoon doonesbury futureofmusic musicpromotion pandora) php 5.3 | Gergely Hodicska Good overviews of what’s new in the forthcoming PHP 5.3 (due early next year). Some nice looking features but on first viewing I’m far from thrilled with the syntax around namespaces. XSLT profiling looks nice though. (tags: namespaces php php5.3 xslt) Social networking . . . all in a good cause | Media | The Guardian ...
Having blogged in a way that might have been interpreted as enthusiastic (it came out less cautious than I had intended) about facebook’s social ads system when it was first announced it seems only appropriate to wade into the furore surrounding the actual implementation. It seems facebook have caused a considerable amount of upset with the way they implemented their system. Technically it’s very interesting, using some clever javascript tricks ( as I link blogged last night) to report your activity on various sites back to facebook. But practically it’s far less impressive as you’ll have to really keep on your toes to even notice what is being reported, and there’s no easy way to opt out of having your activity on participating websites reported to your facebook network. ...
赖洪礼的 blog » Rails 2.0, cookie session store and security Looking at the security implications of the new session storage which becomes the default in Rails 2.0 (tags: cookies rubyonrails security sessions) Radiant Core: Blog: Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript Facebook Beacon is the technique facebook is using to allow partner sites to report your activity back to facebook. It’s an interesting approach, but the approach to privacy is woefully lacking. (tags: beacon crossdomain facebook javascript privacy) Steve Lawson: Facebook for musicians - a jumbled mess? ...
Headstar E-Government Blog » Bristol adds to its e-democracy toolkit A video interview with Carol Hayward, Bristol City Council’s “Corporate Consultation Manager.” Some of their online strategies aimed at engaging young people are actually attracting an older demographic than expected. The internet’s not just for (tags: bristol edemocracy localgovernment participationtools) ies4osx Install various versions of IE on OS X without windows. Useful for layouts, but not really fast enough for testing usability/javascript/etc. (tags: browsertesting ie4osx internetexplorer osx) Headstar E-Government Blog » Why innovators and local authorities may not get on ...
DSL Book WIP Martin Fowler’s working on a book about Domain Specific Languages, and sharing some insights into the process as he goes (tags: book dsl martinfowler writing) howshouldivote.com.au Helping Australians analyse their candidates (tags: australia edemocracy participationtools) No Limits With RETS (Yahoo! Developer Network blog) An XML standard for distributing real estate data. I’ve worked enough with such systems to know it’s much needed, but can’t imaging I’ll be using it in the near future as I don’t work with them any more. ...
One of the many tricky decisions to be made when building content management tools is how to allow users to control the basic formatting of their input without breaking your carefully crafted layouts or injecting nasty hacks into your pages. One approach has long been to provide your own markup language. Instead of allowing users to write HTML, let them use bbcode, or markdown, or textile, which have more controlled vocabularies and rules that mean it’s much less likely that problems will occur. ...
A couple of months ago I found myself needing to generate a “tag cloud” in drupal. The contents of the cloud would be all the children categories of a container and as is the norm with tag clouds it needed to display those children at varying sizes based on how popular they are. I looked around at the existing options but none fitted my requirements in how they integrated with the category module, or producing semantically helpful html. ...
PHPMock: Independent Mock Object/Stub Framework - Maugrim The Reaper’s Blog Looks like there’s work on a mocking library for PHP that’s independent of the testing libraries. That’s a much needed development. (tags: bdd mocks php tdd unittesting) PHPSpec Reporting Gets A Needed Boost - Maugrim The Reaper’s Blog PHPSpec is a behaviour-driven development library for PHP code. (tags: bdd php) Google LatLong: Think globally, mark locally Has google maps got the wrong spot for your house? Now you can correct it. Nice idea. ...
It’s surprising given drupal’s popularity that there aren’t more books covering it in detail. Site launches and contributions by the likes of lullabot and bryght have pushed the CMS’ profile and recent releases have emphasised the Web 2.0 potential, but a quick look at amazon reveals only four related titles. Of the four, Pro Drupal Development is definitely the most developer focussed. ...