Blog posts

Tom Coates and Simon Willison are among a number of bloggers who’ve written about Yahoo’s release of a number of their javascript libraries, interface design patterns, and other elements for use by the community. I’ve not yet had a chance to explore them, but they look like a great contribution and I look forward to finding the time. But my main reason for posting was the content of this screenshot from the design patterns page. Yusef is my middle name (and my maternal grandfather’s first name), but it’s rare that I come across anyone sharing not only the name but the latin-alphabet rendering of it. It’s nice to see the name being promoted like that! ...

My particular focus this year as a member of the Greenbelt web team is on finding ways to better integrate festival related content with the wider web, and then working out how to use the festival’s website as a hub for all of that information. It started out with the collage that we built using flickr photos, del.icio.us links, and blog entries around the festival last year, and the next step (the first longer term one) is integration with last.fm. ...

I’ve posted another entry over at my last.fm blog.

I’m experimenting with posting music-related entries in my last.fm journal, and that’s where you’ll find the entry referred to in the title here. The plan is to splice the blogs together, so that this becomes a hub for everything, but there’s little telling when that’ll actually happen so in the meantime I’ll post links here when I’ve blogged there. You can find this entry at: http://www.last.fm/user/jystewart/journal/2006/01/30/67793/

When I was looking for options to offset our airmiles I noted and commented on a significant difference between the carbon production estimates, and the cost to offset it, from NativeEnergy and Carbonfund.org. I remarked on this in the comments box when placing my order with NativeEnergy and today received the following response from Lauren Aldrich at NativeEnergy, which she has said I’m welcome to post here: Thank you for asking about the CO2 emissions and price discrepancies between NativeEnergy and Carbonfund. It’s important to us that our customers understand why these differences exist, because there are good reasons. ...

One of the best features of freelance work is that when Kari has to travel for work, I can often tag along. Last year that took us to Colorado, and this year to Arizona, for a couple of days just outside Phoenix and a couple more in beautiful Sedona. Our photos are at flickr.

The MySQL developers seem to be developing a habit of rolling out useful new features in their .1 releases. MySQL 4 was a good release, but it’s the group_concat feature from 4.1 that I miss most often when forced to use a 3.x or 4.0 install. MySQL 5 made some huge leaps forward, but already there’s plenty of talk about the new features coming in 5.1. In particular, I’m looking forward to support for XPath and event scheduling. ...

One of the discussions going round the web over the past couple of days has been a discussion on the wordpress trac about dropping RSS0.92 and 1.0 support from future versions as they are seen as redundant. Dropping RSS 0.92 support seems sensible. It’s an old format and there are considerable advantages to using a more recent, better developed standard. RSS 1.0, on the other hand, brings to the table a number of advantages lacking in its higher-numbered cousin. ...

I took a look at Responsible Travel, following a link from Year Of Living Generously. Their system claims to take into account all the emissions of planes (not just CO2) and they offer a very simple calculator for working out the offsets required for a particular journey. Unfortunately it doesn’t work quite so well for our needs, as we are attempting to offset 50,000 miles (3 rountrips to the UK for Kari, 4 for me, plus 2 flights back from New York and 2 rountrips to Colorado), and there’s no obvious place to insert the number of miles should you already know it. ...

I promised more work on XML_Feed_Parser this month and am pleased to say I found the time. The first beta, version 0.3, is on its way into PEAR. Two key developments in this version are support for the ‘content’ module in RSS2 and fix of a serious bug in the main __call method. I was accessing the compatMap variable (that handles the mapping of element names between different syndication formats) directly, and calling array_pop on it. That threw up problems if you wanted to access the same element multiple times, so I’ve added in a temporary variable to fix that. ...