Blog posts

I’ve been meaning to add some sort of comment support on UN Charter.org for a while now and the joint motivations of the site being mentioned in an ETech presentation this month and the emergence of a trackback module in PEAR has encouraged me to give it a try. The integration so far is very simple, but each article should now contain autodiscovery code and trackbacks that have been received will be listed. ...

As part of my new found involvement with the Talk Euro project (aiming to produce an online, commentable, annotatable version of the EU constitution) I’ve been considering how to use Moveable Type to keep track of different versions of a particular clause or article in a document. The issue is that the constitution (and the other documents we hope to then use the toolset with) will inevitably be amended over time and it would be good to be able to keep track of those amendments and to present comments on previous versions of an article to those reading the latest version. ...

By popular request, I just added a discussion board over at sarahmasen.com for those wanting to talk about issues arising from David Dark’s just published second book, The Gospel According To America: A Meditation On A God-Blessed, Christ-Haunted Idea. From what I’ve read so far, I’d have to say David’s onto another winner, and you can find out for yourself by reading a sample chapter courtesy of Books and Culture

Back when the Oscar nominees were announced I lamented the difficulty of tracking down the various short nominees. It seems the fine people at salon.com agreed, and yesterday they put five of them (3 animated shorts, 2 live action) on their site. There are some real gems amongst them, and when you consider that all five will take well under an hour to watch, it’s well worth a look. My personal favourites are " Ryan" (further proof that documentaries come in many guises) and " Little Terrorist" (the best political gestures don’t claim to be anything of the sort) but they’re all deserving of more attention. ...

After using Serendipity for about a month, I’ve decided to make the switch to Wordpress for a while. While there’s much I’m not happy with in wordpress’ architecture, the user interface is more straightforward than Serendipity’s and it seems to handle the inclusion of code within an entry more neatly. Let’s see how long this one lasts…

Daniel Khan, one of the maintainers of PEAR::DB_NestedSet jumped in and offered help after my last post on the subject of that package. It turned out there was a bug in the file Menu.php within the current version of NestedSet which is now fixed in CVS. Once that change was made it turned out there were still a few bugs in my code to be worked out. With everything fixed I can now access menus as I would wish. ...

I’m doing a little work building a page editing tool for a CMS. Each page can have a number of different types of elements and I’ve decided that blocks of text will be controlled using FCKEditor. Rather than having a number of FCKEditor instances on a page I wanted to allow the user to be able to click on a button to instantiate an FCKEditor instance and move the text into it. After a little thought, it turned out to just require a pretty simply bit of javascript: ...

I’ve finally found time to make some changes to Services_Technorati. The key issue I’d been wanting to address was caching and following comments from Doug Clifton and Ryan King I finally got round to working on it. I’ve decided to make use of another PEAR package, Cache_Lite to handle the caching. That way I can hand off most of the responsibility for ensuring compatibility across different filesystems as well as allow for the flexibility to reflect searches with different options. The overheads are slightly higher, but the added flexibility certainly makes my life as maintainer easier. ...

The Six Apart Professional Network blog makes mention of a Moveable Type-powered project called Musicblog. Using blogging to break down barriers between artists and audience seems a good (if obvious) idea, so I quickly headed over to check it out. On the main site I saw: “Musicblog is a joint project between EMI Music and Pixelfury. We utilise the best social software applications to provide easy communication between music-lovers and artists.” But checking out the featured Musicblog, that of The Doves, was a disappointment. So far, it looks rather as if it were written by a publicist and consists largely of the sort of news artists have always carried on their websites. Hopefully it’ll move beyond window dressing, and develop more of an identity (like that of, say, The Decemberists) but I can’t help but feel that once again the music industry just doesn’t get it. ...

The latest version of my (S)FTP client of choice, Transmit, has just been announced. I particularly enjoyed spotting Sufjan Stevens’ tracks in this screenshot. Sufjan will be one of the featured artists at this year’s Festival of Faith and Music at which I will also be speaking.