After far too much time battling interface oddities at expedia.com I am delighted to be able to say that I have booked flights to Greenbelt! It’ll be another whirlwind trip, arriving at Heathrow early Friday morning and leaving Tuesday lunchtime. But so long as I’m armed with a plentiful supply of sleeping pills for the flights, I’m sure it’ll all work out wonderfully.
Services_Technorati 0.6.2alpha is now available through PEAR. Despite the minor version number increment, this version contains quite a few changes. The class no longer instantiates its own cache object, and instead the factory (which should be the default interface to instantiate an object) will accept a pre-existing cache object. For the purposes of forward compatibility, the factory also now takes an argument to specify which API version should be used. ...
A few days, Tantek posted about the latest microformat specification hReview, a set of attributes that can be applied to an html document to indicate it as a review and describe its content appropriately. I responded and skimmed the spec, intending to offer some comments before it went public. In the end, work intervened, and the spec is now publicly available on the technorati wiki. Tantek and Niall have the announcement. My main cause for interest is Grand Rapids WiFi, where reviews are currently available in RDF and HTML formats. In contrast to the RDF representation, the HTML is considerably lacking in the semantics department. In general, hReview looks like it will be an excellent way to add semantic data to that markup and I’ll probably make those changes over the weekend. ...
A few posts in the past few months have touched on the dilemma of those seeking a post-consumerist way of living. In response to a piece Ed referenced I explored a little of the difficulty of breaking free of consumerism’s more insidious traits without simply slipping into an identity simply defined by a different set of consumerist choices, and in response to Thomas Hine’s book “I Want That”, I talked of how a phenomenon he warned could similarly be a more minimalist consumerism might also be an example of a more conscious way of living. ...
Unsurprisingly, Bush’s scheduled appearance at Calvin has generated considerable discussion within and without the college, online and offline. The most prominent mention was in the Washington Post which initially ran this article, which predictably characterised Calvin as a hotbed of conservatism. Kate and others responded to the article, and the result made for more pleasant reading. It was also picked up by Kos, leading to some hundreds of comments. A group of students whose graduation is being compromised by the decision have launched a google group to discuss ways to respond. You can find that good discussion here. And Rob Vander Giessen-Reitsma has written a great open letter, which is to be found here. ...
Yesterday, Tom Coates posted a piece entitled " Trackback is dead. Are Comments dead too?" His argument is that trackback spam has put an end to an interesting attempt to knit together posts between different blogs, that we should allow time for mourning, but we should also begin looking for alternatives. The Six Apart Pronet list has carried a number of posts from people agreeing with his analysis. Trackback never really took off outside of techie circles. The lack of support for it in blogger and the lack of education of new bloggers as to its advantages ensured that. For those of us who are interested in the technical aspects of blogging, and in the potential it offers to change the way we have conversations, it was a great starting point, but it never hit the primetime. ...
It’s probably been reported extensively elsewhere, but today was the first time I’ve run into this issue. I was trying to lay out a page which contains quite a number of alpha-transparent PNGs, a few JPEGs and a variety of background colours, and one fade wasn’t working right. In Firefox and Internet Explorer, the background image faded neatly into the background colour. In Safari the background image seemed distinctly darker than anywhere else, and wouldn’t match up properly. ...
The gallery script I posted about on Friday was a nice improvement on plain image switching, but didn’t quite have the elegance I was looking for, particularly when switching between images of different sizes. Yesterday, I managed to grab some time to play around with resizing images using javascript so as to produce a smoother transition. The effect is rather pleasing. It works by preloading each image shortly before it might be needed, and using the dimensions of the preloaded image to calculate increments to change the displayed image dimension by. After stepping through the resizing, we then switch the previous image to the background, change our container’s source to the new image, and fade it in. ...
Some months ago, through a long-forgotten source, I came across this technique for fading in images without using flash and I’ve been looking for an excuse to play around with such techniques. Today, work on a new page for Calvin gave me such an excuse. I wanted to use the technique within a javascript image gallery. I needed to be able to advance through a set of images and wanted to fade each in in turn. Since the images were named numerically, all it appeared to involve was a couple of javascript functions to increment or decrement a counter and update the photo accordingly. Because I’d be using the same image tag for all the images, I also tweaked the original’s functions to use a predefined object rather than making use of the DOM each time. ...
Among other things, I’m currently working on a relatively large CMS/membership site. At the project’s initiation I decided to steer clear of off-the-shelf solutions, partly because I wanted to take myself through the learning curve that the project was sure to involve, partly because none of the CMS or framework options I looked at really appealed to me, and partly because it seemed as though the customisations required to manage this dataset would take nearly as much time as a from-scratch solution. ...