Andre Venter: Dev

Bleeding Edge of Wiki-Blog Hybrids

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 18:09:11 GMT

Janne, author of JSPWiki, reveals what is going on at the bleeding edge of Wiki-Blog hybrid technology.

"First, a short explanation on the tech behind this weblog: This is an instance of JSPWiki, where each entry is a separate WikiPage?. The Main page aggregates then all of the pages which have a certain signature in their name onto the front page, producing the weblog you see right now. This allows cool stuff like doing collection pages, such as Ropecon2003, or EGC2003, where I just insert a string like [{WeblogPlugin startDate='310103' days='31'}] to get all of the entries from January 2003, for example." - Butt Ugly

In essence, JSPWiki is a Wiki with the ability to pull together a blog-like page out of Wiki pages. Throw in page template to add style and other blogging essentials like calendar and blogroll, you got a blog. Neato. Janne also talks about his XML-RPC-based API for JSPWiki. JSPWiki also supports MetaWeblogAPI. Les Orchard, Mr. 0xDECAFBAD, has implemented the API for TWiki, UseModWiki, and MoinMoin. Les is considering REST version currently. On the syntax front, Janne mentioned the WikiML initiative by Eric van der Vlist, an old pal from my XML/SML days. There is also WikiXmlDtd effort by UseMod folks. Wiki Interchange Format page is also worth a read. Based on my recent scouring of the Wiki technologies, JSPWiki (Java/LGPL) and TWiki (Perl/GPL) are worth keeping an eye on, JSPWiki on the wiki/blog/api front and TWiki on the extension front. There is also SocialText, of course, but I don't know what differentiates their commercial Wiki implementation from popular free open source Wiki implementations other than service. Perhaps Ross or Peter can explain.
[Don Park's Daily Habit]

0xDECAFBAD Quick links

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 18:01:07 GMT

XML.com: Writing Your Own Functions in XSLT 2.0
Eigenradio - The top 20 singular values all day, every day!
fivesevensix: Amazing use of XHTML and CSS for Lee Jeans
Css Hacks - css-discuss
Fast rollovers, no preload needed: The trick is composing all rollover states in a single strip and repositioning the background image in the 'viewport'
Another image replacement technique: Seems like an elegant way to replace text with images, without extra markup

(Produced by BookmarkBlogger) [0xDECAFBAD]

0xDECAFBAD Quick links

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 17:56:34 GMT

ClientForm
Listamatic: CSS lists
XUL Apps > Tabbrowser Extensions - outsider reflex

(Produced by BookmarkBlogger) [0xDECAFBAD]

Listamatic

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 01:30:35 GMT

Russ Weakley's Listamatic borrows a whole bunch of fun CSS list effects from around the web and shows how they can be applied to the same markup to produce a large range of different results.
(via Simon Willison's Weblog) [Artima Web Buzz]

XslScraper

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 16:15:17 GMT

[0xDECAFBAD]

Selected 0xDECAFBAD Quick links

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 16:03:14 GMT

Mind-Expanding Machines: Science News Online, Aug. 30, 2003
cvs2rss - an RSS feed of CVS checkins
Projects - SVG TT Graph, SVG Pie charts, SVG Bar graphs and SVG Line graphs
Jenny Everywhere, Open Source Superhero
DiaWebLog: IRC Weblog bot
PythonToolbox - Matt Croydon::Postwiki
Raggle: Screenshots
Zoom: Z-machine for OS X. Check out frotz, too. Play classic Infocom text adventures and new interactive fiction.
Lantern : Installation: XPath visualisation tool

(Produced by BookmarkBlogger.) [0xDECAFBAD]

RSS template tutorial, part 2

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 03:28:00 GMT

This is a highly technical post in response to an email from a reader who wanted to know how to get comment data, comment text, trackback data and incoming trackback pings into one's RSS feed in Movable Type....
[The Aardvark Speaks in Excerpts]

It's all starting to fall into place

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 03:25:31 GMT

When the researchers and tool vendors hook up with the content providers and entreprenuers, new kinds of micro-content will flourish...
[w4feed:RSS 2.0]

Russian Design Links

Wed, 03 Sep 2003 03:20:53 GMT

In researching the design of a site I'm developing for a Russian friend, I stumbled across a plethora of well-designed web sites coming out of the design world in Russia. Here are a few of the best I've found ...
[CamWorld: Thinking Outside the Box]

Is the death of Flash on the horizon?

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 02:18:22 GMT

[Ars Technica]

KernelTrap: Open Source RSS feeds and blogs

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 02:01:24 GMT

KernelTrap aims to bring news about all open source kernels, not just the Linux kernel. However, at this time the majority of news posted to this site is Linux-centric. KernelTrap (also) has very dynamic RSS feeds.... of specific content.

Generally speaking, any KernelTrap URL that looks like '/taxonomy/view/...' can be turned into a feed by changing the word 'view' to 'feed'. Here are a few examples: Linux stories, FreeBSD stories, OpenBSD stories, and KernelTrap features.

KernelTrap is organized into numerous categories and subcategories utilizing Drupal's taxonomy functionality.
[via Daypop Top 40]

Well-formed writing and information routing

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 01:26:11 GMT

"The tagging conventions I've been applying for the last four months are really springing to life, now that structured search of my blog is available..." (Jon Udell)
[via Daypop Top 40]

Great commercial CSS site

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 11:16:47 GMT

Ryan Carver has done a really good job with his latest project, One True Fit for Lee Jeans. The site is a great example of a well designed, commercial site using CSS/XHTML. If you want to find out more about the site, Ryan has put up a page explaining the techniques he used to create the site. Nice work Fella!...
[Andy Budd::Blogography]

CSS notes

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:43:20 GMT

Some new CSS resources and examples: MiniTab Shapes are a new variant of CSS mini tabs, using small GIFs instead...
[hebig.org/blog]

CSS, Web Standards and Accessibility

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:30:52 GMT

There have been some good articles and posts on various blogs of late about CSS, Web Standards and Accessibility. Here's a selection of some of the best ones. Standards: Designing For the FutureOld Coding Habits Die HardIn Defense of the BoxOver-Accessible?...
[Andy Budd::Blogography]

RSS 2.0 Best Practice Tip: Entity-encoded HTML in Descriptions

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:14:41 GMT

Technical Recommendations for Avoiding Interoperability Issues Related to the Use of Non-ASCII Characters within Elements
[Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

Appease your inner geek

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:09:58 GMT

Any geek worth mentioning has been to SourceForge.net at least once in their life. As a matter of fact, I found an open source program there called POPFile that I simply cannot live without. Now as we all know; "Time is like money because everybody wants some from ya." We don't always have the opportunity to check out the latest software releases from SourceForge.net. Perhaps the thought never even entered our minds. Then a rival geek brags about their latest "open source find" all over the message boards. Don't you hate that? It sure drives me nuts, that's for sure. Fortunately for me I have my buddy RSS to appease my inner geek. The result; enter SourceForge.net's new software release RSS feed. (The feed does come up blank, but it works.) I can save a trip to their website everyday and remain informed of the latest developments in open source software. Mmm, now every time I open my aggregator I can actually feel the open source goodness tingling my nostrils. ;-)...
[Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

Tagging conventions for microcontent

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 03:06:19 GMT

Jon Udell has put up his structured blog search which allows you to write XPaths over an XML representation of his blog and get some useful information out of it. In the accompanying blog post he makes the plea for well formedness, since that makes things easier. No argument from me. What I'm more interested in is a description of his tagging conventions.
[Ted Leung on the air]

W3C Markup Validator 0.6.5 Beta #1

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 02:58:05 GMT

The new "Zeldman Made Us Do It!" edition of the W3C's free online markup validation service includes human-friendly error messages that you can customize, and a "fussy parsing" mode that catches technically kosher but problematic patches in your markup.
[Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]

Two RFCs: Comment notification in Radio and Manila

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 02:57:02 GMT

"Manila-Dev: RFC: Comment notification via email Radio-Dev: RFC: comment notification for Radio via email If you're a Manila or Radio developer, please have a look, and post any comments or questions you have on the corresponding mail list. Thanks!"

[Jake's Radio 'Blog]

Categorical indirection

Sun, 31 Aug 2003 02:35:21 GMT

Don Park's post on how to link blogs and wikis is actually an instance of the following. Take a category, or view (if you prefer database terminology) and send it off to somewhere else. This is cool, and another reason why multiple categorization would be useful. Each category can do its own rendering, transmission, etc.
[Ted Leung on the air]

LiteraryMoose: CSS Destroy

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 13:17:19 GMT

This page collects my own experiments with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Normal usage of styles is omnipresent throughout my site, as it is positioned and styled exclusively with CSS. Nevertheless, I felt the need to express my moosely ideas further, beyond what is considered normal. Therefore, whatever follows, should by construction be considered abnormal. I do not intend to save the world, or present ideas with Edisonous utilitarian properties; all experiments of mine are useless from the socially optimal point of view, they serve no purpose other than maximize the objective function of at least one individual, whilst leaving all others unharmed. Accordingly, if ideas explored here strike your fancy, by all means use them to destroy your otherwise perfect and visually attractive CSS design.

[CSS-Technik-News]

Different ways to organize RSS feeds

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 16:43:04 GMT

...At evectors we are working on a reputation-based filtering system, where users of k-collector will be able to have their news filtered according to who is writing about some specific topic. It's still at a very early stage, but it sounds promising. Whew... it looks like there's still a lot of stuff to invent and code to write, uh?
[w4feed:RSS 2.0]

Introducing O'Reilly's Developer News Site

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 15:20:21 GMT

I'd like to introduce you to O'Reilly's Developer News site. I think it is the cumulative work of the best parts of news sites today.
[Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network Weblogs]

Blogware developed in Ruby!?!

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 14:56:26 GMT

"Congrats on the first publicly deployed blog hosting system in Ruby! Cool! Could we have some more technical details please, Joey? Like why Ruby and why not Perl, PHP, ASP, etc? The things you mention are nice computer science arguments, but some juicy ammunition for PHB's :-) would be awesome!"

"Boss Ross has declared that we are far enough out of stealth mode for me to use my powers as Tucows' TC/DC (Technical Community Development Coordinator) and actually say what language the developers are using to write this pretty cool blogging tool called Blogware...

Ruby!

Some of you might right now be cocking your head to one side. Ru-what? If you're one of these people, Ruby is:

* A complete, full, pure object oriented language. Even the number 1 is an instance of class Fixnum.
* Flexible and dynamic. It's both dynamic (no need to declare variables) and strongly typed (types are checked at runtime). What to add methods to a class at runtime? No prob. Want to add methods to an instance at runtime? Once again, No prob.
* A language with a nice clean, consistent syntax
* Open source

(via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century) [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Closing the loop on XHTML blog content

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 23:08:45 GMT

James Farmer asks about the difference between WYSIWYG XML and HTML editing:
[Jon's Radio]

das Blog - open source and written in ASP.NET

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 16:34:07 GMT

"This is no "for money" product. We have developed that for our own needs and because we are educators and will use this code base in excercises with our students and therefore will give it away for them to play with, anyways, we can just as well share it with the rest of the folks out there, too.

This is "free software" without the politics. The software license we chose for DasBlog is plain and simple: BSD. You may use, modidy and redistribute our stuff as long as you keep us out of trouble and leave our and all of the other contibutor's copyright notices in. If you want to derive a closed-source, proprietary product from it ... just go right ahead. We don't like the GPL and the whole "must disclose source of derivative works" interpretation of "free"."
(via dasBlog.net) [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

SimpleBits | CSS Photo Zoom

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 16:30:13 GMT

After reading Pixy's clever Fast rollovers, no preload needed method for using a single background image for multiple hover states, it got me thinking. What if the concept was used to offer a zoomed view of a thumbnail image, right inline on the page, again using a single image?
(via MovableBlog) [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

The Design Council

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 16:05:53 GMT

The UK's Design Council aims to help people and organisations understand and use design more effectively. As part of this strategy they have an excellent About Design section on their site which focuses on design issues such as user centered design, information design, interaction design and inclusive (or accessible) design. They also run a number of sister sites...
[Andy Budd::Blogography]

The value of design

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 16:03:13 GMT

In my expirience most people view design as a superficial thing. It's about making something look nice, be that a business card, a brochure or a website. This is why many web designers jump straight into Photoshop when they get a new commission, and why clients expect to see designs before any requirements have been set. People just don't get...
[Andy Budd::Blogography]

All Things Distributed: Web Services are NOT Distributed Objects

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 15:54:51 GMT

...Popular (misconceptions) are: "Web services is just RPC for the Internet", or "You need HTTP to make web services work". Below I will try to address a number of the more popular misconceptions....
[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Standards don't necessarily have anything to do with being semantically correct

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 14:23:23 GMT

Since the push toward good HTML/CSS/XHTML standards started a few years ago, browsers have gotten better at rendering standards-compliant code correctly and web designers have gotten better at writing standards-compliant code. Safari and Mozilla in particular have made great gains in rendering code correctly and folks like Todd Dominey, Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, and Doug Bowman (the four Ds?) have built great-looking and usable sites with standards-compliant code and then......
[kottke.org]

Exploration and discovery

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 02:51:55 GMT

This week's column on dynamic languages, and its associated blog entry, provoked some interesting reactions. From Don Box:
[Jon's Radio]

Marc Canter

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 20:23:58 GMT

"The message we should all have tatooed on our forheads should read: Integration, aggregation and customization. Everything we need has been invented. Now it's just time to get it all to work together."

[Marc's Voice]

New Flavour Model for Blosxom

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 17:32:37 GMT

Rael Dornfest, (who I assume is the creator of Blosxom) incorporated a few suggestion I had for improving Blosxom 'Flavours' (themes). Instead of 4-5 text files spread around in the root folder, he has boiled a template down to 1 file stored in its own folder, inside a themes folder. This is going to be a much cleaner system, and now Blosxom has a standard model for themes with component parts, like images and css files. Simply store your images in the same folder as the theme file, and they will be automatically detected and used. In addition to this innovation, Rael will incorporate a standard way to designate different themes/flavours for subfolders in your directory.
[BryanBell.com]

XML-to-string converter (in XSLT)

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 17:23:26 GMT

[0xDECAFBAD Quick link]

RSSlets Are Just the Beginning

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 17:14:14 GMT

Phil had a nice post tonight about RSSlets from Eightlinks. I remember the Amazon RSS feeds hitting the ether about a month ago. RSSlets by themselves provide point functionality. I disagree with the location of the intelligence -- on a server. RSSlets in a MoveableType world can only be server based. In a Radio world, RSSlets are desktop based. Once you move this type of functionality to the desktop, a whole new world opens up. What is needed is a supervisory engine in Radio that provides a plug-in architecture for RSSlets. The rough structure is there with Tools, but this structure needs to be extended to provide management for RSSlets, a simple interface for creating RSSlets, interfaces that feed the news aggregator, and an engine capable of learning your preferences based on RSS subscriptions, RSSlet return data, and specific user input.
[Dann Sheridan's Weblog]

MetaWeblog API

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 17:09:24 GMT

"It is now safe to deploy applications based on this spec."
[Scripting News]

Embedding RDF in HTML

Tue, 26 Aug 2003 00:03:31 GMT

Radio embeds RDF data in the HTML output of my blog. I recall reading about this in the past. What is the commonly accepted view on this (from the RDF folks)? Good or Bad? Update: I found this article by Sean Palmer. The answer: It depends. But basically, OK.
[Blogdigger Development Blog]

New macro tricks put to good use

Mon, 25 Aug 2003 01:26:54 GMT

More insights and tips from TweezerMan! ...Since I worked out the programming for my monthly archive links macro, I keep seeing little things everywhere that I used to think would never be fixed but now are "not too difficult" or even "easy". In my news aggregator, I am subscribed to my own XML feed so I can see what is going out on...
[The Tweezer's Edge 2] Good value again!

Tracking down Radio problems

Mon, 25 Aug 2003 01:19:28 GMT

Well documented Radio debugging help:

[The Tweezer's Edge 2] Good value!

Sun tutorial on RSS

Sun, 24 Aug 2003 20:36:50 GMT

with software that parses RSS files from Java.
[Scripting News]

Cute CSS-based Rollover Trick

Sun, 24 Aug 2003 00:36:58 GMT

Typical rollover uses multiple images, one for each state. Petr Stanicek shows how CSS2's background-position attribute can be used to do rollover with just one image containing subimages for multiple states. Cute. Via Paschal L. For the impatient, here is the meat:

#menu a { ...
    background: url("button.gif") top left no-repeat;
... }
#menu a:hover { ...
    background-position: 0 -39px;
... }
#menu a:active { ...
    background-position: 0 -78px;
... }

[Don Park's Daily Habit]

Flash Head

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 23:39:50 GMT

I'm not sure how to describe this Flash app. Maybe something like this: It's a partial head that moves in response to your mouse. The author calls it "Looking," and says: "This is one of the hardest things I have ever managed to code. The engine is based on a single image and multiple clips sandwiched together. The math involved in the movement is still really buggy.... but hey! it's gettin there." The site is called ARSEIam, and it has lots of other cool stuff.
[The J-Walk Blog]

Scraping HTML with curl, tidy, and XSL

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 12:14:32 GMT

Continuing with making it easier for "Big Pubs" to create RSS feeds. I'm assuming that they have a publishing system, but it wasn't built with RSS in mind, but they want on the bandwagon.

Source: More Like This WebLog: Thursday, 21 August 2003

Using curl, tidy, and XSL to scrape content from HTML pages into an RSS feed. This is basically what I do now with a half-baked Java app using JTidy, XPath, and BeanShell. I keep meaning to release it, but it’s too embarassing to share so far. Yet, it’s been working well enough to scrape what sites I’m interested in such that I haven’t been too motivated to tidy it up and tarball it. One thing I like better about Bill Humphries’ approach, though, is that it doesn’t use Java :)
[0xDECAFBAD]

Bindows

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 23:35:17 GMT

Erik Arvidsson, the DHTML guru behind WebBoard and WebFX, revealed what he had been working on since last year: Bindows. Bindows is a DHTML framework that emulates Swing/WinForms UI, similar to what Convea and Oddpost. I am not sure yet, but Bindows seems to use XML to define its GUI. It seems pretty slow though. I suspect that most, but not all, of the slow speed is due to the server-side misdesigns.
[Don Park's Daily Habit]

Practical mod_perl: Chapter 6: Coding with mod_perl in Mind. Pt. 4

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 22:41:21 GMT

The following is the conclusion of our series of excerpts from Chapter 6 of the O'Reilly title, Practical mod_perl. (O'Reilly)
[WebReference News]

Object Sniffing New Browsers, Part 3: Opera

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 22:40:29 GMT

In this series we've looked at how you can use object detection to distinguish between various browsers and tailor your Web code to take advantage of their individual features (or lack thereof). In this last article, we look at the other major browser out there, namely Opera. (By Keith Schengili-Roberts)
[WebReference News]

XML machine the successor to von Neumann

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 22:31:05 GMT

Really bring data and programs together.
(The Register) [via Der Schockwellenreiter]

Understanding Web Services

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 22:04:56 GMT

[via Der Schockwellenreiter]