Writing
Building software and the web. 53 posts filed under Tech.
In a couple of months this blog will have been running for a decade. The website started as just a mechanism to throw my thoughts into the ether. Over the years however, as I've pushed myself as a web developer, it's become a more of a sandbox for experimentation.
If you follow me on twitter you'll probably know I'm very opinionated and more than happy to discuss (some would say argue or troll) my opinions. I indent with spaces, Lea Verou indents with tabs. Lea has blogged about her reasons why she thinks that tabs are superior. I'm going to provide my opposing opinion and then tell you why neither of our opinions should really matter anyway.
As a rule, we only deploy websites from Subversion and this is something that we made company policy long ago. However, there are times when we are limited to FTP access and for these occasions it's good to have a decent FTP client. Panic's Transmit has, for a long time, set the standard for FTP clients on Mac OS X.
HTML5, I love the idea but I often find myself having issues with the ongoing saga of politics around it. Faruk Ateş recently wrote of The Battlefield of HTML5 (it's a good read if you haven't already) and made one suggestion that I completely support, Modularised HTML5.
It's been a long time since I've given my blog any decent amount of loving. I've often talked about the things that I've wanted to do but my dreams often didn't produce any tangible results. I have created more design concepts for this website than I care to think about and have many gigabytes of hard drive space taken up by concepts in photoshop format. Some concepts even reached the HTML or Wordpress theme stage, but none went live. In terms of development, I've looked reworking and extending Wordpress many times and have even looked at developing a Django-powered version. Nothing came from my redevelopment attempts either. That is, not until today.
The age of HTML5 has arrived and it’s time that we should all be using it, however, in your rush for the “next cool thing” please do not brush accessibility aside.
Apache's mod_rewrite has become a friend to web developers throughout the world. It allows you to create tidy, user-readable URLs instead of ugly, meaningless links that often just expose an ID for a database record. A 'Fancy URL' will usually contain a version of the page title which is both human and machine readable as well as being a valid URL segment, this is called a slug.
I really like CakePHP and as I have previously mentioned, I had been intending to use it for the all new KeriHenare.com. However, I've decided to forget that and try something really new.
Dan Cederholm is in the middle of another live design refresh. In the meantime SimpleBits has no styling what-so-ever. I'm not a very patient person and I love Dan Cederholm's designs so I decided not to wait for the new design.
The web standards community will probably remember today as the coldest day in hell. Microsoft have announced that the latest build of IE8 successfully passes the Acid 2 test. For those who don't know what Acid 2 is, it's a test page created by the Web Standards Project for browser vendors to use as a method for validating the standards compliance of their products. The fact that IE8 passes Acid 2 must have silenced a few of Microsoft's critics.
Jeremy Keith is probably my favourite AJAX specialist, especially with his focus on Hijax. So I was really happy to hear that he's now written a book. Bulletproof Ajax looks like it's going to be a great book for those of us who want to experiment more with AJAX but aren't necessarily JavaScript pros. It's definitely going on my shopping list. (via)
Before I started travelling around I handled all of my email from Mozilla Thunderbird on my Desktop PC using POP3. Thunderbird's spam filtering was great at filtering my spam client-side and I was content. But then I sold my PC and started travelling. I quickly switched to using the RoundCube webmail client (I could have used DreamHost's default SquirrelMail but it's ugly as hell) but ran out of time to configure SpamAssassin to protect my inbox from the torrent of junk floating through cyberspace. So I traveled the globe, often with little time to check with my email, sometimes weeks apart... and the spam piled up.
This is something that I've been meaning to post about for ages but haven't gotten around to, so I'll do it quickly now.
When I originally wrote my portfolio into the website... well I don't know what the hell I was thinking. There were no links and it instead used JavaScript to pop-up a window based on the id attribute value. Obviously I was asleep that day. It was completely non-accessible and you had to have JavaScript enabled just to view any piece.
I've been using Steve Smith's Tiger Admin(istration) Plugin for WordPress for quite some time now. Basically it just restyles the WordPress Admin Panel to look a lot nicer. I recently managed to get my grubby little fingers on the Tiger Admin 3.0 Beta. (By which I mean that I got it from Steve, not illegally.) I'm sworn to secrecy so I can't give away too much but it looks very, very sexy. Expect huge changes which make for a better product. Keep visiting Ordered List to get a hold of your own copy when it releases.
What, drawn, and talk of trends! I hate the word, As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee. Well OK a little over the top, but Shakespeare sure knew how to rant. On one of my all-too-frequent visits to SimpleBits I noticed that Dan had decided to tear things apart and do a live redesign. This approach leaves the website styleless or incomplete in the process. Most people choose to develop the website in private, then through slight of hand replace the old site with the new one seamlessly. Some wish to criticize this approach and others wish to follow the trend. It reminds me of computer game release delays. Everybody complains when a game is delayed but, when John Carmack delayed Doom 3 by 12 months there was no complaint. You don't doubt someone like John Carmack and you don't doubt someone like Dan Cederholm.
When I first got my MacBook I installed Transmission to look after my BitTorrent downloads but found it a little too lightweight for what I wanted. Bit Sticks has to get an honorable mention as a cool widget for for downloading torrents. Runner up was BitRocket but the top podium spot has to go to Xtorrent.
More than anything, this post is just about claiming my blog on Technorati. I don't really use Technorati, as exciting as it's release was it's just never really clicked with me. Apparently I don't visit the site nearly as much as I should as I never re-claimed the blog after switching domains last year. So while I'm at it, here's a chance for everyone to tell me what's so great about Technorati. So what is it?
I have mixed feelings about buzz-words. They save you the time of having to say or write a ridiculously long name but at the same time they become representative of so many things, both good and bad. The obvious example here is Ajax which, let's face it is far easier than typing Asynchronous JavaScript and XML all of the time. Not to mention that Ajax just sounds cool. We have Jesse James Garrett to thank for the term, and when I first read his article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications I was really excited. Here was a way to change the content of a page without the annoying page reload, the birth of true web applications. But sometimes the web moves too fast for it's own good.
I've been a growing fan of Apple Computers for several years now and over the last 18 months they've really become a passion of mine. While travelling I got to have some great Apple experiences thanks to my good mate Hayden and his lovely friends Pam and Paul Costa. Pam and Paul are both Apple employees and Apple fans (Paul is the Lead Engineer on the iMac). They put us up for several nights in their beautiful home in Sunnyvale where proudly displayed is this poster. We got to watch a game of Segway Polo featuring none other than Mr Steve Wozniak followed by lunch with all of the Segway Polo players and a quick tour of the Apple Campus at Cupertino.