Archive for the 'Code' Category
January 13, 2006
PrAjax
Pragmatic Studios is holding a 3-day Ajax training in Reston, VA next month. Check it out if you want your web dev team to be up to speed on the latest in interactive web applications.
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December 12, 2005
Lean XHTML and Precise CSS
For those of you employing or exploring standards-based designs using CSS (and this should be all of you!), check out this post on Lean XHTML and Precise CSS. Looks like a good method for organizing your stylesheets. CSS files can get pretty complex as your site develops, so having some organizational method will make life easier down the road. The article also reviews the benefits of keeping presentation code in CSS and out of your page markup.
(Via 456 Bereas Street blog.)
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November 25, 2005
Feel the Power of Standards-based Design
Chris Spurgeon works on the American Public Media family of web sites. He recently posted on the Well about some changes he made to the Marketplace web site:
I just changed the tab navigation of the Marketplace radio show website (www.marketplace.org) from vertical tabs along the left hand side of thepage to horizontal tabs along the top. Other than uploading the new tab graphics, all I had to do was tweak 2 CSS rules and the change instantly appeared on more than 5 thousand static pages. So damn cool.
Chris graciously gave permission for me to quote his post here. This is a fantastic example of how going to a CSS design allows you to make significant changes quickly by editing just a single file.
Another thing to note is that if you look at the source code for the page, you can see that it includes corporate branding and search elements for the overall organization that do not cleanly separate content from presentation. The reality of web design in large organizations is that you often don’t have control of everything and have to work around various things that are not open for negotiation. However, the rest of the page does separate presentation from content markup, which enabled Chris to make that big change so easily. This shows how you don’t have to follow a purist approach to still benefit from these techniques.
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November 22, 2005
Extension to RSS Spec Released
Microsoft has just published an extension to RSS and OPML to enable updates to be share back and forth (I think) via RSS and OPML.
Ray Ozzie has a post on how it came about.
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November 17, 2005
W3C Forms Working Group on Web APIs
The W3C is forming a working group to look standards for Web APIs. This will be good in the long run for making AJAX interfaces much easier to develop across browsers and platforms.
The W3C Web API Working Group is chartered to develop standard APIs for client-side Web Application development. This work will include both documenting existing APIs such as XMLHttpRequest and developing new APIs in order to enable richer Web Applications.
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October 10, 2005
MySQL and Oracle
Oracle just bought a company that provides a key piece of technology for the MySQL database. Here is Jeremy Zawodny’s summary of the situation.
MySQL is now faced with the prospect of licensing technology they cannot ship without from their biggest rival. Interestingly, there’s always been once piece of the InnoDB puzzle that’s not available under the GPL: the InnoDB Hot Backup Tool. Without it, database administrators cannot backup their InnoDB tables without shutting down MySQL or at least locking out all transactions.
Oracle just bought themselves a whole lot of leverage with MySQL AB and a talented team of database engineers to boot.
Keep an eye on this if you use MySQL within your organization.
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August 5, 2005
tRuTag: Aggregate Your Tags
Here is a nifty web app: tRuTag
I’ve created tRuTag with Ruby because I wanted to explore tagging. What it does is create an html page of your tags on various sites and then allows you to explore them on other sites.
I use it as my homepage and have just implemented some of it’s functionlity on my Ruby on Rails site. Below is a sample page. Please view the readme or download tRuTag and enjoy!
It requires Ruby on Rails to run. I’ll probably try to get this set up on my laptop this weekend.
(Via O’Reilly Radar.)
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July 12, 2005
Scaling Applications with Ruby on Rails
One of my more geekly habits is to track up and coming technologies for the web. Ruby on Rails is a relatively new development framework that focuses on allowing rapid prototyping of database-driven web applications. Here is a nice post on how RoR can scale up under heavy load.
Bonus link: a 15 minute video on how to create a weblog system in RoR in considerably less than 15 minutes. Assuming you know RoR inside and out, of course.
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June 30, 2005
Nick Bradbury on Microsoft & RSS
You may have heard that Microsoft announced recently that they will be building in RSS support to a great extent in their next operating system. Nick Bradbury provides his perspective on the move. He talks about some interesting possible outcomes and how, as a newsreader developer, he isn’t worried about MS eating his lunch, something they have been known to do in the past.
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June 21, 2005
Technorati Redesign
Eric Meyer discusses his role in the recent redesign of Technorati.
I was pleased to have Eric work on a redesign project when I was at ASHA where he optimized our xhtml/css design. Eric does great work, as he should since he literally wrote the book on CSS.
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