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Blogs » Archive for June, 2006
IE 7 Beta 3 is here
For those of you waiting with baited breath, and possessing a spare machine that you can afford to render non-functional or have a Virtual PC license, get IE 7 beta 3 now.
Snake Soup
One of the (few) defining points of Web 2.0 is consuming remote data and services. Which is great if your service provider is Amazon, Yahoo or Google but not so great if it’s your regional elected representatives, who may only have just arrived at Web 1.0. Being able to mine such sites for data is becoming more and more a part of everyday web development.
Anyway, while pondering what forummatrix or wikimatrix is lacking, figured this was a good excuse to take BeautifulSoup for a spin; “a Python HTML/XML parser designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping”, one of the better (if not the best, according to opinion) tools of this kind (note there’s also RubyfulSoup by the same author).
Beautiful Soup is capable of handling pretty much the worst HTML you can throw at it, and still give you a usable data structure. For example given some HTML like;
<i><b>Aargh!</i></b>
…and running through Beautiful Soup like;
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
print BeautifulSoup(’<i><b>Aargh!</i></b>’).prettify()
…I get;
<i>
<b>
Aargh!
</b>
</i>
…notice how it’s changed the order of the tags. This clean up allows me to access the inner text like;
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(’<i><b>Aargh!</i></b>’)
print soup.i.b.string
This isn’t intended as a full tutorial - …
Jun 29, 2006 News Wire
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Flash Player 9
Flash Player 9 is out (but not yet for Linux) with the new, high-performance ActionScript 3.0 virtual machine used by Flex and slick automatic updates.
(tags: flash) -
Flash Professional 9 ActionScript 3.0 Preview
If you’ve got Flash Professional 8, you can now download a preview of the ActionScript 3.0 support coming in Flash Professional 9, currently slated for release in 2007.
(tags: flash) -
Speeding up Prototype’s Selector
You know JavaScript is considered a “real language” when people start optimizing their code for performance. This 3rd party update to Prototype adds special handling of simple cases to greatly boost performance.
(tags: javascript) -
Introducing Drosera
Safari now has a full-featured JavaScript debugger!
(tags: safari javascript) -
Debugging JavaScript with Firebug
At 16-minute screencast demonstrating the features of FireBug 0.4, the indispensable developer extension for Firefox.
(tags: firefox) -
Live Clipboard How-To for End Users
An interesting demo of how Microformats can be used with Microsoft’s “Live Clipboard” technology to enable pieces of information to be “copied” out of one web page and “pasted” into another. This proof-of-concept works in IE only for now.
(tags: microformats) -
No native MacTel Flash 9 player but a solution…
Though Flash Player 9 …
Jun 28, 2006 News Wire
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CSS Galleries: aggregating web design inspiration
A single site and RSS feed that tracks new additions to the various CSS design showcase sites, including CSS Mania, Stylegala, Unmatched Style and many more.
(tags: css design) -
8 Invaluable Wordpress Plugins!
A short-and-sweet look at eight excellent plugins for Wordpress, the popular PHP blog software.
(tags: php) -
jQuery Visual Documentation
A visual reference to jQuery, the super-lightweight library designed to make the most common JavaScript tasks easy and fun.
(tags: javascript) -
Ten Possible Consequences of Google’s GBuy
Some interesting speculation on just what effect the imminent launch of GBuy may have on the world of online commerce.
(tags: business google) -
Flex 2
Flex 2, Adobe’s new platform for building rich web apps with Flash user interfaces, has been released! The SDK is free, the Eclipse-based IDE is $499, and the enterprise data services component is free for 1 CPU ($20,000 per CPU thereafter).
(tags: flex)
Console.WriteLine(”Hello World”);
Hello world. I am Wyatt, and I am blogging this.
Forum Comparison
Following on from wikimatrix.org the same team has now put together forummatrix.org - not yet a comprehensive list but some familiar names already online for comparison.
Might be nice to hook in some external data sources, such relevant security messages from BugTraq and perhaps blog posts from somewhere like Technorati.
Anyway - another useful service I think.
The McFarlane Prize for excellence in Australian web design
A new annual web design award, the McFarlane Prize, has been created to recognize excellence in Australian web design.
Named in memory of noted Australian web pioneer Nigel McFarlane, the inaugural McFarlane Prize, aims to recognize and encourage excellence in web design by Australian developers.
The Prize also aims to be a showcase of the best in Australian web design, and to inspire other Australian developers in their own endeavours.
A jury of specialists in design, usability, accessibility and coding will be tasked with the responsibility of choosing a winner, to be announced at this year’s Web Directions conference in Sydney in September.
Nigel McFarlane was the technical editor on SitePoint’s Firefox book, and was well known and liked by the SitePoint crew. Personally, I credit Nigel for getting me excited about web technology after seeing him present at a Web Standards Group meeting a couple of years ago, and I can’t think of a more fitting way for him to be remembered.
So, if you’re an Aussie and you’re proud of a recent (re)design that you were involved in between August 1st 2005 and July of this year, submit your site and you could …
ASCII diagrams to image
In:
+———+ +———+ +———+
| Shape | | Line | | Point |
+———+ +———+ 2 +———+
| draw +<——–+ start +—-O+ x |
| move +<-+ | end | | y |
+———+ \ +———+ +———+
\
\ +———+
…
Jun 27, 2006 News Wire
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Xyle scope
A nice introduction to Xyle scope, a DOM/CSS debugging tool built on Safari’s WebKit rendering engine.
(tags: css software) -
15 Great ASP.NET 2.0 Data Tutorials Published
This series of fifteen free tutorials explains how to build a robust data access layer for an ASP.NET 2.0 application. Each tutorial is available in C# and VB.NET versions, and can be downloaded as a PDF.
(tags: asp.net .net) -
8-bit png and gif. Which one is smaller in filesize?
According to this blog post, an 8-bit PNG file will be smaller than the equivalent GIF file if that GIF is larger than 4KB.
(tags: design) -
Gabbly
Slick service that provides a chat facility for visitors to any page on the Web. The AJAX -powered chat interface floats over the page, or can be docked to the side of the browser window.
(tags: ajax) -
Web Professional’s Code of Ethics
Molly Holzschlag calls for a common code of practice for the way web professionals do business.
(tags: business) -
The Use of Colour
A nice article describing some of the effects of various colors when used in web design. Provides a decent introduction to the various types of color combinations …
Are you taking care of yourself?
The recent discussion about weight loss got me thinking about selling, working with clients, and general vitality/energy.
I had been feeling lethargic lately, so I worked out with a boxing fitness trainer this morning. What a workout! After the 90 minutes of drive plus workout time, I felt great. Indeed, I got more done the rest of the day than normal. I was much more productive. And when I interacted with people I was more alert, on the ball, and enthusiastic.
Good eating can have the same effect for me. If I eat a big meatball sub (my favorite), I generally feel like a nap in the afternoon. But if I keep the portions smaller and a bit healthier, the afternoon is no problem.
It may sound obvious, but many of us (like me) live a bit unconsciously when it comes to taking care of ourselves. And that can lead to problems taking care of others.
What about you? Are you taking care of yourself?
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