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Blogs ยป Archive for March, 2008
Visualising the world with Twine
It has been almost a week since I have started using Twine. I still feel compelled to explore and find out new things, much more so than on any other social networking site I have used.
The good thing so far is that I don’t (yet) feel overwhelmed with information. There are some peek periods were things pile up, but never too much. Think of it as an intelligent feed that has been hand crafted by some close friends and associates. The other reason there doesn’t seem to be information overload is that people are mindful of what they share. I know I am. with del.icio.us I just chuck anything in it, and that is what it is there for. Kind of like my desk drawer, whatever needs to be kept just gets dropped in.
With Twine it is more like the desktop that your colleagues and friends might see. I don’t want to be so messy, I want to portray at least some semblance of being together and knowing what I am talking about :) Of course with Twine you can do whatever you want. In my private twines I dump things in a more unordered fashion, lots of emails, bookmarks, …
Making ‘IE6-friendly’ PNG8 Images
For all the recent buzz and bubble generated by the IE8 beta, the slightly depressing reality is that IE6 is still going to be occupying more of our thoughts (and nightmares) for the foreseeable future. Even as IE7 has begun to gain marketshare, I can’t say I’m spending any less time writing IE6-specific code than I was, say, two years ago. Sad but true.
Likewise, if we ever thought we’d encountered all demons IE6 had to offer, we were mistaken there too, as George Reilly recounted in an interesting read last week.
Despite the fact that George draws upon seven years of ‘Microsoft insider’ experience, he spent 5 months trying to eliminate persistent, ‘app-killing’ IE6 browser hangs when using the garden-variety PNG32 alpha-transparency hack.
The fact that even he eventually admitted defeat and converted his images to PNG8 could be viewed as a sobering lesson for us all. Can you be 100% sure your PNG32s aren’t locking up at least some of your IE6 users’ browsers?
Of course, these things are often a trade off.
- Do you go for higher quality PNG32 images for most IE6 users, and …
15 invites to Twine
G’day all you loyal readers! I have 15 invites to Twine for anyone who can provide me with their URI. You don’t have one? Well, a little hint, read this post by Tim Berners-Lee and then run, don’t walk to the nearest FOAF-a-Matic and make yourself a shiny new FOAF file.
Put your FOAF file online and add a comment with the location. The first 15 will get an invite.
*UPDATE 20/03/2008* - I need your email addresses as well. Should have made that more clear. Cheers.
*UPDATE 21/03/2008* - Closing comments. All invites (plus some) are gone. If I can scrounge some more up I will post another entry. In the meantime keep your eyes peeled for some new entries on preparing your sites for next-gen search engines.
The Week in ColdFusion: 12-18 March: Beyond the New Atlanta announcement
More fallout from the BlueDragon open source announcement of last week: New Atlanta President Vince Bonfanti attempts to clear up some misconceptions; Allan Williamson gives an example of how the new open source version can be used by developers in conjuction with Amazon Web Services, and calls for community involvement in BlueDragon’s future; Michael Sharman covers a little about the other CFML engines available; and the ColdFusion Weekly podcast hosts a roundtable to discuss the move.
Fortunately, there is other news this week as well: in the tools category, Nathan Mische announced that ColdFire, the Firebug extension to allow ColdFusion debugging with Firefox, is now compatible with the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3; and CFEclipse, the IDE of choice for many CF developers, has a spiffy new web site.
One of the new features in ColdFusion 8 that doesn’t get a lot of press is the .NET integration. Anuj Gakhar demonstrates a potential use for the feature in his Coldfusion 8, .NET and Excel Example. When playing around with new features, you’ll want to be able to access the documentation - so Michael Sharman runs through some of the options available. Steve Bryant shows how to copy a directory using CFZIP; Ben Forta highlights …
A collection is not an array
I’m occassionally irked by the fact that a collection of DOM elements (more formally called a NodeList) can’t be manipulated like an array, because it isn’t one. However it does look like one, and thinking it is one is a mistake made so often by JavaScript novices that for our upcoming JavaScript Reference I felt it necessary to note this point for every single DOM object that is, or returns, a collection.
You can iterate through a collection like an array:
for(var i=0; i<collection.length; i++)
{
//whatever
}
But you can’t use Array methods like push(), splice() or reverse() to manipulate it.
Except that you can, if you take the next step and convert it into an array. This is in fact trivial:
function collectionToArray(collection)
{
var ary = [];
for(var i=0, len = collection.length; i < len; i++)
{
ary.push(collection[i]);
}
return ary;
}
The code above is fully cross-browser, and is called with the original collection as an argument:
var elements = collectionToArray(document.getElementsByTagName(’*'));
However if you only need to deal with browsers that support native object prototyping (Opera, Firefox and Safari 3) then you can simply create a toArray() method of NodeList:
NodeList.prototype.toArray = function()
{
var ary = [];
for(var i=0, len = this.length; i < len; i++)
{
ary.push(this[i]);
}
return ary;
};
Which can then be called as a method of the individual collection:
var …
Learn From The Best: The SitePoint Gurus
One challenge we face with having an enormous online archive of articles (over 1,400 at last count) is that finding information can be difficult — especially if you’re just beginning your journey in learning about web design.
For example, we have 35 articles on the topic of CSS alone — it can be confusing for beginners to know which article to read first.
As I’ve discussed previously, we’re aware of a number of improvements that can be made with regard to article navigation, and there are plenty of changes in the pipeline. The first of these is the SitePoint Guru Lists.
Every year the SitePoint Community Awards recognize those members of the SitePoint Forums who have made an exceptional contribution in helping others in their chosen field of expertise. I approached last year’s award winners and asked them to create a list of their favourite SitePoint articles for the category in which they were recognized. The result is an awesome collection of articles that have been hand-picked by experts.
The articles are listed in the order that they should be read, so if you’re tackling a topic for the first time, …
Apple rumored to move into kitchen appliances sector
Following hot on the heels of Apple’s reported problems with over-heating Macbook Air laptops, whispers emanating from Cupertino suggest Apple intends to launch a surprise raid on the lucrative small kitchen appliances sectors.
Sources believe the vanguard will be lead by their new iFry Personal Grill — a compact, low-fat cooking device designed to take the appearance of a small notebook computer. “Fat is designed to run off and pool beneath the keys leaving the food low-fat and tasty” said one industry insider.
Although some industry analysts are predicting wok and fondue attachments due in the third quarter, at this time those reports are being consistently refuted by Apple management.
As always, Apple have added their own techy spin to the product designed to set it apart from competitors within the sector: the iFry is believed to be able to operate as a fully-fledged, Mac OS computer at lower temperatures.
P.S. This is a spin off from some very cheeky inter-office Mac vs PC banter and posted with tongue very firmly placed in cheek ;)
Interpreting the Results of the SitePoint Reader Survey, Part 2: Content
In Part 1 of my analysis of the results from our reader survey, I revealed how your improvement suggestions were distributed, but some of the categories were a bit vague. For example “content suggestion” covered everything from more blog posts about singletons in PHP to more interviews with leading designers.
In this post I’ll explore in further detail your requests for us to cover specific types of content in our articles and blogs. It is, after all, this category into which the overwhelming majority of your suggestions fell.
Here’s the breakdown of the content that you want to read more of:
As you can see, the three biggest requests, aside from the “other” category, were for more of the same — business, development, and design-related content (in that order). That “business” category is pretty evenly split between requests for content that targets freelancers and entrepreneurs.
A few other suggestions that were high up on people’s wishlists:
- You’re after more multi-part tutorials that start from the very beginning and hold your hand through to delivering a complete solution. These obviously take time for authors to plan and create, but in the mean time I’ll be announcing …
Why RDFa is the only Web scaleable metadata format for next-generation search engines
Yahoo! is soon to launch their next generation Web search system dubbed SearchMonkey. This means that content developers have a powerful new tool in their arsenal. Something that was nearly impossible before. Here is a quick preview from Yahoo!
No longer dependant on Google
You no longer have to depend on Google’s good graces (and their smart people) to make sense of the content you have worked hard to create. You can explicitly specify what you meant with no ambiguity.
I was going to write this post in a few days, but a post on OpenBible.info has forced my hand — thanks for that :)
Yahoo! last week announced that it’s going to start indexing semantic data, including support for certain microformats.
Bibleref isn’t one of those microformats. Should Bibleref proponents lobby Yahoo! to index Bibleref, or should Bibleref change its syntax to be compatible with RDFa or another semantic web standard?
….
So what should Bibleref’s proponents do? It’s possible we could convince Yahoo! to index Bibleref, giving it the traction it needs to take off. However, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Yahoo! …
Twine’s dual personality
With Twine, what you see on screen tells only half the story. Pull back the curtain and it reveals a whole new side just itching to play with the other kids on the block.
When I log on and view my profile page, I see this:
A Semantic Web client sees this:
<rdf:RDF>
<app:User rdf:about=”http://www.twine.com/user/davidseth”>
<web:views rdf:datatype=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#nonNegativeInteger”>17</web:views>
<radar:createdDate rdf:datatype=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime”>2008-03-11T19:28:23.722-0500</radar:createdDate>
<radar:lastModifiedDate rdf:datatype=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime”>2008-03-14T18:47:51.546-0500</radar:lastModifiedDate>
<basic:url rdf:resource=”http://davidseth.net”/>
<basic:url rdf:resource=”http://www.sitepoint.com/articlelist/497″/>
<basic:url rdf:resource=”http://boab.info”/>
<basic:url rdf:resource=”http://davidseth.net/foaf.rdf”/>
<radar:isPerson rdf:resource=”http://www.twine.com/item/1tx4lphj-g5″/>
<app:status rdf:datatype=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string” xml:space=”preserve”>linkinging it all together in the tropics</app:status>
<app:location rdf:datatype=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string” xml:space=”preserve”>Townsville, QLD Australia</app:location>
</app:User>
</rdf:RDF>
Now the graph view:
Graph 1 - Twine (the yellow dot is me)
While the graph above is not going to become the next piece on display in the Louvre, it does include at least one beautiful thing.
The humble URL
That beautiful thing is the URL. This represents the concept of *me* as <http://www.twine.com/user/davidseth>. Technically this is a URI, but the entire point of the web of data is having things connected and discoverable. This means that I should be able to go to <http://www.twine.com/user/davidseth> and actually GET (do you see the HTTP/REST connection) the meaning.
Things are getting interesting
This is where the magic of linked data comes in. I can take my FOAF file (which is just a text file) and get this graph:
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