Those of you who’ve been using vCardMaker may have noticed that there has been little in the way of updates for many months. This is mainly because I’m at university, and most of my time is taken up with working and partying :)
However, my Christmas holidays are fast approaching and I’m going to use the opportunity to apply lots of very significant updates to the service. Many of these updates are features that I’d like to see in the service myself, as well as requests from users and a few new things I’ve thought up.
You’ll have to wait to find out what many of them are, but don’t worry. The wait isn’t long!
Have you ever wanted to have a feed of your MySpace comments so that you can find out when someone’s left you a new one? Well now you can. Derek Punsalan has written up an article about how to create a feed of your comments. It’s free and very easy to set up, and you can even password protect it if you like.
Hot on the heels of the “website as a graph” application is the web2dna art project, which takes a website and renders its source code in a DNA-style graphic.
According to the W3C, XHTML should be served with the application/xhtml+xml MIME type rather than text/html, which is used for plain old HTML, or application/xml and text/xml, which some people (incorrectly) use instead.
Until now, I’ve served my pages with text/html as Internet Explorer does not support application/xhtml+xml and offers your pages for download rather than displaying them as it should.
I found an article yesterday which details a way in which you can serve your pages with the appropriate type depending on the browser. A sample PHP script was also included. I took the script and modified it to serve my purposes, and now my pages are served as application/xhtml+xml if the browser supports it, and text/html otherwise.
Continue reading "The perils of MIME types and XHTML" »
I’ve been using Windows Live Writer for a few days now and posting all of my blog articles using it. I’ve found it an altogether pleasing experience, especially as the software makes it so easy to do many things. However, there are a few small things that I think could be improved.
- You can’t give an article a separate excerpt, which makes Movable Type using a first part of your post body instead. It’s not too bad though, as I prefer the latter behaviour.
- When you paste a multi-paragraph block of text into a blockquote, paragraphs aren’t made properly. Every paragraph starts with a <p> but doesn’t end with a matching </p>, making it invalid XHTML. I don’t know if this is also the case with normal blocks of pasted text as opposed to a blockquote.
- The Windows Live Writer window does not seem to remember its last size settings and always default to a small windows at the bottom of the screen.
Other than these small annoyances, the software is great for a beta.
So Microsoft have decided to conquer the blogging-from-a-PC-application market by releasing the beta of Windows Live Writer.
Basically, the software is a glorified version of the venerable WordPad that’s been with us since Windows 3.1, updated with the 2007 style and with the main functionality of posting to a blog. In a first for Microsoft, they’ve made the tool work with blogging tools other than their own, and even this beta version works with an amazing number of apps, although more support is planned for future releases. The application mainly works using XML-RPC and other such interfacing standards, which means that its support can be extended.
Set-up is very easy, and all you really need to do is to enter the URL of your blog, plus a username and password. The software works out most of the rest itself, and only asks you if it needs further information (in my case, it asked for Movable Type’s XML-RPC URL, which is easy to work out as it offers the placeholders). You can also provide some FTP details if you want it to use those to upload your pictures, otherwise it just uploads it to your weblog app, which then stores it somewhere or another.
The main window contains a writing pane with all the usual rich-text editing tools, plus a spelling checker, which is a must for all us blogging types! There’s even a function to insert pictures and maps from Windows Live Maps. The editor saves drafts just in case that all-important post goes missing :)
After posting your entry, you can have a look at it on your weblog, and if the software supports it, the writing pane itself adapts to show your post in your blog’s style, even as you’re typing it, which is a nice touch.
The interface itself needs a little tweaking here and there and maybe some touch-ups, but overall, it’s a very nice version 1.0 app from the Windows Live people. Well done Microsoft!
PS. Oh, and if you were wondering, this post itself was written and posted using Windows Live Writer. See how easy it is? If you want more information, or to download it and try it out for yourself, visit the Windows Live Writer Zone.
According to Valleywag, Lycos is set to shut down the web coding help site Webmonkey in a few months, quoting an anonymous source from within the company.
If this is true, then it will be another major blow to those who use sites like Webmonkey to get a foothold on the world of web coding and design. The site has a rich archive of well-written and engaging articles which are set to be deleted out of all existance. Granted, some of them are now quite out-of-date, but with Webmonkey’s budget allegedly so low, I’m not at all surprised. There are even broken links on the homepage, which doesn’t bode well at all.
Continue reading "Lycos to shut down Webmonkey?" »
What does your website look like when you render it as a graph? Here’s wackomenace:
I recently signed up to the much-talked-about MySpace to see what all the hype was about. I couldn’t understand why it was so much popular than some of its rivals in the form of Xanga and MSN Spaces, among others. I was expecting a site with plenty of wow-factor, but most of all, flexibility to be able to truly make your profile “your own”. Once I’d signed up, however, I was struck by the complete opposite.
Continue reading "MySpace is not pimpable enough" »
A few months ago, I came across an article named “Web Developers: Speed up your pages!” Yes, it was written in November 2005, but that’s just like me - late to everything!
I read through the article thinking that it would contain valuable advice which I could use in order to speed up load time (which was a problem I had for quite a while before I finally found a way to fix it). However, as I went through it, I found that much of the advice seemed either to be flawed or contradictory to web standards (especially XHTML). Therefore, I’ve decided to look at each point in turn and discuss whether it’s really necessary and whether it’ll actually make that much of a difference.
Continue reading "Standards vs. Speed" »
