Sadly, they inserted a hidden link to some dumb dating site into the HTML they generate. Boo! ... Quiz was fun though.
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Instant addition to the sidebar: ADVOGATO
Dang. Ever have a moment of realization like “Where have I been to have missed this?” While I’ve been nattering on about about xhtml vs. html; tables vs. CSS for layout; PostGRE or MySQL or Oracle or SQL Server; Advogato has been discussing things of real importance. Check a few recent entries: Trust Metrics (which have uses anywhere there are many contributors and you want to have moderated distributed discussion, and applies to other systems as well), “Translation Memory” – Global, Free Repository?, Censor-proof global publishing. Check them out.
Tags: html, Oracle, to other systems
Old Home Weekend
I’ve been thinking about my old job, Jamison/Gold Interactive (no link, they got bought by a big IT Company and crumpled up and blew away) a lot lately. They were a boutique web outfit in Los Angeles, and did excellent Web/Interactive Design. Some news on some of the participants in that place:
Brett Walker, Designer, Director guru, Flash guru, is on the market as a designer, but off the market as a single person. He’s engaged! That’s so cool. So, go to his site, congratulate him on his engagement, and offer him a job!
Joe Toledo (The Ferreteer), Producer, Gamer, Encyclopedia of Media, cranky movie critic, sometime Screenwriter, now works for Ubisoft (I think I have that right). He’s getting married this weekend, and Jenny and I will be attending (Vegas!). He rocks.
Steve Sigler, Creative Director, Designer, daddy. He’s the first guy I ever met who could hack html like geek, and design like crazy too. He recently redesigned his site, and I (bad Joe!) have not checked it out like I want to.
Meanwhile, at my current job, we had coffee (read: quasi-semi-interview) with someone who worked with a boutique web place in San Francisco at the height of the boom. The descriptions this person gave of their working environment got me thinking more about J/G. What worked, what didn’t. The passage of time makes us idealize things, certainly. But it also brings to mind, for me, a fuller appreciation for what it was about. There may be lessons for me and my employer in thinking of the various events of J/G.
Tags: boutique web outfit, boutique web place, Brett Walker, G. What, html, Joe Toledo, los-angeles, San Francisco, Steve Sigler, Web/Interactive Design
Search Engine Upgrade to ht://Dig
Last night and this morning I installed htdig as the new search engine for this site internally. Back in August I mentioned that I would start using google because the solution I was trying had stopped working with any reliability. ht://Dig is open source and originated here in San Diego at SDSU.
Total time for installation and customization was about 5 hours total. This is valuable information in case I ever need to install an htdig search engine for a client. Lots of small details in doing this installation. I downloaded the installation as a tar.gz file, then decompressed that to a suitable location (cgi-bin). Then I had to do configure, make, make install. Installing unix software is always an adventure. This site runs FreeBSD (see: colophon, and I was delighted that it went pretty smoothly.
Then I was ready to start running it. This got tricky, but it was straightforward as I was able to tweak the conf/htdig.conf file to do what I like. rundig is the key to indexing a site. At first I had broken images, but it was working properly. The site initially indexes the htdig site itself. Just like any web robot, it goes out and looks at that site just as a browser would. This put my mind at ease, as I was not sure how it would deal with databased content, or the fact that the pages on my site are very include() driven. I was also concerned that because it is a local search engine, it would index files I don’t want indexed. The perl search engine I had originally installed had this problem. It would find older versions of files and garbage files that had become garbage for a reason.
As I got it working, and pointed it at artlung.com, I found a problem. The indexing process was taking far too long. Seems I had an infinite loop happening! In my accessibility slideshow from 1999 I had a problem. The [next] and [previous] links did not give any thought to whether they should actually show or not. The php for that I had written when I really knew very little php, and I ended up with the search engine indexing not just /words/accessibility/?i=0 to /words/accessibility/?i=10, but it was iteratively visiting the “next” and “previous” links like crazy. ?i=-1, ?i=-2, ?=-3, and on until I stopped it at ?i=-115. That would have been 115 versions of the “previous” page that was no different than the “first” poge. The PHP I had written in 1999 was smart enough to handle bad values for $i, but not smart enough to realize that there was no “previous” pages for those pages. The “next” links had the same problem. The htdig indexer was not smart enough to know that it was indexing hundreds of nearly identical pages. The solution was to fix the slideshow code so that it would not produce spurious links like that. After that fix, it was indexed properly and quickly. This is probably another reason that many search engines simply won’t touch pages with querystrings.
The next problem I had was that it was showing bad search results for certain pages. Example: I searched for the word “Zappa” – and I got far more results than I would have expected. Granted, I am a Frank Zappa Fan, but why would the bio page come up in a result for that? Turns out the indexer found the entry inside the bottom
Tags: bad search results, htdig search engine, htdig site, html, include-driven site, local search engine, Perl, perl search engine, PHP, san-diego, search page, search engine, search engines, search results, unix, unix software, unix system, web robot
inspired by a discussion on the WebSanDiego.org list:
my favorite html tags are [+] and
Tags: html
Messing about with a scheme to navigate the headers. Edging towards bits of dhtml in scattered locations. The HTML validates, too. But not the CSS.
About the W3C’s New Patent Policy which is getting so much attention these days.
I think you’re right. At some point several years ago a whole battery of folks were mad enough about the mess of standards support that we formed the Web Standards Project. I think that that kind of grassroots development was something that was listened to because dammit, we don’t want to have to write MS-HTML, Nescape-HTML, Opera-HTML, Whatever-HTML, etc – we’d much prefer for the browser makers to support a core functionality that we can use – and the w3c Recommendations are a great starting point. My hope is, that they will continued to me.
In my estimation, companies are free to continue making proprietary extensions to html and css (page transitions,
Tags: html, Web Standards Project
My wife has an online diary! voz37.diaryland.com is the address. Somehow, despite being married to me, she has show little serious interest in blogging or keeping a diary – but I think she may be hooked after seeing and enjoying other peoples’ journals.
Also, after having had no interest in anything to do with code for several years, now she’s asking me things like “so how do I make the links blue.” And of course I answer that I can think of at least 4 ways to make a link blue. I will try to limit my comments as she is learning to clear and concise, and not go on ranty raves about how she should assure to markup structurally, and style with css. If I can keep my trap shut our marriage should survive her foray into HTML just fine.
Tags: html, online diary
I put this in the lab because I don’t know where else to put it—HTML 2.0 – An exploration!. The idea here is an exercise in web authoring, 1996-style. Just some pointers to the original specs, and brief ruminations on how it’s a little different.
Tags: html, web authoring
linklint is one of a very few perfect pieces of software around. By which I mean that it does what it sets out to do with a minimum of fuss.
I have been using it since at least 1998 to wrangle the links in large static html sites. The author, Jim Bowlin, has put the software under the GNU GPL. Free, and free to modify. If you do unix it’s a tremendous tool to do QA and testing on your sites. Generates a spiffy report too – here’s artlung.com. Looks like I got some stuff to clean up. It doesn’t do javascript based links, or onclicks, or flash—not sure if it handles CSS style refrerences like: url(‘page.image’) or @import. Much to explore with this upgrade. It’s now 2.3.3. I’ve been using 2.1 for 3 years.
Hm. Looks like urls with querystrings (like my wedding photos) get treated gently. That’s good robot behavior! You can also set a delay so that you don’t inadvertently slashdot yourself. Heh.
Tags: html, Jim Bowlin, unix
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