In reaction to the more than 34,000 visitors that Why your Flash website sucks generated (and is still generating) Jeremy enabled WordPress’s SuperCache for me.
Turns out SuperCache does a less than super job with non-ASCII characters, failing to encode them to HTML entities, and instead writing them out as multi-byte UTF-8 sequences:
This article and map of the “blogworld” has this to say about LiveJournal:
This blogging island is just barely in touch with the rest of the blogworld.
Them’s fightin’ words. You gonna take that lying down, LJ?
I got this email Tuesday from Joel Holdsworth, announcing that he had ported my Alphabet Soup pseudo-letter-generator from a bitmap to a vector model, and turned it into an Inkscape plug-in. He tells me that the extension will likely be included with Inkscape v0.47.
I cannot begin to express how phenomenally awesome this is. This is the kind of news that keeps me writing, and releasing, little free software projects. Six years ago I wrote Alphabet Soup as a little art project; it was fun. I released it under an open source license, and then never got around to improving it to output a vector format. Then somebody I’ve never met comes along, and not only improves it, but integrates it into a bigger free software project and it will soon be available to thousands of users in a greatly improved form.
You can pull the extension out of Inkscape’s SVN here. You’ll need these files:
share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.inx share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.py share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup_config.py share/extensions/alphabet_soup/*.svg
Thanks Joel. Thanks Inkscape. I’m feeling pretty damn freetarded right now, and it feels good.
I’ve just posted Relational databases and free-form data over on the Mosuki blog.
There are two quite different reasons for implementing HTML generation on a website. The first reason is to insert dynamic content, content that comes from a database or is algorithmically generated, into pages. The second reason is templating; to ensure that standard, site-wide parts of the HTML, such as headers and footers, are pulled from a single source. The goal of the first is to have a dynamic, database-driven site. The goal of the second is to avoid having to edit tens, or hundreds, of HTML files when the site design changes, and to avoid copy-and-paste coding.
This all-Flash interface (screenshot) is a complete reimplementation of the WordPress blog interface; One single Flash widget fills the entire browser page, and implements not only the home page, but categories, comments (including posting), and article pages. It sounds like the author intends to use it to replace the HTML interface to his blog entirely. It’s a great example of why you should never build an entire website purely in Flash.
Hank Williams makes an excellent point about the restriction that apps on the iPhone may not run in the background.
[the] issue [of resource limiting applications] has been dealt with in Unix, and with real time systems for many years.
In short, this argument is a strategically placed fig leaf, which is easily blown away.
Previously, I thought the no background applications restriction was a good call on Apple’s part. This article totally changed my mind. Williams is right; and Apple will have to lift this restriction before long, or risk being overtaken Android and others.
Take this awareness test.
If you’re going to write a program to steal people’s logins and passwords, don’t hard-code your own login and password into that same program. Otherwise awesome, benevolent hackers like Dustin Brooks will bollox things up for you real good, and then Jeff Atwood will publicly embarrass you.
