Programming

Creating PHP Web Sites with Smarty

I recently relaunched SportsFilter using the site's original web design on top of new programming, replacing a ColdFusion site with one written in PHP. The project turned out to be the most difficult web application I've ever worked on. For months, I kept writing PHP code only to throw it all out and start over as it became a ginormous pile of spaghetti. Back in July, SportsFilter began crashing frequently and neither I nor the hosting service were able to find the cause. I've never been an ... (read more)

2009/01/14

Peace Declared Between Myself and Sweden

As it turns out, Sweden did not intentionally declare war on my web server earlier this month. Programmer Daniel Stenberg explains how the international incident happened: A few years ago I wrote up silly little perl script (let's call it script.pl) that would fetch a page from a site that returns a "random URL off the internet." I needed a range of URLs for a test program of mine and just making up a thousand or so URLs is tricky. Thus I wrote this script that I would run and allow to get a ... (read more)

2008/12/30

Using Treemaps to Visualize Complex Information

I spent some time today digging into treemaps, a way to represent information visually as a series of nested rectangles whose colors are determined by an additional measurement. If that explanation sounds hopelessly obtuse, take a look at a world population treemap created using Honeycomb, enterprise treemapping software developed by the Hive Group: This section of the treemap shows the countries of Africa. The size of each rectangle shows its population relative to the other countries. The ... (read more)

2008/12/23

Finding Updated Feeds with Simple Update Protocol

FriendFeed is working on Simple Update Protocol (SUP), a means of discovering when RSS and Atom feeds on a particular service have been updated without checking all of the individual feeds. Feeds indicate that their updates can be tracked with SUP by adding a new link tag, as in this example from an Atom feed: <link rel="http://api.friendfeed.com/2008/03#sup" href="http://friendfeed.com/api/sup.json#53924729" type="application/json" /> The rel attribute identifies an ID for the feed, ... (read more)

2008/12/06

Customizing Apache Directory Listings with .htaccess

I was clearing off my desk today when I found an article I've been meaning to scan and send to somebody -- the story of how my friends almost elected a dalmatian and squirrel to the homecoming court of the University of North Texas in 1989. The alumni magazine wrote a feature on Hector the Eagle Dog and Agnes the Squirrel's campaign, which attracted national media and made a few of the human homecoming candidates very angry. I can never tell when a file's too big to send in email without ... (read more)

2008/11/26

Sharing Bookmarks and Feed Lists with XML

I'm working on a programming project that requires an XML format to represent bookmarks and other collections of URIs, but before I reinvent the wheel I'd like to see if there's an existing format that meets my goals. The format should be able to hold all of the following information: Bookmarks in web browsers Links in web directories like the Open Directory Project Feeds in an OPML subscription list Social bookmarks in Delicious There are several potential formats that could be put to use: ... (read more)

2008/11/25

New Comment Pages Added to Workbench

I spent a little time this morning improving the comment system on Workbench. There's now a comments page that shows the 50 most recent comments submitted to the weblog. After you submit a comment here, the site will store your name and home page link in cookies for 180 days so you don't have to type them in again. I've also added a line to the site's moderation policy: "Comments that have nothing to do with the subject of a post will be deleted." There's too much off-topic noise here. I'm not ... (read more)

2008/09/18

Adding ReCaptcha to a Weblog

I've added a ReCaptcha component to the comment form on Workbench to deter spammers. The ReCaptcha system presents two hard-to-read words that must be typed in successfully for a comment to be saved. Here's what the component looks like: I tried as long as possible to avoid using captchas, but the amount of spam hitting this blog continues to grow, particularly from foreign IP addresses. Workbench has received 16,000 comments and more than 260,000 spam since it began accepting comments in 2002. ... (read more)

2008/08/14

SiteMeter Crashes Internet Explorer with 'Operation Aborted'

Last night several of my web sites, including the Drudge Retort, began crashing Internet Explorer with the error message "Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site ... Operation aborted." I've encountered this error before, and when it occurs out of the blue on a site you haven't changed, the culprit is usually a problem with third-party Javascript code, as CNet's Clientside blog explains: IE does this when you attempt to modify a DOM element before it is closed. This means that if you ... (read more)

2008/08/02

Displaying Twitter Updates on a Web Page

I recently began using Twitter, a microblogging service for posting short, chat-like blog entries and reading what other users of the service are doing. The site has severe reliability problems, but it's still an entertaining way to get real-time updates from bloggers I read along with others I know who've been sucked into Twitter's maw. I wrote some code to display my most recent Twitter update on my weblog, Workbench, in a sidebar at upper right. This afternoon, I've released the ... (read more)

2008/07/08

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