Classes

• Support for Traits (i.e., mix-ins; addresses the multiple-inheritance problem).
• Support for chaining from the constructor: (new Class)->method()
• Support for Class::{expr}() syntax.
• Closures inherit $this from the outer scope.
• Added ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor() to create a new instance of a class without invoking its constructor.
• Added a new typehint: callable

Improvements

• Array dereferencing and short array syntax: echo [1, 2, 3][0]
• json_encode() now supports these additional flags: JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE, JSON_BIGINT_AS_STRING, JSON_NUMERIC_CHECK, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT and JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES.
• Multibyte support is enabled by default.
• Faster unserialize() and ternary operator performance.
• IPv6 support.

Fixing the cruft

• ext/mysql, mysqli and pdo_mysql now use mysqlnd by default.
• Removed magic quotes, safe mode, register globals, allow call-time pass-by-reference, and more!
• Default character set is now UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1.

Since then, I’ve been polishing the standards from one project to the next to the point where I believe that I have a solid, rational set of guidelines that others can share and re-use.

Any feedback that other PHP developers may have is welcome. I’m hoping to incorporate the better bits of feedback into improvements to the standards.

http://j.mp/php-standards

Prerequisites

• Install MacPorts

Also, make sure that your MacPorts install is completely up-to-date with:

sudo port -d selfupdate

Installation

Now, I’ve never used MacPorts to install PHP or Apache before, so I’m starting with a clean slate. If you’ve already installed PHP or Apache with MacPorts, your steps may be different. As always, your mileage may vary. For me, I develop several open-source projects, so I need things that others may not. Adjust these steps as necessary.

1. Using “Web Sharing” in your Sharing Preferences should be turned off. Currently this points to the (old) Apple Apache installation, although we’ll change that later.
2. From Terminal, install PHP 5.3 + Apache, and some other stuff. This will likely take quite a while. I’m installing SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL because of my work on CacheCore, so you may or may not need those. mysqlnd is the new PHP Native Driver for MySQL and is supposed to be better, so we’ll use that. We also need to enable non-default settings for cURL.

   sudo port install curl +ssl+ipv6+ares+idn+gss+openldap+sftp_scp \
   php5 +apache2+fastcgi+pear

   You can see all available options by running port variants php5

3. The new Apache configuration file is stored at /opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf while the old one was at /etc/apache2/conf/httpd.conf. Take a moment to copy over any settings you’ll want to maintain into the new Apache installation.
4. You’ll also want to include your extra settings. Toward the bottom of your httpd.conf file, add the following line:

   # All settings
   Include conf/extra/*.conf

5. If you don’t have an SSL certificate, rename your SSL configuration:

   cd /opt/local/apache2;
   sudo mv conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf-disabled

6. You’ll also want to enable PHP in Apache:

   sudo mv conf/extras-conf/mod_php.conf conf/extra/mod_php.conf

7. The new PHP configuration file is stored at /opt/local/etc/php5/php.ini while the old one was at /etc/php.ini. Take a moment to copy over any settings you’ll want to maintain into the new PHP installation.
8. You’ll need to tell Apache to enable PHP support. Open your new httpd.conf file, find where the extensions are loaded (with LoadModule), and add this to the end of the line:

   LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so

9. Restart Apache. If you were using apachectl before, it still points to the old Apache, so we’ll want to point specifically to the new one.

   sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart

At this point, PHP 5.3 with Apache 2.2 and the new mysqlnd extension are all installed.

Extra stuff

1. I generally prefer to have lots more stuff installed locally so that I can worry more about developing and less about installing. Because of this, I also install a few other things.

   sudo port install memcached \
       php5-apc \
       php5-curl \
       php5-gd \
       php5-http \
       php5-iconv \
       php5-imagick \
       php5-mbstring \
       php5-memcache \
       php5-mysql \
       php5-openssl \
       php5-postgresql \
       php5-sockets \
       php5-sqlite \
       php5-tidy \
       php5-xdebug

2. Restart Apache with:

   sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart

Replacing older versions

Now, we want to continue using our command-line PHP scripts and the “Web Sharing” checkbox in the Sharing Preference Pane, so let’s make sure that those are all pointing to the new locations instead. We’ll be backing up and redirecting php, apachectl, and httpd.

1. Open up your Sharing Preference Pane, and disable Web Sharing
2. Run the following command on the Terminal:

   sudo mv /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php.bak && sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/php /usr/bin/php; \
   sudo mv /usr/sbin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apachectl.bak && sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apachectl; \
   sudo mv /usr/sbin/httpd /usr/sbin/httpd.bak && sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/bin/httpd /usr/sbin/httpd; \

3. Re-enable Web Sharing in the preference pane.

Shortcuts

Lastly, I like to set up some shortcuts so that I can access all of my important localhost stuff from one place. I’ll create a new directory called www-config and then I’ll place symlinks into it for quick access to Apache and PHP configuration files.

sudo mkdir /www-config && \
cd /www-config && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl /www-config/apachectl && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/conf/ /www-config/httpd-conf && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/logs/ /www-config/logs && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/var/db/php5/ /www-config/php-ini && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/etc/php5/php.ini /www-config/php.ini

You need to construct a new element, then add properties, then construct a child element, then add properties, then append the child to the parent, and the parent to whatever DOM object you want that’s already in the page.

A few years ago I discovered Builder.node(), a component of Scriptaculous. The problem is that Scriptaculous relies on Prototype, and both are HUGE JavaScript libraries. Later I moved to Moo.fx/MooTools, then I didn’t do much JavaScript for a while, then I started doing a lot with YUI, while sprinkling a little jQuery around here and there. None of these other frameworks had an equivalent to Builder.node(), and again, that sucks.

So last night, I wrote a small JavaScript class to handle this very thing. Introducing DOMBuilder. DOMBuilder is small, fast, and doesn’t depend on any other JavaScript frameworks meaning that it’s easy to use in any project where you need to construct nested DOM elements. The fully commented debug version clocks in around 3k. The minified version is 739 bytes. With gzip compression, it squeezes down to a mere 393 bytes.

It’s not quite as terse or elegant as I’d like (yet), but it’s a good result for about 2 hours of hacking.

Examples

Here’s the HTML we want to generate:

<div class="location_select_control">
	<a href="" class="location_select_label">
		<label>This is my label</label>
	</a>
</div>

Here is how we’d do it with the standard DOM:

control_div = document.createElement('div');
control_div.className = "location_select_control";
control_link = document.createElement('a');
control_link.href = "";
control_link.className = "location_select_label";
control_label = document.createElement('label');
control_label.innerHTML = "This is my label";
control_link.appendChild(control_label);
control_div.appendChild(control_link);
document.body.appendChild(control_div);

Lastly, here’s how we’d do it with DOMBuilder:

document.body.appendChild($dom('div', { class:'location_select_control' }).child(
	$dom('a', { href:'', class:'location_select_label' }).child(
		$dom('label').innerHTML('This is my label')
	)
).asDOM());

Download

This code is BSD licensed, so feel free to use it in personal or commercial projects. You can download it from GitHub.

These instructions apply to a 32-bit Fedora 8 installation. The hardware I primarily use happens to be on EC2, but these instructions aren’t specific to EC2. You may need to tweak things a smidge for an x64 system.

Preparing the LAMP stack (and a few other things)

For FFMPEG-PHP to work, you need to have a web server with PHP support up and running. You’ll definitely need GD for image processing and mbstring is helpful in conjunction with PHP5′s built-in iconv support for managing multiple character sets in ID3 tags.

1. Install PHP, necessary extensions and supporting software.

   yum -y install php-devel php-gd php-mbstring gcc gcc-c++ libtool svn git yasm gsm-devel libogg-devel libvorbis-devel libtheora-devel;

2. Also, I like to create a directory with symlinks to important files so that I can access everything more efficiently. These will be used throughout this tutorial.

   mkdir /www-config; \
   ln -s /etc/init.d/httpd /www-config/httpd; \
   ln -s /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf /www-config/httpd.conf; \
   ln -s /var/log/httpd/ /www-config/logs; \
   ln -s /usr/lib/php/modules/ /www-config/php5-extensions; \
   ln -s /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf /www-config/php.conf; \
   ln -s /etc/httpd/conf.d/ /www-config/apache-conf; \
   ln -s /etc/php.ini /www-config/php.ini; \
   ln -s /etc/php.d/ /www-config/php-ini; \
   ln -s /var/www/html/ /www-config/public-html; \
   /www-config/httpd restart;

PHP 5.x should now be installed and you should have a directory prepared that lets you easily access important files for managing your configuration.

Installing FFMPEG

FFMPEG can be fairly complicated to get running properly, so here’s what I’ve gotten working thus far.

1. Download FFMPEG source. Export the latest FFMPEG trunk from Subversion, then change to the source directory.

   svn export svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk /ffmpeg-trunk-source; \
   cd /ffmpeg-trunk-source;

2. Install x264. Export the latest x264 trunk from Git. Enter the directory, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git; \
   cd x264; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-shared --enable-pthread; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

3. Install liba52. Download the latest version of liba52 (Currently 0.7.4). Decompress the package, enter the directory, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://liba52.sourceforge.net/files/a52dec-0.7.4.tar.gz; \
   tar -zxvf a52dec-0.7.4.tar.gz; \
   cd a52dec-0.7.4; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-double; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

4. Install FAAC. Download the latest version of FAAC (Currently 1.26). Decompress the package, enter the directory, create the configure file, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/faac/faac-1.26.tar.gz; \
   tar -zxvf faac-1.26.tar.gz; \
   cd faac; \
   autoreconf -vif; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

5. Install FAAD. Download the latest version of FAAD (Currently 2.6.1). Decompress the package, enter the directory, create the configure file, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/faac/faad2-2.6.1.tar.gz; \
   tar -zxvf faad2-2.6.1.tar.gz; \
   cd faad2; \
   autoreconf -vif; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

6. Install LAME. Download the latest version of LAME (Currently 3.98b8). Decompress the package, enter the directory, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/lame/lame-3.98b8.tar.gz; \
   tar -zxvf lame-3.98b8.tar.gz; \
   cd lame-3.98b8; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

7. Install libmpeg2. Download the latest version of libmpeg2 (Currently 0.4.1). Decompress the package, enter the directory, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://libmpeg2.sourceforge.net/files/mpeg2dec-0.4.1.tar.gz; \
   tar -zxvf mpeg2dec-0.4.1.tar.gz; \
   cd mpeg2dec-0.4.1; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

8. Install Xvid. Download the latest version of Xvid (Currently 1.1.3). Decompress the package, enter the directory, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://downloads.xvid.org/downloads/xvidcore-1.1.3.tar.gz; \
   tar -zxvf xvidcore-1.1.3.tar.gz; \
   cd xvidcore-1.1.3/build/generic; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ../../../;

9. Install AMR/3GPP. Download the latest version of AMR (Currently 7.0.0.1). Decompress the package, enter the directory, run configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   wget http://ftp.penguin.cz/pub/users/utx/amr/amrnb-7.0.0.1.tar.bz2; \
   tar -jxvf amrnb-7.0.0.1.tar.bz2; \
   cd amrnb-7.0.0.1; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ../;

10. Compile FFMPEG. Configure, make, and install the software, including all options that enable enhanced functionality.

    ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-static --enable-shared --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --enable-postproc --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-liba52 --enable-liba52bin --enable-libamr-nb --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaadbin --enable-libgsm --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid; \
    make; make install;

Installing FFMPEG-PHP

Once you have FFMPEG functioning properly, you can install the FFMPEG-PHP extension.

1. Download and install FFMPEG-PHP source. Enter the directory, download the source, run phpize, configure, make, install, and go back to the parent directory.

   cd /ffmpeg-trunk-source; \
   wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ffmpeg-php/ffmpeg-php-0.5.3.1.tbz2; \
   tar -jxvf ffmpeg-php-0.5.3.1.tbz2; \
   cd ffmpeg-php-0.5.3.1; \
   phpize; \
   ./configure --prefix=/usr; \
   make; \
   make install; \
   cd ..;

2. Add FFMPEG-PHP to the PHP configuration.

   echo "extension=ffmpeg.so" > /www-config/php-ini/ffmpeg.ini

3. Restart Apache.

   /www-config/httpd restart

All done!

FFMPEG and FFMPEG-PHP should now be installed and ready to go. Make sure to check your error log if something isn’t working properly.

cat /www-config/logs/error_log

Also, Digg it! http://digg.com/tech_news/New_Yahoo_Messenger_website_is_LIVE

Nearly every major feature has been enhanced, as well as the addition of several new ones. Be sure to read the upgrade docs if you’re upgrading from Beta 1 or the Preview Release. People who were using trunk builds should be able to just drop this file in as a replacement for any previous simplepie.inc file.

We’ve also added a WordPress plugin and a MediaWiki extension to the mix. And as always, if you have any questions, comments, or need clarification on anything, be sure to swing by the support forums. We’re there a lot.

Enjoy!

According to Bugzilla, the patch has already been added to the trunk (although it’s not quite complete yet), and seeing as how its status has been set to blocking 1.8.1 (which according to this roadmap is Firefox 2 timeframe), I’m hoping that this will finally get implemented.

Yay!

Thought I’d pass this little nugget along from one front-end developer to another.

In completely unrelated news, I really need to fix up skyzyx.com don’t I? Yeah, it’s in bad shape. *Adds it to the list.* I finally have a strategy for it… I just need to execute that strategy. Maybe next weekend…

This led me on a journey to figure out how to handle this. I ended up digging through some TinyMCE source code, and found a gem of a function that I then added a ‘stupefy’ mode to.

Here’s the code:

function entity(str, mode) {
	var str = (str) ? str : '';
	var mode = (mode) ? mode : 'string';

	var e=document.createElement("div");
	e.innerHTML=str;

	if (mode=='numeric') {
		return'&#'+e.innerHTML.charCodeAt(0)+';';
	}
	else if (mode=='utf16') {
		var un=e.innerHTML.charCodeAt(0).toString(16);
		while(un.length<4) un="0"+un;
		return"\\u"+un;
	}
	else return e.innerHTML;
}

entity() has two parameters:

1. entity: is a string which can be either a named entity (») or a numeric entity (»)
2. mode: is an optional value that accepts ‘numeric’, ‘utf16′, or ‘string’. Defaults to ‘string’.

You’d use it like this:

// Normal mode
var div = document.createElement('div');
var text = document.createTextNode('Parent '+[b]entity([/b]'»'[b])[/b]+' Child');
div.appendChild(text);

// Stupefy mode
var num = "The numeric entity for » is "+entity('»', 'numeric');
var utf = "The UTF-16 entity for » is "+entity('»', 'utf16');

I hope this can help other people out there who’ve run into the same problem as many times as I have!

I’ve been doing a lot of Ajax development lately for an internal webapp where I need to dynamically add nodes to lists. In my source code, I’ll have an empty <ul> tag with an ID, then I use that ID when I go and add <li>‘s to it. No big deal, right?

If you use the standard view-source contextual menu item, it will show you the source code that you coded in: the empty <ul> tag. BUT, if after you’ve added your <li> nodes dynamically, you click-and-drag to select the rendered area, and choose “View Selection Source”, Firefox will show you the fully-rendered HTML for that area. As in, it will show you the <ul> tag with all of your <li> tags inside of it… just as though you’d coded it like that in the first place. How awesome is that?

So if you need to see what HTML your JavaScript is generating, simply select the area, and choose “View Selection Source”.

Most implementations typically involve clicking a button or link to go to the Edit page. From there, you typically have to go through some moderately unusable process for reordering links, changing descriptions or current links, or adding new links. This may or may not include several pages and several page refreshes to get it all done the way you want it to be. Quite frankly, that sucks.

So, I spent several hours over the weekend digging through the documentation for Prototype and Scriptaculous in order to build a much more usable, natural, intuitive system for making these kinds of customizations. It’s not quite the same as the lists used in Basecamp, Backpack, or Ta-Da lists, but these services were definitely an inspiration. Here’s a video of what I’ve got so far. The video is a little tall for standard 1024×768 monitors, so you may have to size it down a smidge to see it all. QuickTime 6 or 7 should be plenty new enough to watch the video.

I’m not quite ready to release the code yet, as it’s not completely done, but once I add the few more things to it that I plan to, you can download the code and do whatever you want with it. The backend is done in PHP with text files, and shouldn’t require anything special except for a relatively modern browser (released in 2001 or later).

I’ve still got some things to implement, bugs to fix, design tweaks to make, and API to build, but overall the new 1.2 version of Tarzan is shaping up extemely well. I don’t like to announce timelines for personal projects (as work/professional projects have been known to take up large chunks of time, and I have to dedicate myself to those in order to pay the bills), but I can say “soon”.

I’m also hoping to put out a v1.1.1 release to address Dreamhost’s recent decision to disable the use of PHP’s fopen() function for accessing data from external sites. This decision directly affects both Tarzan and SimplePie.

I know that this is just a visual sneak peek, and there isn’t much here for Tarzan developers, but what do you think?

Although there are zero API changes in this release, there are lots and lots of web interface improvements for people administering Tarzan installations. I’ve also laid the groundwork for keyword searching, which will be the primary feature of the next release.

Beyond that, here’s a short list of what’s new:

• The Tarzan information page has become the Tarzan Control Panel. You’ve got access to more information, and have more control over what all is going on with your Tarzan system. It now requires a login, and has been localized into English, French, German, and Japanese.
• Automatic Update Detection for both the Tarzan software and your Tarzan Extensions. Color-coded notifiers in the Tarzan Control Panel allow you to know if updates are available just by glancing at them.
• The lifespan of the cache is now a configurable option.
• You can either use Tarzan’s built-in error messages, or enable error handling to handle your own Amazon errors.
• Tarzan can work configuration-free for people who just want to upload and go. Even better is the new Tarzan Setup Assistant, which will import your old configuration settings (if any), ask you a few questions, then create the new configuration file automatically.
• LOTS of other changes, tweaks, and improvements.

As always, you can see the demo, view a working implementation, read the release notes, ask a question, or just get to the point and download the software.

I resolved some localization issues that primarily affected France, Germany, and Japan. If you’re currently localized as an english-speaking country, you probably won’t notice anything new. However, setting the character encoding for your Tarzan-enabled pages to UTF-8 is highly recommended for US, UK, and Canadian installations, and required for French, German, and Japanese installations.

I also tweaked the get_rating() function to add /5 to the end of the rating (since it’s out of 5 anyways). If you’re currently adding /5 or “out of 5″ manually after using this function, you should remove it when you upgrade.

Lastly, I made some very minor, primarily subtle cosmetic changes to the Tarzan Information Page. Mostly just tweaking the margins and padding. I also added the quantity of cached files alongside the cache file size.

As always, you can check out a rough demo, ask a question, or see a real live implementation.

I’ve also written a custom extension for displaying my own wishlist. If you’re interested in checking it out to build off of for your own wishlists (or whatever else it might be useful for), you can get ryan_wishlist.tzx here.

And although I had wanted to add search capabilities to Tarzan by 1.0, I’ve decided to build an extension for that. I’m planning to have this extension ready by next week sometime.

Tips and Tricks

There are a couple of tips and tricks that can be used with Tarzan. I’ll post them over to the Tarzan Support Forum later on today.

Resizing images based on the size of a single side

For my wishlist, I’m more concerned about items being the same height, rather than the same width. How do I manage that? Setting either the width or height value to zero will allow image resizing of one sider to rely solely on the other. For example, if I wanted to set an item to a height of 90 pixels without caring how wide the image is, you could use this:

echo get_image($asin, 0, 0, 90);

The first is the ASIN/ISBN number of the item. The second parameter (set to zero) tells Tarzan that you want to resize the image. The third parameter (also set to zero) is the width. Since the width is set to zero, then resizing will depend entirely on the fourth parameter, height, which is set to 90 pixels.

PHP running out of memory?

Some webhosts have limits on how much memory a process can use (like the webhost for Skyzyx.com, iPowerWeb). In this case, the new clear_memory() function is helpful. This allows you to unset() the value of an array node, particularly the product that you just finished processing. You can read more about this function in the Tarzan Documentation.

All you UK’ers should now be set to go! I’ll be converting my wishlist over the next few days in an effort to flush out any remaining bugs before I declare this a 1.0 final.

Have at it!

Initially, I started digging around to start implementing support for the UK. After a while of digging, however, I found out that I’m using an older version of the Amazon Web Services API. Fantastic. The new version (AWS 4.0) supports full localization in all of Amazon’s countries (U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, and Japan).

If I’m going to be able to stay on top of this, I’m going to need to upgrade Tarzan’s core code to support and use the newer API. It sucks that I thought I was almost done and I’m not, but this should only take me a few hours to recode now that I have Tarzan’s implementation figured out. Re-writing the necessary parts of the documentation will take a bit, and re-writing the Sample page and Breakdown Tool will take a bit of time too.

The good news is that Tarzan 1.0 final will be compatible with all of Amazon’s countries, without any code changes on your end. Tarzan’s functions will continue to work seamlessly and upgrading to the next release candidate will not affect current installations, despite all of the code upheaval. The bad news is that parts of the extension model have changed a bit. If you’re a go-getter of a developer who has already started writing their own extensions for Tarzan, then I’m talking to you. Hold off until RC2.

If you’re not an extension developer, and you don’t care about support for countries other than America, then you can ignore this entire post. If you’ve been asking me about support for the UK, France or Germany, then RC2 will be something to look forward to. Overzealous developers, just sit tight.

So, a few years ago, I came up with the brilliant idea of making my wishlist available on my website somewhere. That way, when people asked what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday, I could just point them over to some big-ticket items on my list, and wouldn’t have to waste brain cycles on it. Great idea, huh?

Well, my website has certainly evolved over the last few years, and so has my wishlist. This past holiday saw my biggest wishlist ever with over 170 items (mostly old CD’s that are scratched and need to be re-bought). Updating and adding items was a real pain, and I figured that after the holidays I’d try to figure out a way to make it all easier.

Most of the items on my wishlist are pointing back to Amazon, and I’ve got my referral ID in there so that I also get credited on all of the purchases made from my site. I also know that Amazon makes their database information available through their Web Services program. Ideally, all I’d like to have to do is pass either the ISBN number (of a book), or the ASIN number (of most other items) to a function, and have that function figure it all out for me. How on earth can I make it all happen?

Introducing Tarzan, an easy-to-use set of functions for accessing all sorts of data from Amazon’s product database. It’s as simple to use as SimplePie (if not, simpler), and has a built-in extension model that allows developers to extend the functionality of Tarzan simply and easily.

Tarzan caches everything it can for 30 days (since Amazon’s data doesn’t change much, and as to not overload anyone’s server), supports resizing images using GD functions (all behind the scenes), and most functions will work as expected by just passing the ASIN/ISBN number as a parameter. For more information, documentation, a sample demo, tools for building your own extensions, and downloads, check out the Tarzan Project Page.

« Update » I make a minor tweak to the code and released Tarzan 1.0 RC1a. I added cache stats to the tarzaninfo() function (which can be seen in action by viewing your tarzan_info.php page.) This certainly isn’t critical, and you can definitely wait for RC2, but if you got Tarzan already and you want to see the new info, simply replace your current tarzan.inc file with the new one.

For those of you currently using SimplePie, this new version makes more strides towards improving support for sucky feeds, tested support for PHP 5, and other bits of fine-tuning.

You can download it, read the documentation for changes in this version, and report bugs and get support.

With a small, one-time change, Conditional Comments will work again and recognize the values 5.0 and 6.0, again; however, it will not recognize 5.5.

How is it done? Go to the registry and look in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector\ for the key IE. Simply get rid of it by renaming it to zIE — that’s it!

As I had installed IE 6.0, I looked into the registry for its version number “6.0.2800.1106″ and found 7 entries in HKLM, 3 of them belonging to the key “Internet Explorer”: Wizard Version, Version and Build. I looked also into the module iexplore.exe and found this information 4 times. All these 11 occurrences appear to be character data with minor variations in format, but no one was compatible with the design for the Conditional Comments!

So to meet the specifications, a new structure was created, the “Version Vector”. IE reads the information (currently 5.0002, 5.5000, or 6.0000) from there when it is started: if the program cannot find it, it gets the information from the module. This also means that IE has to be closed and restarted to get the change.

Now in case of IE 5.5 we can see the incompatibility which forced the creation of a new structure: CC gives true for “gte IE 5.999″ and “lte IE 5.9990″! As CC cannot be nested there is no way to identify IE 5.5 properly.

For example the following CC’s will work even with multiple IE’s installed:

1. “if IE 6″ or “if IE 6.0″ — for use with IE 6.0
2. “if IE 5″ or “if lte IE 5.5″ — for use with IE 5.01 and 5.5
3. “if IE 5.0″ — for use with IE 5.01
4. “if gte IE 5.5″ — for use with IE 5.5 and 6.0
5. “if IE” or “if lte IE 6.0″ — for use with IE 5.01, 5.5, and 6.0

This CC will still not work when multiple IE’s are installed:

1. “if IE 5.5″ — for use with IE 5.5

To see this run the above mentioned test. For better understanding CC you might want to read About Conditional Comments.

I have tested quite a lot on my Win98, but as the whole structure was build exclusively for CC, I would expect no real problems with later versions.

You can discuss this further at the Skyzyx Support Forums.

If you’d like to test out the current Beta build (2004.12.03), you can do so a couple of ways:

• Basic Online Feed Reader utilizing the latest version of SimplePie
• The SimplePie source file
• The documentation file for this particular build

Please take the time to test it with your feeds that you read. I’ve also enabled an option that allows you to see how the feed’s source code is modified by SimplePie. This is great for debugging and for helping test.

If you have any bug reports, please list them in the Bug Report forum. The same goes for feature requests and questions and comments.

Thanks for helping to make SimplePie great!

Heads-up: the linked image is a 1.3 MB PNG file.

There are several new features listed on Paul’s SPG Mini-Site, but there are a few that are my favorites (as I was a beta tester for this and the last versions):

Image Precaching

This was one of the two features that I actually coded the original code for *grin*. In v1.0 and the early v1.1 betas, I got tired of clicking the Next and Previous buttons and having to wait for the new image to load, after I’d just spent several seconds looking at a single picture. It didn’t seem very efficient to me, so I figured why not allow the image loading to happen in the background while I’m spending time looking at this picture anyways.

So, what I did was I figured out what images the Next and Previous buttons were pointing to (which is all dynamic, BTW), and added the Next and Previous to the page at a size of 1×1. I then added inline styles to the image that absolutely positioned them to the top-left corner of the page, and set the visibility to hidden. Doing so allowed the images to load into the cache, while remaining invisible to CSS-enabled browsers (and as two 1 pixel dots on CSS-disabled browsers).

Voila! Image precaching for the previous and next images in sequence.

Image Resizing

Do you have a digital camera that takes pictures at a ridiculously gargantuan size? I used to have one that saved images at 1600×1200. With this feature, you can upload these images, and they will automatically be resized and cached according to the settings in your sp_config.php file. Very useful.

Accesskey Navigation

This was my first suggestion for features in SPG 1.1 after 1.0 launched. I took a 3ds Max class in college, and we had to build something cool from the things we’d learned in the class, and make both a still frame as well as a short rendered video. Mine was about 3 Macs.

Anyways, I went online to grab various images about the computers that I was going to be building. At first, I’d have to open one, then another, then another. Tiring of this quickly, I wrote up a quick HTML page with a JavaScript that would allow me to simply hit Previous or Next to move from one image to the next. The it dawned on me to use accesskeys, since I knew they at least worked in IE and Mozilla (this was during the pre-Firefox “Phoenix” days).

Instantly, I was able to hit Alt+Plus and Alt+Minus to move back and forth through the images. When I recommended this to Paul, we had some discussion, and this is what ended up getting implemented:

The Previous button is Alt+Minus[-]. The Next button is both Alt+Plus[+] as well as Alt+Equals[=]. This is because most QWERTY-language desktop keyboards have a 10-key number pad on the right where [+] and [-] are right next to each other. Most laptops, however, don’t have that, but rather a [-/_] key right next to a [=/+] key (where you have to press shift for the latter). This means that you’d have to press Alt+Minus to move back, and Alt+Shift+Plus to move forward, and that sucks. Allowing Alt+Equals to move forward makes it easy for both Laptop and Desktop QWERTY-keyboards.

Automatically Generated Sub-Folder Details

This was yet another idea that I had for the 1.1 release, and that was to add the number of images in a folder, much like how many people will display the number of comments a blog post has. It just seemed to make sense.

Conclusion

Paul has done a terrific job with writing this software, and I have really enjoyed the opportunity to be a part of it. Heck, I’m probably just as proud of this release as he is, and I’m excited that so many of my suggestions made it into the final release. If you’ve got an image gallery, or you’ve been thinking of setting one up, I would highly recommend Paul Griffin’s Simple PHP Gallery.

This version is pretty much feature-complete. The only remaining pre-1.0 work will be testing and catching any remaining bugs. I might add a couple of minor features, but nothing too major. I’m open to feature requests for the 1.0 – 1.1 releases, so if SimplePie is missing something or if it should have something that other parsers don’t, let me know.

« Update » If you downloaded SimplePie within 60 minutes of this posting, you should re-download it. I fixed a glitch that affected feeds from East of GMT, and some related documentation.

There’s still a smidge of fine-tuning left to do. Although I fixed a very high number of feeds in this release, I broke a small handful of others. The newly broken feeds include Forever Geek’s RSS (not Atom) feed, Asa’s notblog*, News.com, and GameSpot feeds. Out of a list of approximately 334 test feeds (374 total – 30 duplicates – 10 no longer exist), only 9 aren’t working. Not too shabby, I’d say.

I’ll probably begin working on v0.95 on Saturday. Here is a list of things I plan to do in time for the 0.95 release:

• Finish fine-tuning the regular expressions I use for supporting bad feeds.
• Add the ability to display images in feeds, even though the server is set to block the display of images on other sites.
• Encode all tags used inside <code></code> tags.
• Get speed back to v0.93 levels.
• Improve the ability to display feed dates.
• Improve support for relative URL’s in feeds.

Keep watching this space. Hopefully it won’t take me another month to get the new version out. Come to think of it, have you all gone and bugged Señor Paul about getting SPG 1.1 done yet? If not, you should. He might forget to work on it otherwise. *grin*

The downside is that it slowed SimplePie down a bit. I think that it’s something I’ll let slide for this version, and try to tackle it for the next. I still need to go back through the list of 300+ feeds to make sure I haven’t broken something else, but assuming that all goes well, I’ll post SimplePie 0.94 sometime tonight or tomorrow.

I hope you all are using it, or are planning to use it. It’s good software, really… and no, I’m not trying to float my own boat. If you find any bugs or would like to see something added, let me know.

SimplePie takes a very Apple-esque approach to feed parsing. Coming from the use of MagpieRSS, I decided to create a “feed parser for the rest of us”. One that is easy, logical, and doesn’t require too much of a background in PHP to use it. My background is in JavaScript, so I believe that if you have a handle on JavaScript and can spend an hour learning about some of the nuances of basic PHP, you should be able to implement SimplePie with little or no fuss.

There are many feed parsers out there that only support one or two flavors of RSS. Most still don’t even have Atom support yet. They all go through and create this whole big array, and then just leave it all sitting there for you to figure out. Maybe they’ll even throw in some caching while they’re at it. Good for them.

When building SimplePie, I wanted to make it as easy as possible for someone to be able to use it. I looked at a variety of desktop and web-based feed readers to get a feel for the most used and most useful RSS tags, and then I created a collection of functions for those specific purposes. Going with a Firefox-like mentality, I made sure to support everything that most people would want/need while maintaining the ability to extend it as need be.

As Mac OS X is built upon a powerful Unix-based core, SimplePie is built upon a very powerful, yet easy-to-use XML parsing library called XMLize. XMLize takes a fantastic approach to parsing XML documents in a very simple, logical way. I was parsing XML documents within 10 minutes of having found it. This easy-to-use software makes it easy for anyone — even PHP newbies — to extend the power of SimplePie.

Switching from MagpieRSS to using XMLize at the core allows SimplePie to process RSS and Atom feeds at incredible speeds. SimplePie is also aware of some common problems in feeds and makes adjustments as necessary. Does your current feed reader leave you with visible entities or odd question marks? SimplePie automatically handles some of these common glitches, so that the end user doesn’t see anything too wierd when trying to view their favorite feeds.

If you’re looking for new feed parser software, or even if you’re not, give SimplePie a try. If you’re new to PHP, or even if you’re not, SimplePie can save you time and stress. If you’re looking for a feed parser that can be easily extended to do more than it currently does out-of-the-box, SimplePie is your answer.

Download Now! File servers are standing by.

What I need from you are your reading lists. Whatever sites you read or follow via RSS or Atom, I want to know about them. If you’ve got Feed Demon, SharpReader, RSS Bandit, NetNewsWire, Shrook, PulpFiction, or another feed reader, do me a favor and export your feed listings in OPML format (which would be the easiest thing for you) and upload them to your website somewhere. Then, leave a comment that contains the URL to that OPML file. I’ll then go through each and every site and find each and every RSS or Atom feed and test them one-by-one to make sure that SimplePie is as solid and production-ready as possible.

The higher the quantity of feeds I’m able to test, the better SimplePie will be. I know that most of the (standards-compliant) blogging world is pretty solid, but I’ve noticed that many development and programming-related sites have horrendous feeds. I’m also going through the Feed Demon forums and testing as many of those feeds as I can.

Your help would be tremendously appreciated!

For those who are skeptical of “yet another feed parser”, or are hesitant to switch to (or begin using) SimplePie, let me explain it this way. Most RSS parsers go through this process of breaking a feed down into this big array, which may be fine for some, but can be impossible for beginners and newbies. SimplePie takes an Apple-esque approach by providing thoughtfully-named, easy to use functions that do what one would expect them to do.

At the core, SimplePie relies on XMLize (as the easy-to-use Mac OS X relies on the more powerful Unix-based core), which is a very powerful, yet elegantly simple class for parsing XML documents with PHP. This means that if SimplePie doesn’t do all that you want it to out-of-the-box (which would be suprising, but possible), you can easily extend it to support whatever else you might want.

I’ve frozen the current function set where it’s at. This means that if you’ve been using SimplePie already, or if you’re wanting to start using it, you won’t need to change any of your code as new versions get released. You’ll simply need to replace the old SimplePie library with the new one to take advantage of new improvements. New functions may become available to use, but new versions of SimplePie will not break existing services and applications.

If you’ve been thinking about building your own web-based RSS/Atom reader, why not give SimplePie a try?

While working on SimplePie initially, I used copies of Dunstan’s Atom and RSS feeds because I felt that they’d be representative of most people’s decently well-formed feeds. I know that some people have worse feeds, and that Mark Pilgrim’s feeds are a bit too “academically” correct.

Dunstan has a problem with his feed. He uses the numeric entity for a “smart-apostrophe” in his feed’s <title> tag. This happens to be a UTF-8 character. For whatever reason, parsing his feed in every PHP-based feed reader I’ve ever used displays that smart-apostrophe as a question mark. In wanting to build a “feed parser for the rest of us”, I decided to be smart and wrap a CDATA section around the contents of the <title>, <link>, and <description> on the fly for those that don’t already have them. Dunstan’s question mark becomes the character that it’s supposed to be. No problem.

On the other hand, Andrei also has a problem with his feed. Well, not really… it’s just that the fix I put in place to fix Dunstan’s feed broke Andrei’s feed. Andrei does a fake-out with his CDATA sections. He closes the CDATA section in <description>, then has one last bit of content before closing the tag. This is just enough to get past SimplePie’s logic. Wonderful.

Since Dunstan’s issue is only in the feed’s <title> tag, I went ahead and changed how SimplePie handles the feeds by removing the code for wrapping CDATA sections around <link> and <description>. Both Dunstan and Andrei have working feeds again.

Then, I go and test it on Mark’s Feed Parser project feed. SimplePie breaks down again. Well, crap. Instead of using <title> like normal people, Mark has to be all cool by using <title type="text/plain">. Argh.

So, I’m off to find some code that can resolve this little quarrel. I’m thinking about going through and looking for UTF-8 entities (4-digit, typically begins with an 8: ’) and wrapping CDATA sections around those entities alone, which will probably work. I don’t want to release this software as 1.0 until it performs satisfactorily with every single feed in my entire reading list.

Version 0.92 is on it’s way here folks. Andrew, how’s that WordPress plug-in coming along?

The only complaints that I got were mostly speed-related. Most people who sent me feedback thought that SimplePie was just too darn slow. Unfortunately, the speed issues were directly related to my use of Magpie RSS as the parsing engine.

So, I decided to re-write it completely from scratch. I did away with Magpie altogether, and built a brand-new feed parser based around Hans Anderson’s XMLize library for parsing XML documents with PHP. The results were astounding!

I removed all external dependencies. SimplePie is now completely self-contained. Also, I tweaked with the way that SimplePie parses RSS feeds. In doing so, I’ve got v0.9 running anywhere from 20 to 162 times faster than v0.8. Specifically, it’s a maximum speed increase of over 16215%. On average, however, it only runs around 100 times faster than the previous version. As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen v0.9 take longer than 0.35 seconds to process and render a RSS feed.

If you’re looking for some RSS parsing software for PHP, I hope that SimplePie will be your choice. Of course, I’m always open to feature requests and bug reports, so let me know if you have something to say…

You can download SimplePie 0.9 from the SimplePie Project Page.

Personally, I’m still fairly new to PHP, but I have a solid understanding of scripting principles grasp of basic PHP syntax. Even still, I found Magpie a bit confusing sometimes as I was starting out with it. Because of this, I figured I’d try to make it easier for people like me to leverage Magpie’s power with a simpler command set.

I’d like you all to welcome SimplePie. SimplePie is short for “Simple API for Magpie”, and makes it very easy to create your own PHP-based feed readers on your own sites.

I’m sure it’s not flawless, so I’d like you all to download the latest copy of Magpie RSS and SimplePie, give it a try, and tell me how you like it and what I can do to make it better.

Meanwhile, I recently found out that my cookie script has been recommended on IBM’s forums, my Java detection script has been talked about on Sun’s Java forums, my Message Center 5.5 script is gaining popularity at Coding Forums, and I continue to get help with ideas to improve my Flash detection script (which uses a format that I will soon switch all of my other detection scripts to because it’s more flexible).

I’m aware of two different projects that are using the standalone IE’s: OpTool, which appears to add the ability to load any URL into any browser, and MozIE that allows you to have a split-screen view of a webpage with multiple browsers at once.

I’ve also been contacted about using my Feed Parser engine in an upcoming application he’s writing. Nothing too nailed down yet though, as I’m still working out bugs for a v0.7 release.

Lastly, I came across a site today that points to one of my posts about the browser wars. This is what she had to say:

This article/story about the Browser Wars is brilliant. How the writer has managed to make a fairy story out of the browser wars makes it amusing to read. It provides the story in such a way that you would find it so easy to understand. I feel that he is more biased towards Netscape than to Internet Explorer. He talks about the domination of King Explorer and the Emperor of AOL. But waiting in the wings patiently is Inigo Mozilla.

I think this is the best article I have read in a long time.

Sue Holland

If you missed it when I first wrote it, here it is again.

The first would definitely be the lack of Feed Demon (my absolute favorite RSS reader) for Mac. I got NetNewsWire Lite installed, but ease of use and features aren’t even comparable to Feed Demon. *sigh*. I need to get my PC up and running again.

The second would be a lack of a really good hand-coding tool that has code coloring. I’m using BB Edit to type this right now, and it’s beginning to drive me nuts. I used to use BB Edit Lite 4.1 back in the day, but aparently there isn’t even a Lite version anymore. Argh.

One thing that I love is the iLife Suite. I’m having some minor issues going between my Windows iTunes to my iPod to Mac iTunes. My genres are all messed up. I’ll have to mess around with them. A good thing, though, is that the music I bought from iTMS on my PC still works on my Mac.

I’m having trouble getting Apache 1.3.x installed. I downloaded the Mac OS X binary from the Apache site, installed it, but couldn’t get it to start. After Googling around to figure out what might be wrong, I found out that Mac OS X already has Apache installed. Now I’m trying to figure out where all the Apache files live between the two versions (the manually-installed version is showing up on my localhost).

I don’t anticipate any problems getting PHP or MySQL installed, and after that I think I’ll be ready for some full-blown web development while I ride the train to work everyday. I’m wanting to finish up the 0.7 final for Feed Parser. I just need to implement support for the Creative Commons metadata in RSS 1.0 and add support for the RSS 1.0 Content Module. I’m trying not to get behind the FP roadmap too much.

It will also allow me to move forward with some of the really, really cool features of Blocker 2.0. I’ve got a whole slew of new features I am (was — before my computer crashed) working on for the next release. An early alpha of Blogroller will be available as soon as I have some time to get to it.

Anyways, I’ve rambled enough for this posting. I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff lately, that I’m wanting to post about here. We’ll see what I have time to write.

There are many features that I’ve been wanting to add to my website. Most of these aren’t big, new fancy features, but they mostly involve the intelligently elegant integration and layout of metadata and information in general. I’ve been pondering how to more fully integrate certain types of data into the very core of my website through a combination of XML, PHP, MySQL, and Movable Type.

I think that Paul has simply had more time to play with new data ideas than I have. But that’s okay, because his site has really come a long way in the last several months.

Good job, Scrivs.

Now, I know that there are other ways to do it, but they require syncing the text on the page with text in your CSS file — which is fine if it’s a permanent header or something. But it doesn’t work as well with blogs.

So, alas, Safari 1.1+ users now can see the use of the text-shadow property on my site, even though I can’t. *sigh*

P.S. I didn’t work entirely blind. I used Dan Vine’s iCapture to see what I was doing.

« Update » Apparently, text-shadow has been in Bugzilla for 5 years! It appears that no one has bothered to write the code for it, and that’s the only reason why it hasn’t been implemented yet.

Two and a half weeks?! Ryan, that’s just no good. What’s your deal, man? Why are you being suck a slacker?

This is the obligatory “Sorry, I’ve been busy” post as made famous by Dan Rubin, Todd Dominey, and Adam Polselli.

Every time that I’ve come across something cool lately, my boss has handed me another 5 hours of work that is due in three. Everytime, I’ve gone to work on Feed Parser, or Blocker, or Blogroller, my wife says “Time for dinner!” Everytime I’ve gone to sit down and experiment with unexplored features of CSS (for my upcoming redesign with the Longhorn-esque timeline), I realize that if I don’t leave right away, I’ll miss my train and be late for work.

Weekends haven’t been that much better either since I’ve either been out of town or watching my friend’s kids for a few hours while they’re at work, or I’ve been trying to get through disc 1 of 3 in Final Fantasy VII.

I’ve got to figure out how to re-work my schedule so I’ve got a little more room. Spending over 3 hours a day either on or waiting for the train as been a huge loss of time. Of course my iPod and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for GBA-SP have helped the boredom issue, but I’ll be able to do more once I can finally afford to get my laptop.

From what I can tell, it’s a pretty solid system. There are a few blogs who use it, and I like the idea of not having to rebuild static files. Other than that, I really don’t know much about it.

Has anyone had any experience with WordPress? Should I jump ship from MT to WP? Any feedback on it would be appreciated.

Movable Type offers a lot of options and features that are built-in to the CMS, but I get a few too many 500 errors to stay happy. In that vein, I’m wanting to extend the functionality of my website using PHP, MySQL, XML, and other related technologies that I’m learning as we speak.

One of the first new features for this site has little impact on you, but saves me a bit of work. That is the Blogs I Read section. Using a combination of RSS, OPML, and PHP, I’ve got a pretty spiffy system in place. If I come across a site that I like, I’ll add its RSS feed to Feed Demon. From there, I simply export the OPML file to my hard drive, then upload it to my webserver.

From there, PHP does all the handling to dynamically generate the content of each of the pages: Apple, CSS Design, General Web, etc. If a feed fails to be read, I use the information supplied in my OPML file to create a filler spot. No problem.

Granted, not everybody prefers to create a section of their site for this, but if anyone does, I’ll be releasing the PHP source as soon as I get all the bugs and quirks worked out.

How’s that for automated?

The first thing I did was make it more error-friendly. If someone mistypes a feed URL, instead of seeing nonsense errors that have no value to the user, you get a simple error page that suggests that there was a problem with the feed, and to try a new feed URL.

The next thing I did was allow the user to skip the http:// protocol as long as there was a www. at the beginning of it. If the URL doesn’t have a www., then the http:// is required.

I also added support for the feed:// protocol. I did two things with this. Since the protocol is the same as http:// anyways (it’s designed to help feed readers subscribe a feed), I have the RSS Reader strip out the feed://, and replace it with http:// so that Magpie can parse it. The other thing I did was add an option to subscribe to a particular feed on that feed’s page (i.e. Zeldman). This should be fairly convenient.

Another thing that I’ve made an attempt to support is auto-detection of RSS feeds. Sites that have something along the lines of this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" »
	title="RSS" href="/rss/skyzyx.xml" />

It seems to work for some sites, but not for others. I’m still working on why the inconsistency exists, but I plan to have it worked out as soon as I get around to it. Some examples of sites that auto-detect are: The Daily Report, StopDesign, and Simon Willison. Some examples that don’t work are Superfluous Banter, Whitespace, and my own Skyzyx.com.

I’ve modified the user-agent string. To find out what it will return on your sites, load a valid feed, then check the source. I’ve noted it in the comments. Anyways, I hope that this tool is useful to someone.

Speaking of, what do you think about online RSS/Atom readers? Are they better or worse than desktop applications? What are some pros or cons of each?

Yesterday, the W3C released a shiny new recommendation called XML 1.1, and another called Namespaces in XML 1.1. The changes in XML 1.1 are seemingly minimal, and appear to primarily affect certain character entities defined in newer versions of Unicode.

The W3C’s XML 1.0 Recommendation was first issued in 1998, and despite the issuance of many errata culminating in a Third Edition of 2004, has remained (by intention) unchanged with respect to what is well-formed XML and what is not. This stability has been extremely useful for interoperability. However, the Unicode Standard on which XML 1.0 relies for character specifications has not remained static, evolving from version 2.0 to version 4.0 and beyond. Characters not present in Unicode 2.0 may already be used in XML 1.0 character data. However, they are not allowed in XML names such as element type names, attribute names, enumerated attribute values, processing instruction targets, and so on. In addition, some characters that should have been permitted in XML names were not, due to oversights and inconsistencies in Unicode 2.0.

Namespaces, however, have been completely revamped, from what I can tell. From what I understand, instead of having namespaces add support for certain tags, it will instead forbid support for certain tags. The W3C says it best:

The overall philosophy of names has changed since XML 1.0. Whereas XML 1.0 provided a rigid definition of names, wherein everything that was not permitted was forbidden, XML 1.1 names are designed so that everything that is not forbidden (for a specific reason) is permitted. Since Unicode will continue to grow past version 4.0, further changes to XML can be avoided by allowing almost any character, including those not yet assigned, in names.

I’m just curious as to how this will effect news syndication feed formats like RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom. Whereas the first two seem to be pretty much complete, Atom looks like it will continue to develop. From what it seems, XML 1.0 will continue to be the best bet for syndication formats. You never know though.

Anyways, the only real problem I had with Feed Demon was that it didn’t properly parse the feed for Dunstan’s blog. I went back and looked at his XML, and he wasn’t using a <link> tag for his permalinks. He was using the <guid> tag instead. Hmmm…

I went and dug up the RSS 2.0 specification so that I could read up on the <guid> tag. The tags details say this:

If the guid element has an attribute named isPermaLink with a value of true, the reader may assume that it is a permalink to the item, that is, a url that can be opened in a Web browser, that points to the full item described by the <item> element.

That’s all fine and dandy, but Dunstan’s <guid> tag didn’t have that. Oh no! Was Dunstan’s XML feed not well-formed? *Gasp!* I read on, and came across this:

isPermaLink is optional, its default value is true. If its value is false, the guid may not be assumed to be a url, or a url to anything in particular.

Okay, okay. So Dunstan knows what he’s doing. Fair enough. But will my favorite feed reader never be able to properly read Dunstan’s Permalinks?

I submitted this as a bug report on the Feed Demon newsgroup last week. Today, Nick Bradbury released Feed Demon 1.1 Beta 1 (it kinda rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?). This issue is fixed in this release. Woo-hoo! There’s also basic support for Atom 0.3, which is kinda cool too.

I love the power of feedback.

You can switch between the Winter style (the one that’s been here since the beginning of December), or you can use the Default one (the one in place before that). I’m working on another style or two, even still.

There are still a couple of quirks, though. They’re more to do with stupid inline styles than anything. I’ll fix them. Unfortunately, I’m going out of town for the weekend, so whatever I don’t fix today will have to wait until Sunday night or Monday. Which reminds me, does anyone know if a new Alias will be back on Sunday, or will we have to wait another week?

Anyways, I hope you all have a great weekend, and if something doesn’t work quite right today, kindly reload.

In the end, I just chalked it up to Internet Explorer sucking, and left it alone. Recently, however, my question was answered.

For elements that act as though they were relatively positioned, then go ahead and use position:relative; on it. It seems to fix it without a hitch.

Just thought I’d pass this along.

At one point, I made available the PHP code that I use to do it, once Magpie is already installed. If you do a search on this site, you can probably find it. I’ve been very happy with Magpie since I first began using it last summer. It was way better than the parser I’d written in JavaScript, and a lot faster too.

If you look at the left-hand menu, you’ll see that I’ve added an RSS News Reader section. This is much like the RSS section that I had a few months ago that ended up getting merged with the Blogs I Read section. The reader is also powered by Magpie, and I hope it does some people some good.

In an effort to better track who is reading this site (and who isn’t), I’ve moved the location of my RSS feed. You can get the current URL from the RSS section. I might even add more of a variety of feeds, depending on the response I get from people. I’ll play that one by ear.

Lastly, I’ve made some ever-so-slight adjustments to the order of the menu. If you don’t see a menu option where it normally is, look lower.

This section began as part of the “Articles” section, then branched off into it’s own “Propaganda” section, before becoming “Resources”. The most usable part of this section (in my opinion) is the CSS Methods, Techniques, and Hacks area.

Many of these are very popularly used Hacks/Methods/etc., and might be of great use to many web people out there.