This has actually been up for about a year, but was never made public. This is where the Standalone Internet Explorers, latest Firefox releases, and other bits of software will live too. Actually, part of my goal for this is to be an unofficial mirror for the Firefox 1.5 release.

There’s lots more to come in the coming weeks. Some of it will be old stuff with a fresh face, others will be new things all together. And I’ll finally have a place to showcase all of the Ajax demos I’ve worked on over the past few months.

At the moment, I have the latest copies of the Macromedia Studio 8 Trials, Nero 6.6 Ultra trials, OpenOffice 2.0, and more. Have fun!

« Update » It’s back up again. Move along. There’s nothing to see here.

While doing this, I utilized two services: FeedBurner and del.icio.us. I think that at this point, most bloggers know what del.icio.us is. It’s a way to bookmark things, and share them around. I’ve begun using this service in place of my normal bookmark functionality and it makes it infinitely easier to keep my bookmarks synced between multiple computers. I’ve actually got a fairly large dump of bookmarks that will be going into del.icio.us in a day or two. It took a while to get my old sidebar links into it, but now everything is peachy.

FeedBurner is a service that allows you to track how many people are reading your site, and also provides statistical analysis of things like user-agents (what application or service is being used to read your feed) as well as things like time-of-day pulls and such. There’s a free and a pay version. I’m using the free one right now, and at the moment, it’s all I need.

One thing that I absolutely hate is when someone changes the URL of their feed and either doesn’t say anything (really bad), or posts a message that says “hey, I changed my feed URL to this… update your bookmarks” or whatever (bad, but not as bad). I was guilty of this at one point long ago, but I never wanted to do this to anyone ever again because of how much it bothers me. So, Apache 301 redirects were the solution. If your service or feed reader supports 301 redirects, you’ll be in good shape whenever the old feed address finally goes away.

Of course it only bothers me, because I have to switch away from my feed reader to go login to Bloglines, then delete the old entry, and re-add the new entry. Then, I have to go into each feed reader I have (Feed Demon on 2 computers and NetNewsWire on 1), delete the old feed, then pull down the new feed. It’d be much easier if I could get 2-way syncronization across multiple products and services… but hey, what can I do?

So there you have it. Both of the above-mentioned services are good, so I’d recommend looking into them. Hopefully I’ll soon have all of my pictures loaded into Flickr, and my redesigned site will have images from there, as well as my iTunes listening habits. Ooh… integration…

For those who don’t know, I started working on my website’s redesign about a year and a half ago. After several months of development, my hard drive fried, and I lost nearly everything. This was rather discouraging, and as such I didn’t get around to beginning development fresh until April-ish of this year. I got WordPress installed (I love the 5 minute install), exported the then-current entries, and imported everything into WordPress… no problems.

A huge part of this redesign is an overhaul of the information architecture. This site has grown far beyond what I had initially anticipated, and I was still using 2 year old IA. So, I began organizing my categories as much as possible, and placing posts in multiple categories, where appropriate. About 2 months ago, I started getting 500 errors in Movable Type. This had less to do with Movable Type, and more to do with a bug in the latest release of CPanel, which is what my other webhost uses (for now… I’m switching hosts for .com this month). Anyways, I couldn’t login anymore, which meant that I couldn’t export my posts from Movable Type anymore.

So last night I had an epiphany. Log onto my .com server, backup my Movable Type database, install Movable Type on my .net server, import the database backup, and use the MT interface to do a formal export, which I then imported back into WordPress. The whole thing took about 15 minutes to accomplish, after spending the last two months frustrated over the whole thing.

Anyways, I’m moving Skyzyx.com to the same host that I have Skyzyx.net at: Dreamhost. Dreamhost is freakin’ awesome, and that’s all I have to say about that. Anyways, all of the content that is currently at Skyzyx.com will still exist once my dual-site strategy goes live. Skyzyx.com will be the home of all things professional: my resume, projects like SimplePie and Tarzan that could almost be considered “Products”, and things like Web Building Resources and such. Things that are a little more static, and don’t need to be updated as often. Skyzyx.net will be more personal and experimental in nature. This is where my weblog will live, along with experimental software, CVS repositories, etc. This is the plan today, anyways. Or I might simply have any address at Skyzyx.com redirect to the same files Skyzyx.net, or vice versa.

Anyways, I’m back. I was never dead, I was just trying to balance fixing my website, caring for my new son, and figuring out how to develop JSTL-based, Ajax-enabled portlets for Oracle Portal (at work). Things are coming along. Expect lots and lots and lots of changes while I get used to this WordPress thing, figure out how to build my own design, and generally get this forever-old redesign out and ready to go.

The only other thing that might be worth mentioning is that SimplePie still has a difficult time with non-encoded special characters in feeds and feeds in non-western-european/non-american/non-australian languages. Beyond that, it’s pretty solid so far.

Now, before I get to explaining, I’ll point to a del.icio.us demo with SimplePie in action. Now, here’s the code as a whole:

<?php
include_once("../simplepie.inc");

@ $rss = simplepie("http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/web", false, true, 0.02);

if ($rss != false) {
	print("<p>Reading from " . get_feed_url() . "</p>");
	print("<ul>");

	for ($x=0; $x < 15; $x++) {
		print('<li><a href="' . get_item_permalink($x, $rss) . '">' . get_item_title($x, $rss) . '</a></li>');
	}

	print("</ul>");
}
else {
	print("The del.icio.us feed is not currently available.");
}

print("Powered by " . sp_linkback());
?>

Let’s begin with the first part, include_once("../simplepie.inc");. This is an instance of including the SimplePie library. In my example, the simplepie.inc file is located in the subdirectory.

The next line is where we start processing the rss feed:

@ $rss = simplepie("http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/web", false, true, 0.02);

We start by passing the first parameter, which tells SimplePie where the feed is that we want to process. The second parameter asks whether or not to enable a mode called XMLDump, which we don’t need for this excersize. The third parameter asks whether we want to cache the feed that we’re reading. Since SimplePie currently doesn’t work if the feed isn’t cached (unless it’s a local file), this needs to be true. Lastly, we tell SimplePie how many hours before refreshing the cached feed. We then set the feed to the $rss variable.

Next, we check whether the feed actually exists and was processed. If the expression if ($rss != false) (if $rss is not false…) is true, then we begin displaying the del.icio.us feed.

If you so choose, you can display the URL of the feed you’re using with the get_feed_url() function. I also chose to have this display as an unordered list, since that’s really what it is.

Inside of that <ul></ul> code block, I’ve set up a for-loop. Using $x as my counter variable, I decided to display only the most recent 15 entries. If you want to display all entries in the feed, you can use the get_item_quantity($rss) function.

As a backup plan, I like to add a short message for when the feed isn’t working. In my case, I said that “The del.icio.us feed is not currently available.” Simple and to-the-point.

Next, you want to tell everybody how you made all of this really cool stuff happen by linking back to the SimplePie project page. The easiest way is with the sp_linkback() function.

There! You should now have a fully-functional del.icio.us sidebar right there in your website.

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.

I’ve gone ahead and added my new server (www.skyzyx.net) to the download list as “Primary Download 1″. I’ve also finally gotten around to adding the MackHosting.com mirror. Chris at MackHosting.com has turned out to be a cool guy that I’ve gotten a chance to talk to a bit via IM. Although he’s not a weblogger, he does offer really good small business hosting plans (100 MB space and 1GB transfer for $30/year). Go give his website some love.

I’ve also been contacted by someone who knows how to enable conditional comments in the Standalone IE’s. I’ve really been lagging on getting this information out to the public, but I’m hoping to get to it this weekend. Keep an eye out.

« Update » I figured out how to get Bit Torrent setup, so you can now download these files via BT too!

However, today I was going through the licenses available from Creative Commons, and I’ve decided to drop the SkyGPL all-together. All of my scripts will soon be re-licensed under either the Attribution License, Attribution-ShareAlike License, or the Attribution-NonCommercial License. I’ve found that these licenses are more specific and less restrictive than my own, so I’d highly doubt that anyone will have a problem with it.

The first script to take on a new license will be SimplePie 0.95, once it comes out of Beta. Although previous versions (0.94 and older) are not bound by this license, newer versions will be. I don’t think that it’ll make much difference to anyone who’s already using SimplePie, but if you’re unsure if this affects you at all, drop me a line, and we’ll see what we can work out.

Dead Hard Drive: My 160 GB drive bit the dust last weekend. I’m still at a loss for why. The upshot is that it only took about 15 minutes to get a new 200 GB drive up and running in my system. The downside is that I’ve lost everything besides my boot drive, installed applications, and my music collection (which are all on other drives). The worse part is that any and all work I’ve done on my long-awaited redesign went up in smoke as well. Convenient excuse, I know. I just hope that my new code will be better than my old code.

sIFR: I’ve discovered how cool the Inman Flash Replacement technique is. Even cooler, I’ve discovered the Scalable Inman Flash Replacement Technique (or sIFR for short). This latest version of the groundbreaking technique really improves previous versions.

Firefox 1.0 PR: I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Firefox 1.0 Preview Release. The PR release date has been pushed back 9 days from when it was scheduled (according to Planet Mozilla), and I’m trying to keep from biting my nails from excitement. Thunderbird 0.8 is also right around the corner, although I don’t know how close around the corner.

SimplePie: I’ve hit a roadblock in my SimplePie project. I need to figure out a regular expression that will grab self-closing tags (<description />, <tagline />, etc.), without also grabbing normal open-close style tags. I’ve done some tremendous work for v0.94, but I insist on holding back this release until I get the bug worked out. I know that this bug (combined with other elements of the code) effects Ben Hammersley and GoogleBlog, among others. If anyone cares to help me out with this regular expression, please let me know.

A New Church: After several months of looking for a good, solid, scripturally-sound church, we’ve found one. We’ll continue to visit for the next several weeks to really get a feel for the church, but it seems like what we’ve been looking for. I’ve been wanting to get back involved in music and children’s ministries, and this looks like the place for that.

SPG 1.1: Vaporware? That’s the feeling I’m starting to get about the update to Paul Griffin’s outstanding Simple PHP Gallery software. Let’s all go and ask him about it, so that he’ll feel the pressure to finish it. =)

Some Leafs: I’m totally diggin’ the photography in this new Zen Garden design.

Quick-and-Dirty Weather: Using the raw XML (not RSS) feeds from the United States National Weather Service, I was able to hack together my own simple weather RSS feeds. If you’re interested, check out Quick-and-Dirty Weather.

My Daughter: She’s growing up so fast, I can hardly believe it. She gets to be more and more fun as each day goes by. She’s just finishing up her potty training, and we’re going through tic-tacs like crazy. It was really warm when we got home this evening, and we couldn’t find any of her nightgown jammies, she I put her to bed wearing one of my old T-shirts. She was absolutely adorable. She misses us, my wife and I, when we’re gone all day at work, and she’s become vocal about it. It breaks my heart to be away from her all day long (although I’d probably go nuts otherwise), so I’m trying to find reasonable ways to remedy that. *sigh*

Anyways, that’s what’s been going on with me. What all has been going on with you?

I’ve come quite a long ways since version 1.0 of this website was released back in October 1997. One thing that I’ve learned is that your site will be much more successful if it’s about something. I spent the first 5 years coming up with better and better designs and really working to sharpen my coding skills (“chicks like guys who have good skills” — Napoleon Dynamite), but I never had any real content. Of course, most of that knowledge was tossed away when I randomly stumbled across the website of a guy who called himself “The Ubiquitous Z“.

I’ve learned much from from the web design/development/standards community. When I started this site back in March 2003, my goal was to give back as much as I could to the web community, as well as to help budding web designers learn the things that it took me years to figure out.

Even if I’ve only helped a handful of people in the last year-and-a-half, that handful is enough to make this site not only worthwhile, but also a success.

To the web community at large, thank you for teaching me so much, and allowing me to teach you a thing or two as well.

• Internet Explorer 6.0 – 39%
• Gecko browsers – 22%
• Internet Explorer 5.x (Win & Mac) – 19%
• Crawlers/Search Engines – 12%
• Netscape 4.x – 3%
• Safari – 3%
• Opera 7.x – 2%

Gecko browsers are gaining on IE 6.0 here at Skyzyx.com. It’s good to know.

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.

For the time being, I’m still accepting all comments from everyone. However, provided that I’m still using MT a few months from now, I’m planning on requiring a TypeKey account for unmoderated comments. Users without a TypeKey account (a few months from now, mind you) will still be able to post comments, but I will moderate them before they actually get displayed on my site.

At the same time, I’m questioning the need for this. Since I released Blocker 1.2, I haven’t had any automated comment spam attacks. So far, I have excellently behaved commentors, so I may very well not require comment registration at all.

Anyways, welcome to my MT3-powered personal site.

I got a GMail invite today. I haven’t used it much yet since today was a very busy day at work, but I like how I’m told I’m using 0% of 1 Gigabyte. Also, Yahoo! Mail bumped up storage space to 100MB for the free accounts (2GB for the paid accounts), and 10MB per email. Teriffic. Now I can email my dial-up friends 9.8 MB emails.

The power went out at work today, so I got to come home a little early. My best friend Eric, who is in the US Air Force, is moving to Texas on Friday for his Navigator training. For those who don’t know what a Navigator is, he’s essentially Goose instead of Maverick (for those who’ve seen “Top Gun”). He came to visit me last night, went to San Francisco to visit his cousin today, and will swing back through on his way back to his parents house where he will be staying until Friday morning when he leaves. =(

I’ve been so enthused about my new PowerBook G4 that I haven’t even tried to get Windows XP re-installed on my desktop computer yet. I need to do that because that’s where all of my web development and graphics software is. And I still miss my Feed Demon (Nick, please start doing cross-platform development on it!).

Lastly, my big redesign that fell through the cracks a couple of months ago when I got a new job and had to start commuting is now back in development. My focus for this redesign is more about the structure, availability, and presentation of data than it is about a visual redesign. However, you should expect a visual change. I’m not too sure how much yet, but there will be a change. I plan on keeping multiple stylesheets, including the one from this current design. My favorite is the current “Default” stylesheet, while I’ve been told that other people still prefer the “Classic” stylesheet. Which of the two should I keep as the secondary or tertiary stylesheet?

It’s the middle of the week (almost). The weekend is right around the corner!

I got a letter from them today trying to get me to renew my domain with them. The name sounded familiar from something Andy had said, so I went to work and looked it up. Sure enough, it was exactly who I thought it was.

I’m usually pretty good at catching that kind of stuff, and this time was no exception. I get stuff like that from time to time, and I just throw it away, since I know that nothing will change unless I act… and scammers know that too. Andy’s post just made it easier to spot.

Thanks Andy!

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.

Granted any new forum is always wanting new visitors, but it’s been cool seeing other webloggers like Paul, Andy Mac, Darice, Sken, and others.

This will definitely be a new stop on the internet for me!

I’m still getting used to my new job. I have to take the train to get to work and back everyday, and it has so far proven to be less than reliable (it took 2.5 hours to move 45 miles last Friday). I’ve been keeping up decently with the blogs I read over the last few weeks, particularly SxSW this weekend (I hope I can go next year), but I’m still unpacking my stuff, and am still waiting on the delivery of my new computer desk which is now two weeks late (I’ll never shop Office Max again).

So, my ever-so-exciting upcoming redesign has been on the back burner for longer than I’ve wanted it to be. I also haven’t had time to complete and release the updates to Blocker I had been working on, nor have I had the time to do any more work on Feed Parser. Grrr… I don’t like falling behind on projects.

I’m also working on a easier-to-use version of my blogroll system. Currently it’s just kinda hacked together, but I’m working on a version that would be easy for anyone to just start using. This system just reads through my OPML files that I export from Feed Demon, and parses it out to finds the RSS/Atom feeds, then parses those feeds to display content about it. Currently, I’m relying on a modified version of Magpie for the RSS/Atom parsing, but I’m tempted to try to implement a custom-built, simplified, RSS/Atom parser into the new Blogroll system. Really it just depends on my ability to figure out how to implement some sort of reliable caching system.

I submitted a link to Cameron Moll’s website to the CSS Vault, and it got accepted! Cameron has a fantastically beautiful site. Go congratulate him on it!

Anyways, that’s all from California’s Silicon Valley for today. Talk to you again as soon as I can.

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?

Some people really like the design of this site. I do too, really, but I want something more. I want to be a LION TAMER!

I’ve been significantly inspired by a variety of designs lately, and I think I’m going to attempt to take my favorite elements of a few different designs, play with them, and make them my own. Maybe once I’m done this site will be Vault-worthy.

Some of the designs I’ve been looking at are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I’m also beginning to focus on how to make the best use of the metadata that I’ve got. I think that the integration of my Blogs I Read and RSS Reader sections is good, but can always be improved.

I’m wanting to increase the amount of readers (namely, commentors) on this site in order to make it a more active community. Hopefully, this new design I’m playing with coupled with new ideas, as well as a better focus of topics I discuss should hopefully bring in as much traffic as I can handle.

From now on, RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 feeds will contain summary posts, and the RSS 2.0 feed will contain full posts. That way, people can pick and choose which they want. My Atom feed contains both.

It’s pretty simple, I think. Those of you who subscribe to the Atom feed have the best of both worlds. I’m not sure if there is a news aggregator out there yet that can switch between summaries and full posts in Atom feeds, but I’ve filed a request with Nick Bradbury to add this functionality to Feed Demon. We’ll see what happens with this in the Feed Demon 1.1 Final.

Is this a good move? Should I change it back to all summaries? Let me know your thoughts.

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?

• Afterdawn
• Ars Technica
• Brainstorms and Raves
• Branchleft
• Clagnut
• Design By Fire
• Design Meme
• Dooce
• IBeBloggin’
• Nick Bradbury
• OS News
• Plasticbag.org
• The Register
• Robot Johnny
• Sken.be
• Signal vs Noise
• Slorp!
• Something Normal
• Surfin’ Safari
• Textbased
• Think Secret
• Twenty4.org
• Wired News

I’ve also categorized them all into various sections. Each section has an OPML feed so that you can import any or all of these feeds straight into your RSS/Atom Reader.

The “Recent Posts” part of each blog listing displays the 3 most recent posts to each website. There is also a fourth option, “Read More »”, that allows you to read the RSS feed through the normal Skyzyx.com interface, via my RSS/Atom Reader. Simple, cool, easy.

Also, I know that I just gave it away, but I’ve added Really Stupid Atom Support to my installation of the Magpie RSS Parser. It now supports Atom 0.3 feeds, but I haven’t tested earlier Atom feeds. If anyone thinks Atom 0.2 or 0.1 support is worthwhile, contact me with a feed URL.

I’ve been asked about parsing RSS feeds for people who don’t have PHP. Since I don’t know Perl, and some people couldn’t use it anyways, I’ve begun writing an RSS/Atom parser in JavaScript. No ETA yet, but it’s on the way.

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.

Now, I don’t know if all of these websites came about in 2003, but I’d like to list some of the best ones I’ve come across in this last year (in alphabetical order):

1976 Design: Dunstan seemed to have come out of the middle of nowhere to be one of the most read websites in the community. He’s been accepted into WaSP, and has some very entertaining content on his site. Definitely a must-read.

456 Berea Street: Roger has a very good site here on web standards, accessibility, CSS, and other such stuff. His site is less personal, and more focused on pure web design. Perfect for no-nonsense people.

Adam Polselli: Adam is a very good, up-and-coming web designer, with a weblog focused on graphics and design. His site goes beyond the simple understanding of aesthetics into just plain looking freaking good. I anticipate many good things coming from him in the next year.

Darice.org: Darice is a newcomer to the world of web design (as far as I can tell), and she is getting better and better as each day passes. She’s got interesting content, and I expect her writing skills to grow tremendously in the next year.

Hicksdesign: John Hicks is an excellent designer from the UK. Well worth reading.

Mezzoblue: Not that Dave Shea needs an introduction, but I’ll go ahead and give him one anyways. His work with the CSS Zen Garden and the new Mozilla Foundation website is world renowned. He’s a major name in web design, yet seems very accessible to the rest of us. I have a tremendous amount of respect for this man and the work that he does.

Sidesh0w: The first time I came across Ethan Marcotte’s site was when following a link entitled “CSS Only Mostly Stupid” when I was trying to learn more about this new Langridge Image Replacement technique. I heard about Joe Maddalone’s now-famous article for multiple versions of Internet Explorer at once from Sidesh0w. In turn, Ethan was the first person to link to the IE downloads on my site. Because of this, I went from 150 hits a day to 800+ hits a day. Thanks Ethan!

SimpleBits: Dan Cederholm was the brain behind the redesigns of Fast Company and Inc.com. His work has always been excellent, and his content is nothing short of the most helpful information out there. I owe much to this man.

What Do I Know?: Todd Dominey has been an inspiration for minimalist design for me. His site is clean, his voice is strong, and his work is brilliant. Another must-read.

Whitespace: This is definitely the break-out website of the year. There are not enough good things that I can possibly say about this man’s website. His work with Whitespace and the CSS Vault has gained recognition from some of the biggest names in the industry. Keep it up!

Happy 2004 to everyone. May the new year bring you joy, happiness, and the correct year on all of your checks. God bless!

P.S. One of the sites I must say I’m looking forward to in 2004 is the one from David House. According to comments he’s made he’ll probably have a website up sometime in the spring. We read and comment on many of the same blogs, and we both participate frequently on Coding Forums. From what I’ve seen from him so far (pre-website), I’m expecting many good things to come from him. Watch the design community for his name in the upcoming months: David House. =)

This morning, I checked my email, and received an email from Andy McCulloch that read the following:

“… I say this because I had a similar problem back in the summer, caused by a dodgy MT plugin that was tanking up to much processing time. I removed all plugins (easier said than done) and re-installed them one by one until I found the culprit. Solved the problem.”

After removing the three plug-ins I was using (Acronym, MT-Blacklist, and SmartyPants), I re-installed them one by one, and found that SmartyPants was the culprit. I contacted Jon Gruber, the author and publisher of a terrific site, Daring Fireball, and we’re in the process of getting some details worked out. Apparently, I’m the only one who’s had an allergic reaction to the new version. Even then, my sidebar works great with the new version, while my main blog does not. I must’ve screwed up somewhere and have no one to blame but myself. I hate it when that happens. Grrr…

Two-and-a-half weeks is a long time to be down-and-out, so expect a number of posts over the next few days. Woo-Hoo!

I’ve posted for help on the MT support forums, but to no avail. Has anyone else had a problem like this? Has anybody got the answer? I won’t be able to post anymore until I get this fixed. =(

If anyone has any ideas, please contact me!

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.

If you’re just visiting for the first time, I’d like to point out that I’m currently looking for full-time employment as a web designer in Silicon Valley, Fresno, or San Diego. If all you’ve got is some contract work, I’d be interested in that too. Here’s my résumé. Let’s chat.

Also, I’ve got some useful JavaScripts, and my Resources section will see many changes by the weekend.

Enjoy your stay!

You can pull the RSS feed into your news reader, if you’d like.

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.

• Microsoft trying to control blogging.
• Gator tries to shed it’s self-inflicted unpopularity by changing it’s name to Claria.
• Napster’s back (well, it’s pretending to be…).
• MSN splits in two.
• Mozilla Firebird is a viable (and better) alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer. Well, duh!
• Eolas, don’t make the W3C smack you down…

Some of the more common ones are CSS, XHTML, W3C, IE, NS7, IE5/Mac, and US 508. Actually, it’s just my way of testing out what this plug-in can do, and what it can’t…

However, the two could definitely be better suited working together, so now they are. I’ve gotten rid of the “RSS Feeds” section but created an enhanced version of the “Blogs I Read” section. Each listing now lists the three most recent posts from each site. It’ll help keep things fresh to say the least.

So, how do you like it?

To help make it better, I’ve opened myself up to user comments. Specifically in the JavaScript section of my site (which is where I get roughly 85% of my hits), I’ve had a long-time feature called the “Suck-O-Meter”. In some cases, it’s been great to have. I’ve been able to get a sense of what my users think about my scripts and the documentation that I provide, and have been able to apply suggested improvements in an effort to make this site as good as it can be.

Unfortunately, I get many users who like to send me “Suck-O-Spam”, wherein they rate the script seemingly arbitrarily, and then don’t leave a name or email or a comment on how I can make it not suck. These are a complete waste of my time, and continue to fill my email box.

As of right now, I’m forcing those who want to comment to “Cowboy Up”, and put their name with their remarks. This way it’s not a waste of my time (and mailbox space), and they can actually do something to help this site improve. All form fields for the “Suck-O-Meter” are now required. It’s just plain better this way.

And no, I won’t give out your email addresses or flame you for giving a script a low score. If I do contact you, it would only be for clarification purposes.

I also released the new version of my calendar script tonight. It’s a shiny, new version 1.2 and a whopping 7.19k for the JavaScript library, the CSS file, three (count them, three) demo files, and an XML document. Gah-head. Give it a whirl. You know you want a calendar on your website… you know you do.

« Update » I posted a list of the features and such that I want to build into my calendar script over time. This morning, I sat down and began working on them. Out of 13 or 14 new features, I got 8 of them done all in only a few hours. How cool. I’m not planning on releasing anything until version 2.0 is complete, so if you’ve been chomping at the bit, you’ll probably have to wait another week or so for me to finish up this release, and then a couple more days to update the documentation.

There have been mostly additions to the API… only minimal tweaking has been done to the v1.x command set. Users of any 1.x version should be able to upgrade without a hitch. The most drastic noticable changes are how much of the layout has been offloaded to CSS. The sample CSS file, although the concepts are the same, offers significantly more flexibility in styling the calendar. Upgraders will definitely have to update their CSS stylesheets.

Destroy Drop was designed by Geir Landro (who is also the guy who wrote dTree). His site was copied in the form of Emoticate.net by a guy who calls himself “Krycek”. I recognized Krycek’s design, and submitted it.

If I remember correctly, Krycek tried to play it off as though he was the one who came up with the design, but I knew he was caught. Mwah-ha-hah!

Also, I’ve added a sitemap. I must admit that this is my first sitemap. I’ve never had enough content to justify using one until now. Woo-hoo! You can find both links in the menu to the left.

Luposlipaphobia: The fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor.

Although I don’t actually have this fear, it’s rather entertaining to pretend that I do. On the other hand, how many of us don’t have Luposlipaphobia? Hmmm…

It’s been a while since I’ve updated or commented on my daughter’s website, JuliannaGrace.com. I suppose more commenting about her could be fine. Video games I’m playing, and schoolwork would be fine. I suppose I’ll think about it…

I use PHP to have messages sent to me, so I don’t even use Formmail. I’m going to delete it just to be safe, as I don’t want this to continue. Zeldman had the same problem recently, and although I can’t find it, I remember reading that someone else was having the same problem. Grrr…

The background color for my <h2> tag disappears on the first visible instance of it. The text is there, as well as the padding and margins. Only the background disappears. As far as it being visible, I had hoped to apply an invisible <h2> tag right above the first, but to no avail.

<h2 style="display:none;"></h2>

As we all know, there will be no more updates to IE/Win until Longhorn is released in the 2005-2006 timeframe. Mainstream use of this OS is not anticipated until circa 2008. I’m open to suggestions on how to workaround this bug. Mozilla 1.4 and Opera 7.11 don’t seem to be affected. Gotta love that IE…

To quote some of the other Coding Forums members, “IE, you are the weakest link. Goodbye.”

One of the cooler things I did in this version is begin to use PHP more liberally. As I’ve come to understand it more, I’ve realized that it’s really similar to JavaScript in syntax and thought. I like it.

A few years ago, I would use JavaScript libraries to draw my layouts to the screen. The most obvious drawback, of course, is the fact that JavaScript is a client-side language. With PHP, I can do (and do do) the same thing, except when you look at the source, it looks like normal HTML. Therefore, it processes just like HTML, and I don’t have to worry (very much) about browser JavaScript compatibility issues. If I want to change part of the layout, I just modify the code in a single PHP file, and voila!

I love the web.