http://xmouse.ithium.net Just another WordPress weblog Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:39:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There seems to be a simultaneous movement toward both centralising services and decentralising services. Web apps like Gmail, Flickr and del.icio.us, ever more popular, are inherently centralised: everyone's email and access to that email is kept on one network. In a similar vein, the rise of things like REST and the ... http://xmouse.ithium.net/2008/to-centralise-or-not-to-centralise Dave Shea mentioned moving to generic XML for blogging purposes recently. It's an interesting idea: is it worth moving markup languages, due to the limitations of HTML? Let's pretend this was actually possible in the first place, and look at the options. Generic XML This is an interesting proposition, and it could ... http://xmouse.ithium.net/2005/marking-up-blogs I just discovered 43 things and immediately fell in love with it. It's such a brilliant idea: I've got so many abstract goals floating around in my mind, getting them down on paper (even if it is electronic paper) was both a great exercise for my personal development plus a ... http://xmouse.ithium.net/2005/social-tagging-systems I'll be the first to agree that Greasemonkey is really, really cool :) Up until about a week ago, GM scripts had been little Javascript scripts that were designed to make browsing specific pages that little bit easier. Simon Willison's Fixing Paul Graham's Footnotes script is a good example -- ... http://xmouse.ithium.net/2005/greasemonkey-and-ethics Since I migrated to Linux about two months ago, I've been setting up a development environment. By that, I mean installing everything I need to do web development on my own computer (things like a web server). It's been a great learning experience, both for learning how the individual pieces ... http://xmouse.ithium.net/2005/setting-up-a-development-environment Note to self: here follows the easiest way of removing an item from a PHP array. As I see it, there's three main ways to remove an item, knowing the key, from a PHP array and preserve keys. array_slice() around it Firstly, the most conceptually awkward, hardest to think up and most ... http://xmouse.ithium.net/2004/removing-values-from-a-php-array I'm sure you've read the latest validation debate (yes, they are discrete, the blogosphere isn't actually one long validation matters/doesn't matter row :)). Ethan of Sidesh0w started it off with a post at WaSP, Keith exploded it, and 73 comments later over at Asterisk, no conclusion has been reached. Here's ... http://xmouse.ithium.net/2004/perfectionist-web-development Note: the changes seen here won't be apparent if you are using Internet Explorer. The reason why will take too long to explain, but you should think about switching to a better browser anyway. See if the Get Firefox and Browse Happy sites help you. Fitts' law is may appear blindingly ... http://xmouse.ithium.net/2004/applying-fitts-law Something that's been on my mind slightly more than the usual lately is how the front page of weblogs are presented. By 'front page', I'm refering to the page the user sees when visiting the weblog's base address: not a specific archived page, but the page that normally displays the ... http://xmouse.ithium.net/2004/front-page-designs You've probably heard of floating, absolute and relative positioning but it's less likely you understand how they work. The information is available, but those specifications are aimed at browser-builders, not beginner CSS coders. It's properly technical stuff. So with this tutorial I hope to lay out the concept of the ... http://xmouse.ithium.net/2004/what-is-the-flow