March, 2008
January, 2008
- Safegarding your data with Parchive After a brief mishap with a hard drive, I've gone backup-crazy. This article looks how I'm using Parchive to give myself an extra bit of confidence in my backups.
- Carlo’s launched Escaloop Carlo's just launched his latest lifestream-badge-making project: Escaloop.
December, 2007
- Innovation and Interoperability Briefly, my thoughts on the current dustup over the W3C's CSS Working Group.
- DNS Made Easy is actually pretty easy In a spontaneous burst of productivity, spawned mostly by my complete and utter failure as a sysadmin, I moved my parent's email account off my server. DNS Made Easy made this a trivial task.
- Solving strange text wrapping problems in `bash` I started having strange text wrapping problems after implementing implementing the beautifully colored bash prompt I discussed on Monday. After fidgeting around a bit, I think I've come up with a solution.
- Now I have a colourful `bash` prompt My jealousy of Adriano's pretty `bash` prompt has been assuaged by the construction of my own, _prettier_ and _more functional_ prompt. So there!
- Presentation: Love the Terminal When Murray and Norm solicited talks earlier in the year for the Yahoo! Frontend Summit, they somehow neglected to mention that the presentations would end up being hour-long blocks. :)
November, 2007
- Photoset: @media Ajax I still haven't written anything useful about the @media Ajax conference, but here are some lovely pictures. Should be worth about 64,000 words, right?
- Just back from London I'm back from London after @media Ajax with some security papers for you to read, and not much else yet.
- Looking forward to @media I'm looking forward to @media Ajax
August, 2007
- Goodbye Grandmom My grandmom died today.
July, 2007
- Playing with Pownce… Pownce looks like a more interesting Twittr.
- Viva la Y! French News Site!
- Congrats to the Singapore News Team! Singapore launched their News site today using the code we've been working on here in Munich as a base. Nice work!
June, 2007
- Two more News relaunches, up and running… We relaunched Yahoo! Nachrichten in Germany and Yahoo! Notizie in Italy today. Finally! :)
- I am a Super Early Bird. Are you?
- Escaping Curly Braces in XSLT Attributes Curly braces in the attributes of XSLT document's elements are interpreted as XPATH expressions to be evaluated. This sometimes causes problems...
- Ice Water for Some… Safari's coming to Windows. Welcome to the party...
- Short-form Link Blogging Blogging is hard for me, mostly because I have an irrational desire to make each of my posts "important" and "interesting". I'm working out ways to solve that problem for myself...
May, 2007
- Home again, home again…
- Stupid i18n Mistake. Italian (and other languages) are full of single-quotes. Maybe I should escape them...
- How do I unit test a website? Unit testing seems like an unqualified good, I'm just not sure how to apply the concepts to my work.
- Words Escape Me I'm bored, and even though I should be overflowing with things to write about, I'm not.
- My bookmarks are amazingly out of date. I'm removing the bookmarks from this site on a temporary basis. That should drive me insane enough to actually do something about the fact that they haven't changed since last year.
- Domain Transfer I'm (finally) hopping off GoDaddy and onto Gandi. Hopefully nothing explodes...
- ¡Es vivo! We launched the Yahoo! News site in Spain today. Finally!
- Stopgap Solution I bought a Treo 600 on Ebay. And it's huge. HUGE! But also very powerful and nice.
April, 2007
- I used to be so pretty. A few days ago, my landlord asked me if I was losing hair. *sigh*
- Fun Apple Remote Tricks Funny, funny coworkers can be stymied by pairing your Apple Remote with your mac.
- Just the stats A List Apart is running a survey to gather demographic info from web professionals; I think it could be a worthwhile enterprise.
- Amazingly Stupid DataRequestor Bug James Moberg pointed out that I'm a complete idiot, and shipped DataRequestor 1.6 with some debug code left in.
- Installing `libgd` from source on OS X `libgd` is a pain in the ass to install from source. Here's a step by step guide in case I ever have to do it again.
- It’s live. Today, we relaunched Yahoo! News in the UK. Finally.
February, 2007
- DataRequestor — Version 1.6 After a brief (ha!) hiatus, DataRequestor's 1.6 release fixes many outstanding bugs. Grab it now!
January, 2007
- Signs of Life It's great to see that SSHKeychain isn't dead.
- Benchmarking Your Site with `http_load` http_load is a great benchmarking utility that gives you a quick overview of your web server's performance. This article describes how to install and use it.
- Subversion 1.4.3
- Locking Your Mac My coworkers love playing pranks on poor, unlocked computers. This is the method I've decided on to quickly and securely walk away from my Mac.
- Auto-configuring Proxy Settings with a PAC File Configuring a browser's proxy settings manually is inflexible; proxy auto-config (PAC) files are much more flexible.
- Installing Textpattern 4.0.4 with Markdown This site is built on top of the Textpattern engine, running Markdown instead of Textile. Here's how to make that happen.
- Setting Up an OpenID Server with phpMyID
- iWant. I want an iPhone. Just like everyone else.
- Using YUI in Greasemonkey Scripts Carlo Zottman has a great article out on Yahoo's User Interface blog. Nice work!
December, 2006
- Frohe Weihnachten!
- Building SSHKeychain as an Intel Binary I've seen a few Universal Binary builds of SSHKeychain floating around, but I'm paranoid, so I built my own. It's easier than I expected.
- Building Subversion 1.4.3 for OS X Metissian's pre-build Subversion binaries are out of date, and Dan Benjamin's excellent guide to building Subversion yourself runs into a wall for 1.4+. You, however, are an impatient pioneer. You want to build the latest stable (impatient, not _imprude
October, 2006
- Starting out with the SVK Version Control System SVK is a version control system that sits on top of a Subsverion, CVS, Perforce, etc. repository, and provides the promise of a common interface. Here's how to install it on OS X.
- Comments With Specificity Jack Slocum's new comment system is really inspirational.
- Apartments in Munich Help me find an apartment, please?
- Backing Up E-Mail Rui Carmo wrote a great python script to backup e-mail from an IMAP server.
September, 2006
- Serverless SVN Repositories You don't _need_ a powerful SVN server in order to reap the benifits of version control. This article explains how to set up repositories on any machine you have SSH access into.
- Traffic Analysis with Mint I use Mint to analyze the traffic on this website. It's a powerful tool, made more powerful with some excellent plugins.
- You heard me: `leave`! `leave` is a brilliant little utility that annoys you at a pre-specified time until you log out.
- Scope in JavaScript My latest article for Digital Web, 'Scope In JavaScript', is up and waiting for you to read it.
- Answers to Common Technical Interview Questions The interview articles I found yesterday had more than a few common "phone screen" questions that I decided to make sure I could answer: here's what I came up with.
- Articles about Interviewing A short list of articles worth reading for interviewers or interviewees.
August, 2006
- Quick Optimization DOM calls are expensive; this article walks through one quick way to optimize them out of your code.
- French Translation of ‘I Wonder What This Button Does’ John Garner has translated the revision control article I wrote for A List Apart into French! Exciting!
July, 2006
- I wish I was at OSCON: “Subversion Best Practices” Brad Choate has a great summary of what looks like a _wonderful_ presentation on Subversion best practices, given at OSCON 2006 by Ben Collins-Sussman & Brian W. Fitzpatrick
- I Wonder What This Button Does I've got an article up on A List Apart, introducing my favourite behind-the-scenes development tool: Subversion.
- I wonder how to say “ugh” in German? I _hate_ being sick.
- Building Accessible Widgets for the Web I've got an article up on Digital Web, outlining the processes I use to build accessible UI controls for web applications.
- “Forbidden” Errors and Subversion Commits A wayward `mod_rewrite` rule broke my Subversion commits with 403 ("Forbidden") errors. Here's how I fixed it.
- Digital Web and Me I've joined Digital Web Magazine's editorial team. Yay!
June, 2006
- Pimp My JavaScript — Duff’s Edition Your code can be faster! Here are a few tips to help you speed up the toughest pieces of your JavaScript.
- Install SQLite Locally on OS X SQLite is a nice little database engine that can be incredibly fast as a website backend. Installing it on OS X is equally quick.
- `mcw_ma_gnolia` version 0.4 is out A new version of `mcw_ma_gnolia` fixes an issue with parsing Ma.gnolia's new linkroll format.
- Virtual Hosting on OS X Setting up virtual domains on your local OS X Apache installation is pretty easy. Here's a quick description of the process.
- TextMate bundle for TextPattern A quick note about a TextMate language bundle for Textpattern that integrates with `mcw_templates`.
- Subversion Post-Commit Hooks 101 The "Hello World!" of Subversion `post-commit` hooks is the use of `SVNnotify` to send e-mails out to a project team every time a new revision is committed to the repository. This is easier than it sounds.
- Working with Subversion File Properties Subversion has a very powerful system for associating metadata with the files you have under version control. This article describes how to automate the process of adding properties to the files you put under version control using `auto-props`.
May, 2006
- Leveraging `mod_rewrite` I have three kinds of `mod_rewrite` rules in my `.htaccess` file, this article explains each, and lays out best practices for managing your site's URL scheme.
April, 2006
- mcw_ma_gnolia `mcw_ma_gnolia` is a TextPattern plugin that generates a customizable Ma.gnolia link roll for use on your website.
- Preparing a Mac for Resale Describes the easy process of setting up a mac for resale (patches, etc) while keeping the Setup Assistant experience for the new owner.
- mcw_templates — v.0.2 `mcw_templates` is a TextPattern admin plugin, enabling the trivial export of pages, forms, and CSS rules to a specified folder for convenient editing, and the subsequent import of new and updated files.
- mcw_templates — Import/Export Textpattern Templates mcw_templates is a TextPattern plugin allowing the export/import of pages, forms, and css rules to files for external editing.
- New Server, New Design I've redesigned, and moved the site to a new server. Exciting, eh?
March, 2006
- DataRequestor 1.6.1 — Ajax without the confusing API DataRequestor is a JavaScript wrapper for the `XMLHttpRequest` object that enables the trivial implementation of dynamic interfaces without the painful necessity for a complete page-refresh to talk to the server. It's Ajax without the confusing API.
February, 2006
- Son of PerfectTime: The Validationator! The PerfectTime JavaScript class gets updated to support the hCalendar format.
- Showing Perfect Time (Unobtrusively) We can use JavaScript to deal with the nasty annoyance of displaying times in a user's local time-zone.
March, 2005
- Slidable Select Widgets Explained A walkthrough of the process I used to make an accessible slider widget from a SELECT element.
- Type-Ahead search for select elements An expansion of earlier unobtrusive JavaScript articles: this time we're adding type-ahead search functionality to SELECT elements.
- Component encapsulation using Object-Oriented JavaScript An introduction to using classes in JavaScript in order to avoid namespace conflicts and gain interesting object-oriented functionality.
- Event Handlers and Other Distractions Attaching behaviors to the semantic elements in your HTML document isn't nearly so hard as it sounds.
