Rewind a little more than 10 years to December 18, 1997. Internet Explorer 4 had been released 3 months earlier. The Mozilla Foundation had not yet formed, and their Firefox web browser was years away from public release. There was no XMLHttpRequest… there wasn’t even XML. On that day, over a decade ago, HTML 4.0 was published as a W3C recommendation. Read the rest of this entry »
While I’m primarily a developer, I end up spending a lot of time working with CSS and other front end technologies. I’ve learned a lot about CSS, but I don’t use it enough to have really good habits and often end up with superfluous selectors and bloated code. So when Tom Armitage’s CSS Redundancy Checker popped up in my feed reader I was intrigued. Tom’s solution is simple, elegant, and reasonably quick. But it’s a command line app that requires ruby and some additional packages — not exactly newb (or lazy programmer) friendly. Since I was looking for an excuse to play with Rails a bit more, I decided to write a web front end and build an Online CSS Redundancy Checker on top of Tom’s code. Read the rest of this entry »
IBM Developer Works just posted a new article discussing a variety of “lightweight” Web Servers. They analyze a number of servers across a variety of dimensions including performance, scalability, security, flexibility, and manageability. The article explains that “while it’s reasonable to assume the market leaders have been carefully optimized to be effectively unbeatable in performance (for example), many tiny competitors are faster for simple service of static Web pages.” This is in line with the results I found when I ran a comparison between longtime stalwart Apache and lightweight newcomer lighttpd. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s rather ironic that, while search is nearly ubiquitous on the web, there is no perfect solution for adding search functionality to a web application. Many developers simply use the basic search functionality built into whatever database server they’re using. Until recently, systems that required a more feature-rich, efficient, or flexible search solution had to turn to proprietary commercial software. But this is no longer the case. Apache’s Lucene project has brought the open source community a sophisticated and flexible search solution that rivals most commercial packages. Read the rest of this entry »
After more than a year of development, the long awaited stable release of Zend Framework is finally here. Zend Framework is a fully object-oriented PHP 5 class library that was carefully designed to be modular and flexible. It includes components for authentication & authorization, internationalization, efficient database access, and utilities for consuming and exposing web services, among many other things. Broadly stated, the project’s goal is to “provide the most commonly required 90% of the value you need… leaving you the ability to custom build that last 10% to meet your specific business needs.” Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been reading a lot of blogs lately and was wondering what the average blog’s readability was compared to say, the New York Times, or even the USA Today. I figured I could write a little spider to crawl a blog and calculate these statistics, but I never got around to it. Then yesterday I came across an interesting post discussing the ideal length of a blog post, and was inspired. So now, I present to you my Blog Readability Tester (I figured the name Charlotte was appropriate since she’s a spider that likes words). Read the rest of this entry »
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