My two sheds: RSS Feed

Tumblelog for 04/21

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 05:09:00 GMT

Just discovered for myself the Visor by Blacktree (creators of most wonderful Quicksilver). It gives you Quake-style sliding console - not to mention a lot of geek cred! Visor is activated with a system-wide shortcut, mine set to F1.

Tumblelog for 04/09

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 04:16:29 GMT

CushyCMS: CMS as a webservice - how Web2.0 is that! Provided you're cool with giving your FTP credentials to a third-party. What I really would like to see though is an SFTP option and better anonymity. (Use invite code "BETA" to sign up).

Tumblelog for 07/18

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 18:23:14 GMT

Plaxo, the makers of a cross-platform web-integrated address book syncing service, have posted a generic but thorough walk-through on enhancing your website with OpenID authorization. Great read!

Tumblelog for 07/10

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 12:09:00 GMT

Remember The Milk, the best web-based task planner & todo list, has announced its integration with Twitter, popular micro-blogging service. Now you can add, update and review your tasks via SMS, IM, web or any third-party Twitter client by sending direct message to user rtm: d rtm <message>.

Tumblelog for 07/09

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 17:31:00 GMT

Us geeks can make a programming language out of anything (or even nothing) - how about imaginary cat-talk? Meet LOLCODE - already at version 1.2, has several compilers and assumed to be Turing-complete.

Tumblelog for 06/29

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 21:27:38 GMT

Finally! Apple iPhone's D-day is today! No idea when this uber-gizmo gets to Russia but I'll still be on my toes as the rest of geek world when the stores open. Hoping for live webcasts, first unboxing pr0n and reviews to follow in short time afterwards.

Tumblelog for 06/20

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 17:30:00 GMT

WMD: The WYSIWYM Markdown Editor (demo available) is a lightweight JavaScript library that turns any textarea into an editor for blog comments, forum posts and other text management duties. It requires exactly one script of code to use on a page, works in all major browsers, provides a live preview (that's second line) and is free for non-commercial use. I'm considering the use of its preview feature here specifically for comments.

Tumblelog for 06/18

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 03:29:00 GMT

Versions (private beta) is a new Subversion client aiming to bring iApps-like experience to version management on Macs. For those who can't wait, there's Xcode by Apple itself which also can do concurrent versions in GUI but it doesn't look as delicious.

Tumblelog for 06/17

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 04:18:00 GMT

A note to my RSS subscribers: I was re-mixing an RSS template lately so if you experienced some funky behavior on my side, it's not a bug - it's a sign of a coming XSLT article, wink-wink.

Google Mashup Editor: Swiss-army tool for a wannabe Google hacker

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:46:00 GMT

In May Google introduced its new brainchild - Google Mashup Editor. It has been presented as a no-nonsense online interface and an API for creating mashups and simple applications using Google's own webservices and external data. Upon its launch it has been compared a lot to rival Yahoo! Pipes project that enables users to mix, filter and process various data sources available on the web in a simple and visual form.

Yesterday my beta access application has been approved so now I will give you an inside look at Google Mashup Editor and explain what it is and what it is not.

In fact, Mashup Editor and Pipes are not direct competitors. They compare like AppleScript and Automator in Mac OS X - while the first one gives much more power and lets the experienced programmer pull the inner strings of an application by working with source code, the latter trades this power for the concept of drag'n'drop "actions" that is pretty easy to grasp even for newcomers.

At the core of every mashup is a source code in GML-format (where GML probably stands for Google Markup Languge) which has a syntax in many ways similar to XSLT. GML even uses a subset of XPath!

Current feature set is quite limited. Editor itself is an AJAX'ified text field enhanced with two core features of a programmers' editor: syntax highlighting and auto-indent. To the right is a list of your personal projects followed by examples which include the arbitrary "Hello World" as well as more intriguing "Feed Reader", "Task List", Google Maps mashup etc. Clicking on any of those will save your current project and switch to the selected item.

Clicking on "Help" link to the right will replace the list of project with GML syntax reference. Underneath is another section that shows a list of files that belong to the current project.

As explained in Getting Started Guide, GME converts every data feed to Atom feed format so that accessing data is standardized. The second tab, "Feed Browser", lets you peek "under the hood" and see raw data the way your application will see it:

Third tab, "Sandbox", is where you can test your applications before publishing them (more on that later). Your mashup will be put into a sandbox every time you click the Test button in the Editor screen.

When you're satisfied with your creation, it is time to publish it. Once published your mashup will be hosted at Google under a subdomain of googlemashups.com. You can also turn your mashup into a gadget which puts it into a public directory for users of iGoogle personalized homepage.

But keep in mind that published GME applications are not "black boxes". In fact, Google has done a great thing by providing the conveniently-named "Source" link in the top-right corner of every mashup's page. This way inner mechanics of any application (its GML file) are instantly revealed to a curious eye.

Browser support is currently limited to http://getfirefox.com v1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+. Support for other popular browsers like Opera or Safari is said to be "on the way". But the greatest limitation so far is lack of support for dialects of XML other than RSS and Atom. There's a reason for this (see above about the conversion of RSS feeds to Atom) but I've posted a feature request on GME's Google Group anyway - let's see if it gets any love from dev's.

All in all, Google Mashup Editor looks pretty solid (for an early beta) and it already allows power users to create some interesting web apps. So if you ever wished to develop your own Google Maps mashup, now is a great time to start! Get in, hack away and share your ideas with the rest of the world!

Reference

Coming soon: Free source code for your own Google mashup!

Tumblelog for 06/13

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 08:00:00 GMT

After two weeks my application for Google Mashup Editor beta test has been approved. I'm just taking a look around but it's already clear that this thing will blow Ning out of the water!

Tumblelog for 06/08

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 13:48:32 GMT

The makers of DivX codec are giving away a free DivX Pro license today ($20 any other day) - act quickly to get your freebie!

Tumblelog for 06/05

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:18:09 GMT

www.apple.com/macbookpro!

Tumblelog for 06/04

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 16:26:56 GMT

www.apple.com/iphone!

Widon't in XSLT: don't be a widow-maker!

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 15:36:00 GMT

Bad typography on the Web doesn't exactly kill people (even if it is believed to be 95% of what web design is) but it can still make widows - typographic widows, that is. To quote Shaun Inman:

For those who donвЂ™t know, in typesetting, a widow is a single word on a line by itself at the end of a paragraph and is considered bad style.

Compare these:

Helping website owners to fix the most frequent errors automagically will hopefully make online texts more readable and stylish as well. Mr. Inman came up with a simple yet perfectly working solution: replace the regular whitespace between last two words of a title with a non-breaking space (i.e.   entity) - and released it in a form of an easy-to-use Wordpress plugin. It is now also ported for Movable Type, Expression Engine, Textpattern etc.

Today I make Widon't available for Symphony and other XML/XSLT-based engines via an XSL template. Read on for full source.

Edit your Entries utility (or any other file that you want to make use of this method) to include this template:

<xsl:template name="widont-title">
    <xsl:param name="temp"/>
    <xsl:param name="text"/>

    <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="contains($text, ' ')">
            <xsl:variable name="before" select="concat($temp,' ',substring-before($text,' '))"/>
            <xsl:variable name="after" select="substring-after($text, ' ')"/>
            <xsl:choose>
                <xsl:when test="contains($after, ' ')">
                    <xsl:call-template name="widont-title">
                        <xsl:with-param name="temp" select="$before"/>
                        <xsl:with-param name="text" select="$after"/>
                    </xsl:call-template>
                </xsl:when>
                <xsl:otherwise>
                    <xsl:value-of select="concat($before, '&#160;', $after)" />
                </xsl:otherwise>
            </xsl:choose>
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
            <xsl:value-of select="$text"/>
        </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

Update: By request from Josh I've modified the source to drop the non-breaking space if the combined length of two last words is longer than desired so that it won't break the layout in a bad way. The default is 35 characters but it can be modified either by editing the template or using an optional maxlen parameter. Download the updated template if you prefer this behavior.

N.B.   entity is a proper way to place a non-breaking space in a generic XML document because   is only defined in (X)HTML!

Call this template where appropriate, e.g. if you use Symphony stock data source and template, replace these lines in Entries utility's source:

<a href="{$root}/entries/{@handle}/">
    <xsl:value-of select="fields/title"/>
</a>

with the following (don't forget to modify both "brief" and "full" modes):

<a href="{$root}/entries/{@handle}/">
    <xsl:call-template name="widont-title">
        <xsl:with-param name="text" select="normalize-space(fields/title)" />
    </xsl:call-template>
</a>

Notice how I used normalize-space() function to remove any extra spaces that may occur in your string. That's important: a stray trailing space can make this algorithm fail since non-breaking space will be placed after the last word!

XSLT code used in this article is based on the work of XSLT standard library project and is in turn licensed under a GNU Lesser General Public License.

Tumblelog for 06/02

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 07:52:30 GMT

Solved Einstein's fish puzzle! Feel myself pretty smart.

Tumblelog for 06/01

Thu, 31 May 2007 22:38:00 GMT

Google Mashup Editor - is it like Yahoo! Pipes for über-geeks? Applied for a beta access - will see.

Tumblelog for 05/31

Wed, 30 May 2007 20:58:00 GMT

Firefox was updated to v2.0.0.4 (still don't get the extra dot) feat. security fixes, Vista support and l10n updates.

Tumblelog for 05/30

Wed, 30 May 2007 16:36:55 GMT

AJAX is omnipotent - they ported vi! Now I'm waiting for a <canvas>-based Doom, then - NES emulator!

Tumblelog for 05/29

Mon, 28 May 2007 20:09:57 GMT

Post your Twitter updates from the comfort of Firefox's address bar with TwitterBar extension.