Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

“The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding („TNG“) is a powerful way to manage and display your genealogy data on the Internet, all without generating a single page of HTML. Instead, your information is stored in MySQL database tables and dynamically displayed in attractive fashion with PHP.”

Marc Hedlund – Etsy’s Excellent Visualizations: “I had seen Etsy, the marketplace for handmade goods, but not its excellent visualizations, until Upendra showed them to me this week. Check these out: * Etsy ColorSpace * The 3d Etsy Time Machine (I love that the clock runs backwards) * The Etsy Geolocator“

François Joseph de Kermadec – I’m wikied out: “Wikis and Forums are awesome. They allow the community to improve the documentation, build upon it, provide feedback to the developer. But they cannot replace the documentation. By definition, a Wiki is written by someone who feels comfortable enough with the application to need “tips“, forums require…

Joe Gregorio at XML.com – Dreaming of an Atom Store: A Database for the Web: “Imagine that you just have a huge glob of storage that you can store Atom Entries in, and which you can edit using the APP, and then search over using OpenSearch. That idea, that big blob of Atom Entries, all…

PostgreSQL Gotchas: “PostgreSQL is a fully-featured, robust open-source database with strong SQL standards compliancy. As with all RDBMS products it has its odd little idiosyncracies, which while documented, are not obvious, counter-intuitive or just head-scratchingly odd.” I’ve already run into some of the problems described there – “unquoted object names fold to lower case“, and…

Tony Marston – An activity based Workflow Engine for PHP: “This document will describe the activity based workflow system which I have constructed as an extension to my Development Infrastructure for PHP. […] In order to implement a workflow system it is first necessary to find a suitable means of designing and modeling a workflow…

Marcus Baker – Listen kids, AJAX is not cool: “If you writing a user interface, make sure it responds in 1/10th of a second. That’s a pretty simple rule, and if you break it, you will distract the user. […] Suddenly we have lot’s of web developers “enhancing” the browser experience with behind the scenes…

In “On Browser UIs”, Richard S. Tallent has a comprehensive list of reasons “why web apps suck“. On “missing widgets“: “Tree views: even the best ones out there suck. MSDN, for example. They also almost invariably lead to using frames to avoid population and rendering on each page refresh. […] Context menus. This alone is…

Neil Kandalgaonkar – Links to essays in Best Software Writing I: “Joel Spolsky has compiled a book of essays on software, which he calls The Best Software Writing I. The essays all came from online sources, but when Spolsky released the chapter listing, I didn’t see anywhere online where he posted links to the originals.…

Andi Gutmans – PHP OCI8 Driver Updated!: “Antony just sent an email that he finished commiting the updates to the PHP OCI8 driver and giving a short overview of the bug fixes and improvements. The OCI8 extension has had a lot of bugs in the past few years, and it became clear that if this…