One of my current interests is the semantic web — that is, the push to move from publishing text on the Web to publishing structured data, which can actually be understood by computers (in so far as a computer can truly “understand” anything). By publishing information so that computers can understand it, you make the … Continued
OK, so the Trackback specification includes the ability for a pinging page to specify its article title and blog name when it sends a trackback ping. However, these fields are optional. When not present, typically the recipient of the ping will then make an HTTP request back to the pinger to determine the article title … Continued
I get probably about 10 to 20 spam comments left on this blog every day. However, nobody ever sees them because, firstly, the most obvious spams are automatically filtered out using content scanning and IP blacklists, and secondly, the remaining messages are checked by a human moderator (i.e. me) before they appear on the site. … Continued
PHP lets you define your own error handler, so I decided to get a bit fancy. MegaErrorHandler (MEH) outputs its errors as specially-formatted HTML comments, with the details of the error encoded using JSON. A small client-side script, with an associated stylesheet then pulls this data out of the comments and formats it as a … Continued
I've said it already, and I'll say it again: typography is a very important and oft-neglected aspect of web design. demiblog is my CMS; although great typography requires the conscious effort of the author/typesetter, and can't be handled automatically by a CMS, there are certainly steps a CMS can take to ease the burden on … Continued
URL design is important. For this reason I’ve put a lot of thought into the URLs used by demiblog. demiblog has a PHP object SiteURLSpace that maps between URLs and data queries. This means that demiblog’s URLs don’t necessarily have to bear much resemblence to its code structure. It’s also pretty easy to completely replace … Continued
If you’re not aware of EXIF, here’s what it is: EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format, and is a standard for storing interchange information in image files, especially those using JPEG compression. Most digital cameras now use the EXIF format. That is, many images, including most of the JPEGs you get off modern digital … Continued
I’m currently in the process of extending demiblog’s database support. Version 0.1.0 only supports PostgreSQL, but I plan on also supporting MySQL in the next release, and a few other databases further down the line. Because this cross-database support had always been planned, I’ve been very careful in writing my SQL to make sure that … Continued
At last, my new CMS is at a stage when I’m able to actually start publishing with it. Now that I have an easy-ish tool to publish with, you can expect that this website will be updated more frequently and with more and better content. Updating this website in the past has been a major … Continued
Michael Fesser wrote: My scripts make use of many of the new OOP features in PHP 5, so they won’t run at all on PHP 4. Ditto. My current big pet project is http://demiblog.org/. This is PHP 5+ only and supports MySQL 5+ and PostgreSQL 8+. Although I do realise that earlier versions of these … Continued
