I’m way behind on data entry for sfmagic.org, so the first thing I need to do to improve it is to get it up to date. It would help to have a better system for entering the data.
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I’m a little behind schedule for December. I’m still going to try to work on sfmagic.org for this month, moving it over to Python and Pylons, and possibly to PostGreSQL, and moving it to a different server.
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A colleague gave a presentation at work today on Pylons, a web framework for python. I was curious about the slides he was using, because they looked like they could be in S5, which I like. So afterwards I asked him, and he said that he wrote them in “rest”, which confused me at first because I thought of the REST approach to Web architecture. He was in fact talking about reStructuredText, a plaintext markup system that I’d never encountered before.
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I’ve been using star-light by Dean Edwards for a while to do syntax highlighting in HTML, and it works extremely well.
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Starting at Metaweb, I had to set up a new machine, something I haven’t done in a while. One thing that made it a lot easier this time is that I have a lot of my config in my Subversion repository, which saved me quite a lot of time. This also reflects some changes I’ve made since writing Essential Windows Software last year. (Oh, and all the software is Free Software.)
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In the eight months since writing Some Plans for sfmagic.org, I’ve made little progress. This is mainly because of gating factors such as moving it into subversion and getting my database backups into subversion as well. Now that those things are in place, I need to review how it works right now to figure out how to proceed.
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Today I told Nimblefish I was leaving. My last day is 4 May, Friday after next.

It’s rather weird to be leaving. I’ve been there for almost five years.
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AJAX has a significant limitation: for security reasons, it can’t fetch data from sites other than the one the user is on. This makes a number of cool things much harder to do.

One way around this is the script tag hack. But that requires a third party that outputs JavaScript files, whereas what I want is to be able to process XML and/or HTML from that third party.
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As I’ve been continuing the process of moving files into my Subversion repository, I’ve decided on metadata to use with each file.
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I’m still searching for semantic authoring tools, and spent some time yesterday trying out Vex and WYM editor. Both look promising, but neither does enough of what I want.
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The CSS fixed value for the position property is extremely useful, particularly in allowing for persistent navigation on long pages. Naturally, versions of IE before 7 don’t support it. I’ve been getting around that using JavaScript.
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When you’re manipulating the DOM and are working with elements through list or array iterators, it’s important to remember that the arrays/lists are “live”—otherwise you’ll end up spending a lot of time trying to figure out why your code is, for example, skipping nodes.
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These are the tools I use when doing web development.
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I’ve had a heavy JavaScript workload for a while, and these are some thoughts/observations.
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I spent a significant chunk of the weekend getting files into my Subversion repository. As I was trying to recreate historical versioning from a a bunch of files that weren’t in version control, it took rather a lot of time to do this. I’m rather happy to finally have all my personal stuff under version control. However, there’s a lot of cleaning up left to do.
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I’ve recently been writing documentation at work, and have been writing it in HTML, which is more or less my native format for that kind of writing. In doing so, I’ve been focusing more on document structure and how it aids usability for the reader. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve also started to focus on how it might improve usability for the author.
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Steve recently tried to rile me up by sending me a link to this article by a Flash developer about why he does’t think open source Flash is necessary. And it worked. A state of riledom indeed ensued.
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Monika recently mentioned that she wanted to learn HTML, and Brian has similar intentions, prompting me to wonder how I would teach HTML at this point. I’ve taught it before, but not for quite some time, and I think my approach would be different now.
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In Exploring HTML form elements, I wrote about semantic elements that improve form markup and usability. Sadly, the legend element has some significant problems.
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Years back I wrote some online tutorials on how to animate circular movement in Lingo and JavaScript. While moving my older articles to this site, I realized that I could not in good conscience move this one without updating it. So, a tutorial on circular animation in JavaScript follows.
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After collaborating with me on an AJAX enhancement to our web application, my co-worker Ryan today asked me to give our engineering group an introduction to AJAX techniques. That seems like an interesting idea, so I’m going to sketch out the kind of thing such an introduction might cover.
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HTML form elements are richer than is generally understood. There are a variety of completely standard and semantically-useful elements that seem to languish in semi-obscurity, despite having been around since 1999.
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I don’t write about work too often, but I’ve really been enjoying what I’ve been working on for the last few weeks. I’m writing the specification for how our system should handle turning standard HTML files into files that handle the variability delivered by our backend.
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