The Norwegian weather service Yr.no is very popular in the Nordic region as they release weather data for free. We (as in the Swedish web development company Dotvoid AB) have used their service to create mashups and services as many others have before us.

Recently Malin Holm converted all our old bitmapped weather icons to SVG and we decided to release two png versions (60×50 and 120×100) licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution No Derivative 3.0 Unported License. All icons are named after the weather codes used by Yr.no but can of course be used for other data.

Download the full weather icon set at the Dotvoid AB icon page.

Weather icons

$isochars = "\xFC\xFD\xFF";
$asciichars = "uyy";
$urlfriendly = strtr($actual_string, $isochars, $asciichars);

What struck me was that the character þ (FE in hex) was translated into y. As is correct if you look at how y, in different forms, was used as an abbreviation for the, that and so on in old English – or Anglo-Saxon. Often it is now written “Ye” as in the blog post title. (Yes – the “Y” in the title should be pronounced as “th“.

However, it is a bit odd as the Icelandic language still use the letter frequently. The sound value is more or less the equivalent of the English “th” in this or the.

The major value in SEO friendly urls is the readability. Shouldn’t it be more friendly and natural to translate þ into “th” in SEO friendly urls then?

Conferences? Apart from the usual PHP conferences that might or mightn’t (!?) be of interest there’s a score of other events focusing less on technology and more on softer issues. An hour ago I received an email from the Ning group Swedish Startups with lots of interesting conferences. I probably won’t be able to attend many of those. But Future of Web Apps in Dublin really caught my attention. A not too expensive one day event with lots of cool people and companies. Not to mention a good reason to visit the city I lived in almost eight years ago. (At the time I was working as a contractor on a then cool project.)

What I want to aggregate are Swedish web development and web entrepeneur blogs. I like the planet-planet concept that for example planet-php use. (Though I don’t think planet-php use python…) Conveniently I had this idn domain, översikt.se, lying around which I haven’t used up until now. As is normal nowadays (for me at least) I used Zend Framework to build the site. It was the first time I used Zend_Feed class. I works like a charm.

The whole website logic (both model and controller) is about 200 lines of code. And the main logic of fetching the feeds are really nice and short.

foreach($urls as $url) {
    try {
      $feed = Zend_Feed::import($url['feedurl']);
    }
    catch(PDOException $ex) {
      error_log($ex->getMessage());
      continue;
    }

    $feedTitle = $feed->title;
    $feedLink = $feed->link;
    $title = '';
    $link = '';
    $desc = '';
    $pub = '';

    foreach ($feed as $item) {
      if (is_a($feed, "Zend_Feed_Rss")) {
        $title = $item->title();
        $link = $item->link();
        $desc = $item->description();
        $publ = ($item->pubDate()) ? $item->pubDate() : $item->date();
      }
      else if(is_a($feed, "Zend_Feed_Atom")) {
        $title = $item->title();
        $link = $item->link('alternate');
        $desc = $item->content();
        $publ = ($item->issued()) ? $item->issued() : $item->published();
      }
      else {
        error_log("Feed <$feedid> is an unsupported format");
        continue;
      }

      // Parse and normalize date and check if new
      $time = strtotime($publ);
      $publ = date("c", $time);

      // Execute the previously prepared sql insert statement
      $result = $sti->execute(array(
          'feedid' => $url['feedid'],
          'title' => $title,
          'link' => $link,
          'publ' => $publ,
          'desc' => $desc));
    }
}

I skipped database exception and error handing in the above code to make it even more readable. Zend_Feed have failed me only once when trying to read and parse an old weird rss format. Wonderful.

(For those that don’t have browsers that support idn-domains I linked to the punycode variant of the domain name översikt.se, www.xn--versikt-80a.se, above. But mostly because my damn editor refuses to use the Swedish letter “ö” in the href attribute.)

More annoyingly my simple comment spam prevention I put in place here on dotvoid.com early this summer has leaked considerably. I have just cleaned out all the spam and put more rules in place and it should be harder for the bots now. I must take some time to have a closer look at what techniques are best for spam prevention besides captcha when I’m not as busy.

Something that made me much happier was an offer to write an article on a specific subject for a large PHP magazine. It would be interesting to know what kind of payment one should expect for a multiple page article… It still isn’t clear after asking.

I have finally had enough time to work on our Swedish project Mitt City with its fifty city portals and they are now going live. Many features are still missing but we will add them one after another the following months as well as fixing issues we have found. It feels really good to have the project going again. Especially since it is based completely on PHP 5, PDO and MySQL 5.

After working with Mitt City spending months with PHP 5 as well as MySQL I am amazed that so few are leaving PHP 4 way behind. I will not look back.

I’ve been busy writing agents for retreiving and parsing data in many different formats from many different sources the last couple of weeks. These agents fetch data for the Swedish city portal (actually almost 50 portals) that we are working on. The data sources are a big mess of free text, HTML, weird XML formats and CSV. PHP 5 is a wonderful language to work with when creating these agents.

Today I stumbled upon a quote I had written down many years ago from the science fiction book The Childgarden written by Geoff Ryman and published early in 1994. Great book, great writer. The quote doesn’t really talk about the web as we know it but it felt so right.

“Below that, there’s the Web, That’s the memory. That’s where everything is stored, and the Web is a real mess. You can get tangled up in it.“

At work we just had a meeting discussing all the technologies and applications that we are working on at the moment. Currently, my small team of three people including myself, are integrating and developing systems using PHP, javascript, Java, C, C++, C#, ASP, Orbix  (corba), SOAP, MS CMS, MS Commerce Server, BizTalk, Oracle, MS SQL Server. We even support a Powerbuilder application on top of this. All these applications and systems run on linux, Solaris, Tru64 and windows environments. No wonder my head is spinning from time to time.

So it is time to let go and start focus on other things. I have decided to spend the following six months pursuing opportunities in rich web applications using technologies like PHP/C and javascript on *nix. Throw in SOAP and databases, maybe even some XSL, in the mix and I’d be more than interested…

Next week I will have a break from all this. I’ll spend a week in Puerto Banús, Spain, with my family. We will stay in a really nice two story apartment with all the stuff and fluff you really don’t need; outdoor pool, a huge plasma TV screen as well as a broadband connection. Hopefully I won’t use the latter…

So today I decided to start doing something about dotvoid.com. The site is filled with comment spam. I hate it but I haven’t had the energy to do anything about it. So I cleaned out around 4500 comments with links to various “resources”. I still haven’t done anything about the main problem though – that it is so easy to spam the site.

I still use my own content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It is a great system in many ways but it is not a very good blogging tool.  It wasn’t my intention in the beginning but dotvoid.com has more or less become a blog. So either I start implementing CAPTCHA, pingbacks and all that other stuff into Firesite CMS – or I can start using another system or tool that already has this in place. As I said – I’m full of energy and I’ll investigate my options the following days. I use s9y on another site so maybe I’ll go for that. Suggestions are welcome. Anyway – it is time to do something more with dotvoid.com. But first I’ll have a nice walk into town in the warm sunny weather with my girlfriend and my three year old daughter.

I don’t want any PHP mixed with my html. I don’t want javascript in there either which is why I like the unobtrusive way of adding javascript to my applications. So behaviour fits right into my world. Normally you scatter lots of onclick and other event handling attributes in the html like below.

<a href="#" onclick="myaction()">My action</a>

Instead I create rules with the help of behaviour that applies certain events to a specific element based on id or css class. This gives me really clean html and is good because I need to style links individually in CSS anyways.

<a href="#" id="myaction">My action</a>

var sheetRules = {
    '#myaction': function(el) {
        el.onclick = handleMyAction;
    }
Behaviour.register(sheetRules);

I also want to use access keys. I don’t want users to be forced using the mouse. So the html I want is below.

<a href="#" id="myaction" accesskey="m">My action</a>

Using the access key combination, ALT-m in case you’re using windows, is working great. It seems the browsers are intelligent enough to fire the onclick event instead of following the actual link. So it doesn’t ruin it for you even if you have a backup link in addition to the onlick handler in case the users have javascript turned off.

It is actually quite simple to create accessible applications that degrade gracefully.

I personally prefer right aligned text but I still think left aligned text is better looking. I really like his formulas for the the eye movement over the different form designs. It almost make me wonder if it is a joke.

The formula for the Left Aligned Form
X*N + ((N-1)*(SQRT of( X^2 + Y^2))

The formula for the Right Aligned Form
(X/2)*N + ((N-1)*(SQRT of( (X/2)^2 + Y^2))