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.)

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…

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.

Firesite logo

I am slowly working on Firesite CMS even though there are thousands of things going on at the moment. It feels like a thousand things anyway. I am about to move to a new apartment. Somehow it seems me and my girlfriend is moving at least once a year. Always a hassle. Anyways, at the moment I am concentrating on the file management replacement.

I am creating a more file manager lookalike interface which is actually very promising. It seems everything you’d want to do is doable using javascript and html only. Below you can see a small screenshot of the unfinished file browser.

Firesite file browser

The one thing I still haven’t decided upon is whether or not to use double click to open a folder or file. Using double click to open folders and files would enable the user to click on a folder to select it and then click the delete button. Very intuitive. To double click an item in the web gui environment to open it however – is not very intuitive.

If I stick to single click to open folders it is more in line with the rest of the application. But then I don’t know how to solve selecting folders for deletion in a simple way.

I have been trying to get dotvoid.com look the same would you prefer Internet Explorer or, as me, Mozilla. I have disregarded Opera even though the few times I’ve tested it, it seemed to be a good enough browser. I just assume Opera has no problems as I try my hardest to stick to the standards. There are a few things bugging me that I still need to sort out though.

First and foremost I am actually very annoyed at the embeddable HTML editing widget in Mozilla. Supporting the same kind of embeddable wysiwyg editor in Mozilla as existing in IE was a great decision. Annoyingly the mozilla team made the editor insert a <BR> instead of a new paragraph when hitting enter. This makes it very hard for me to create a completely xhtml 1.1 compliant site using my own Firesite CMS. Sigh.

Dotvoid.com design

The menus I have created on the left side of the pages are supposed to look like tabs, which they also do in Mozilla. This effect is easily achieved using CSS and a negative right margin for the menu item which overlays the border of the page content. I don’t explain so good so just look at the above image and you’ll see what I mean. In Internet Explorer I get a thin border between the (active) start menu item and the content. I am sure I’m going about it wrong but I just can’t seem to figure it out.

I am not an artist nor a designer. Colors and patterns I pick somehow refuse to look good together unless I use different shades of gray. However dull gray is, it is extremely easy to apply to any design. Sure it looks clean but when people send me emails telling me my design looks good I can’t help but thinking – “what design?”.

So what should a man desperate to create a design good enough for his carefully crafted website do?

As for me, I set forth on a quest through the wonderland of good looking designs scattered thoughout the vast and dangerous world wide web. Somehow it feels good to see that there really isn’t much originality out there. All the graphics, design and javascript bloggers have links to sites in the same genre and name their linked cyberfriends sites as an inspiration.

An innovative design quickly spreads and creates a new trend. These trends in web design being very obvious. A year, or probably two years, back the white low tech design was very hot. I guess in some way it still is because of Movable Type and the likes. Before that the portal interface with numerous distinct boxes were hot stuff. Heck, I remember when a black background was cool design and a white background meant the page was produced in Frontpage. Right now patterns have a revival.

I guess I won’t ever see fresh ideas before they already have created the trend and spread all over the loosely tied networks of bloggers and all the sites I frequent. And as a code oriented non designer web developer I guess I am doomed to be a follower.