Posts tagged: WEB DEVELOPMENT

Seen on Flickr: this huge collection of Web 2.0 company logos. You can argue with the taxonomy but it’s still fun to look at.

Very cool feature from the WebKit team, coming soon to a Safari near you – the Web Inspector:

The Web Inspector highlights the node on the page as it is selected in the hierarchy. You can also search for nodes by node name, id and CSS class name.

One of the unique features of the inspector is the ability to root the DOM hierarchy by double clicking a node to dig deeper. This lets you easily manage large nested pages and only focus on a particular sub-tree with minimal indentation.

When I came across this set of outage notices on the Google AdSense site tonight I couldn’t resist turning them into a general-purpose, public access tool that apologizes for broken websites in 23 languages.

For example, let’s say you’re the webmaster for Happy Fun Ball Corporation and you accidentally overwrite the web server’s document root while backing up your ASCII art collection, and it’s the day of a global product launch. No problem!

I built a proto-wiki in Django as an exercise for learning how to make a custom template filter. It’s absurdly easy, it turns out. Per the docs I added a templatetags module; here’s all the code in it – wikitags.py:

from django.core import template
register = template.Library()

@register.filter
def wikify(value):
    "Makes WikiWords"
    import re
    wikifier = re.compile(r'\b(([A-Z]+[a-z]+){2,})\b')
    return wikifier.sub(r'<a href="/\1/">\1</a>', value)

Then, in my page template:

{% load wikitags %}
<h1>{{ page.title }}</h1>
<div class="body">
    {{ page.content|wikify }}
</div>
...

I wrote about 60 lines of Python code in total. There are much smaller wiki engines, of course, but given the flexibility and expandability offered by Django I think that’s pretty good.

Another Update, 2005-12-15: MS has fixed the incompatibility with Gecko-based browsers as of today.

Update: A connection at Microsoft has said that this should at least work on Firefox, and that he’s passed along my report. Hopefully fixes will be forthcoming.

Windows Live Local has potential, but it’s a total strikeout on the Mac.

(Perhaps the “Windows” part of the name should have been a clue. But if it’s really not supposed to work on the Mac, why not do some browser sniffing and send a helpful message – like “Go away”?)