We’ve been in hardcore documentation mode at my day job for the last few weeks. Unfortunately, this means that I’m spending a lot of time in Microsoft Word. (I know I could be using OpenOffice or NeoOffice. I just don’t like working in word processors, in general.) I would much prefer to be working in Vim. Today, the itch got bad enough to require scratching, so I wrote a little Ruby script that converts a Markdown document into a full HTML document. Because the managers are expecting me to produce Word documents, I added a style block so that things can be tweaked to look good in Word.
If you try it out, I’d appreciate feedback.
As a web developer, one of the things I struggle with is keeping my CSS files from becoming a complete disaster. I’m sure that some of you reading this share my pain. A couple days ago, I ran across a post by Emil Stenström about what he calls the Tree Method.
Overall, it seems to make a lot of sense. The only thing I might object to is organizing properties alphabetically. Grouping related properties makes more sense to me, even though it often means I’m not totally consistent with how I order them.
So, I ask those of you who are good with CSS (I know that at least one of you are): Would you recommend this method? What would you tweak to make it better? Do you have another method that you feel is better?
This is old news, but it’s worth pointing at, as it will likely affect the work of many of my readers: Tim Berners-Lee says the W3C plans on setting up a new HTML workgroup that will make incremental, parallel changes to HTML and XHTML. There will also be a new XHTML 2 group to work on a completely new spec.
Let’s hope they manage to keep all the cats moving with the herd this time.
Yesterday I was working on a project that relies heavily on regular expressions. I got to a point where I had to look something up, so I tried pulling up my favorite regex reference, A Tao of Regular Expressions. As you might have noticed, it’s no longer there.
So I Googled the title to see if there were any mirrors. It seems that a lot of people pointed to the page, but none of the top results contained the actual content. (PDFs don’t count. They suck.)
Since the page everyone links to was a copy of the original, I figured that no one would complain if I made a copy of the copy. So I grabbed a copy of the page from Google’s cache and posted it on my site.
I took some notes during Rasmus Lerdorf’s excellent talk about scaling web apps during the PDXPHP meeting at OSCON. But rather than take the time to write something up, I’m going to take advantage of the lazyweb by pointing to Niall Kennedy’s post about the same talk Rasmus gave earlier in the day.
I’ve added a couple scripts to my new Projects page. Regular readers of this site will probably be familiar with them.
Since I switched to a one-column layout for my site, I’ve been trying to figure out where to put some of the links that were in the sidebar of my old layout. Tonight I put together a little sliding menu. I’m not happy with the design and code (especially the XHTML/CSS). But I figured that I’d throw it out there for your feedback.
FeedBurner has an API for its FeedFlare service. I’m going to have to check that out this weekend. If you’re subscribed to my main or comments feeds, please update their URLs in your aggregator.
