phil wilson :: a geek commodity

Focussed on Phil Ringnalda for a change ;)

Blogger has a new look.

Supports comments (including, it seems, a Typekey-style registration for all Blogger sites).

Supports per-post archives.

Support user profiles.

Has a massively increased tag templating system.

It successfully imported and modified my old template to use its new tags, and other than that, I'll let you know how it goes. Suffice to say for the time being - wow.

After five consecutive beta test periods, a new version (v0.6.5) of the Markup Validator was released today. This maintenance version of the popular service introduces significant improvements in user-friendliness, thanks to improved documentation, usability, accessibility, as well as new features such as community-contributed error explanations and user-friendly fallback mechanisms.

Brilliant news, and many many thanks to all those (unpaid) developers, QA people and everyone who gives feedback to the www-validator mailing list.

Congratulations! You are now the proud owner of your very own Web Designer! But now what do you do?

Matthew Thomas has an interesting article (When semantic markup goes bad) about people (and tools) who just blindy replace all instances of <b> with <strong> without actually thinking about whether it makes sense to do so.

Of course, not thinking about it probably means most of your markup isn’t actually semantic anyway, because it requires a degree of thought to get right.

On a related note, although the original Textile doesn’t let you insert <b> tags, JTextile does via **double asterices**.

JTextile is based on a mix of the original Textile and Mark Pilgrim’s original PyTextile which it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at; doing so now, it’s been rewritten to follow the new and overblown Textile 2 syntax. A couple of the nicer features (such as easy links to Google, IMDB, Amazon) might make it to JTextile, but as for the rest – you really may just as well use HTML.

Since I started using del.icio.us in a semi-serious way I realised that it’s most useful to me as a place to store links that I could a) potentially blog about or b) might need when I’m on a different machine.

Of course, all things being equal and despite my best intentions, I can’t really blog about all the things I save to del.icio.us and in lieu of a sidebar-linklog thing I present a small weekend reading list (yes I know it’s Sunday afternoon, but tomorrow’s a Bank Holiday so you’ve got plenty of time).

• UK Postcode Coordinates (via Jim) – I should probably link this in to the UK Blogger Map and the full list of UK Bloggers by postcode to come up with a semi-complete map. Two versions maybe? Bigger version for zoomability?
• RDFMapper searches an RDF or RSS file for resources with geographic locations, and returns a map overlayed with dots representing located resources. Neat.
• A biased Outlook 2003 vs. Thunderbird comparison – I’ll leave it to you to let the author know where and how he’s wrong.
• BBC Web Development Guidelines – this is very interesting reading. Of particular interest is Appendix E: Browser Support Standards which provides details of what browsers must be supported by all bbc.co.uk pages and says that Safari is only partially supported, and that there’s no need to test in it. Blimey.
• Print CSS — table headers and footers – an incredibly useful nugget of information about getting headers and footers to appear on multiple pages in CSS.
• ZVON tabs and sidebars – for RSS Reader reasons I was looking at sidebars again, and got depressed at how lame sidebars are in Firefox compared to Mozilla. I desperately want my F9 back.