Vos Virtual Network

Archive for March, 2006

A few more cool things from Aaron Swartz… (the teenage wiz kid who co-wrote RSS 1.0) … Now there is web.py and a cool new wiki-blog-diff-thing called InfoGami

It’s Monday morning. I took a few aspirin for my back pain, but the CSS three column layout thing is still bugging me. So I did a little more reading over at saila.com, on the topic of CSS and HTML standards (eg. Tables vs. CSS) in web designs that actually work in real-world browsers, and pass (x)HTML validation and CSS validation tests. Craig Saila provides some HTML layout templates, CSS examples, and analysis of how they perform with various browsers. Craig also has nice annotated version of his v2 layout with discussion of browser quirks and hacks.

So, after doing a little more reading, my confidence level is up that my design goals will be achievable. And I hope to begin implementing my vvn.net homepage makeover using the new PHP templates I am creating.

Still looking for the perfect 3 column layout done correctly with web standards and CSS? Bob Easton has compiled a list of CSS based 3 column layouts, and provides some analysis. The CSS Discussion Group and Wiki (hosted by Incutio) has tons of great CSS information if you are getting serious about CSS (like I am trying to do.)

Boy am I on a goose chase today… and I hope I catch the one that lays the golden eggs! This research about CSS lead me over to Big John Gallant and Alex Robinson and the Position Is Everything website. Big John has a link over to a tool that generates a layout based on what you want and how you specify it. Alex and John talk about a lot of CSS bugs, and quirks in various browsers, as well as pitfalls to avoid as you continue in Search of the One True Layout.

Mark Newhouse has a nice three column layout (CSS and html design pattern) that also iplements a header and footer. (Wow – looks like he wrote this article back in 2002.) I have been doing layouts like this for years with tables, inside of tables, inside of tables… (Sounds like I am confessing my sins again — for not following web standards.) With the advent of Firefox 1.5, Opera 9, MS-IE 7, and NN7 – these things are changing.

Mark has not updated his Real World Style blog since May 5, 2005 — but as of this writing, most of the material is way ahead of where most people are at anyway.

Hey, a bunch of you lurkers are laughing at me, but when are you going to update your old web pages that have all that crufty old html junk, styles, and design patterns from 1995?

rawdog is an RSS feed aggregator… I looked at a few PHP based RSS libraries this morning and loaded a few of them up to try them out. Then found this Python based tool set which looks a little more powerful.

The project write-up says: rawdog is an RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur. Written in Python, it uses Mark Pilgrim’s feed parser to read RSS 0.9, 1.0, 2.0, CDF and Atom feeds. It runs from cron, collects articles from a number of feeds, and generates a static HTML page listing the newest articles in date order. It supports per-feed customisable update times, and uses ETags, Last-Modified, and gzip compression to minimise network bandwidth usage.