A slight Change

sorry about the late update, I have had a bit of an emergency move due to the place i was living kicking me out at very short notice. I am still without an internet connection at where i am staying now, but i do have access to a free wifi hotspot reasonably near by.

I don’t know how long i am going to be in staying like this for, hopefully not to long.

I will be writing in here more after i have got the logistics of my new life sorted out, stuggling with the change, i hate the change.

normal service should resume in about 3 days to a week time. with an article on the state of UK free internet access.

Right, i need to go, and get this project finished.

Published: 1 March 2007 | Categories: , Permalink

Blank out there for a sec

Whilst redesigning the site i came across what seem to be a common problem with the textpattern CMS The blank page returned by a search with no results. So i tried to find a fix.

With a little bit of searching around, and a quick trip to the amazing textbook website i quickly found a plug-in which claimed to fix my little blank page problem.

The plug-ins name is rss_if_search_results and is another one of the great wilshireone.com plugins.

At first, this plug in seemed perfect for what i needed, It promised to alow me to display a useful message when no search results were returned, however, for some reason i was unable to get this to work.
After a little more experimenting i found the chh_if_data plug in and this post describing its use. The implementation of this plug in was not quite as obvious as the other plug in, so i feel the need to share the code ( love )

After installing the plug-in, go to you default page, and place the following code into the place you wish the search results or message to be displayed.

<txp:if_search>
<txp:chh_if_data>
<p>Here’s an article list containing your search inquiry</p>
<txp:article />
<txp:else />
<p>No articles found</p>
</txp:chh_if_data>
</txp:if_search>

A nice touch when using the above form with the message displayed when results are found would be to edit the form named search_results to:

<p><txp:search_result_title ></p>

With this method in place, the blank screen when there is no search results is resolved.

Published: 18 February 2007 | Categories: , Permalink

Microformats, though the backdoor.

I was reading the why micoformats site when i discovered that the hCard implementation at yahoo was done quietly by a developer. This is interesting, as i would consider from what i have heard (which is by no means authoritative) that yahoo is very forward thinking.

Talking about this in the microformats chat room, and asking about how the politics is where people work i realized how many people do things which i would consider wrong because they are forced to by the company they are working for.

An example from the room, was about doing presentations about standards and microformats. For this presentation they were using Microsoft power point, purely because they were as Microsoft reseller. I found that this is called “eating your own dog food”. Eating your own dog food refers to using your own software for means of testing and for have the same user experience as the client. it also shows confidence in the software or service.

In this situation, i would feel morally confused about the requirement to use power point, when S5 (the simple standards-based slideshow) was more suitable for the situation, and the person who i was talking to i think agreed. The reason why i would use S5 in this situation is that, S5 is a great example of breaking the mold of how people perceive the internet and hopefully this would make the talk more memorable, nothing like starting a presentation with demolishing old concepts.

As a talk on microformats which i believe was going to be made publicly avaliabe, the advantage of using S5 is also a technical one. Easy online implementation, no extra work or data replication.

These things got me thinking. How much pressure would it take to introduce microfromats to a large organization? How should new ideas and concepts be introduced to the cooperate environment.

In defense of eating their own dog food, i can see how this helps development, and i am not questioning how this effects the development of a product, but surely, when doing a presentation about a subject, using that subject as the means for you presentation would be really advocating its use.

Published: 17 February 2007 | Categories: , Permalink