Daily del.icio.us for May 28, 2006

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Daily Del.icio.us for May 26, 2006

  • My 5 CSS Tips — Business Logs
    I’ve been writing CSS professionally now for about 2.5 years so here are 5 quick tips that help me out in my day to day work. I wouldn’t call them best practices because everybody has a style that works for them, but these are what work best for me.Tagged as: best-practices css design tips web webdesign webdev
  • htaccess Generator
    htaccess GeneratorTagged as: apache generator htaccess programming reference tools webdesign
  • the jackol’s den » htaccess Cheatsheet – Mikhail Esteves
    Here is a simple cheatsheet for the .htaccess fileTagged as: apache cheatsheet development howto htaccess httpd reference web webdev
  • Lance’s Whiteboard : Export IE Favorites To OPML file!
    Lastnight while working on some new RSS-related projects, I created a simple app to Export your entire list of IE Favorites to OPML (XML). Click here, to download “FavoritesToOTagged as: OPML bookmarks browsers tools windows xml

Blog Post from Microsoft Word 2007

Just downloaded the latest beta of Microsoft Office 2007 and am testing out the blog posting feature. Microsoft Word has added functionality that allows you to create blog post and post them directly to your blog. They support most of the blog platform out of the box including MSN Spaces, Blogger, SharePoint, Community Server and Other, which includes any blog platform that supports the MetaWebLog and the Atom API.

Word 2007 blog setup screen

The HTML created by Word 2007 is also pretty clean and I think I can really get used to this as my primary blogging interface. I still need to play around with some of the settings to customize the layout. I am hoping I can import or point to a CSS document and have it allow me to format the contents of the blog post. Haven’t found the option yet but I am hoping it’s here somewhere. If not, be a great feature for the final GA release.

Blog setup in Word 2007

Some of the bugs I’ve discovered so far are:

  • Posting doesn’t work – Pretty critical bug I would think. 🙂 I need to reverify my setting but I am able to post a blog entry as a draft but not publish it directly
  • The post date is set to December 31, 1969
  • Images included from Flickr (or anything off the Internet addressable by a url) show in the Word interface but the blog entry doesn’t include the img tag reference.

I’m sure that’s not a complete list of bugs but Word does show promise as a decent WYSIWYG blog editor.

Microsoft, Microsoft+office, office2007, word2007, blog, blog+editor, WYSIWYG, atom, metaweblog, api

A Profile In Courage

You’ve heard the old adage about how adversity builds character? Like many others, I believe that a person’s character is simply revealed when they are faced with adversity. Case in point – Pat Shanahan. Pat was a co-worker and a friend and he passed away a few days ago after a courageous fight with cancer. Even when it was obvious that he was going to lose the battle to cancer, he never asked for any sympathy. He came into work like nothing was wrong as he wanted to contribute and he never asked for any special treatment. He didn’t make a big deal about his illness and was kind and patient as we asked him the same stupid questions over and over again. He was a great guy and everyone that knew him loved him. He will be truly missed and all of our thoughts and prayers are with his family.

Please give generously to the American Cancer Society or LiveSTRONG or any organization that works to fight cancer. I wish the pharmaceutical industry would spend more time working on things like cancer, diabetes, parkinson and other diseases instead of more pills of ED, or yellow toe nails or restless leg syndrome or dry eyes.

cancer, diabetes, parkinson

An Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth – This film offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man’s fervent crusade to halt global warming’s deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. That man is former Vice President Al Gore, who, in the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, re-set the course of his life to focus on a last-ditch, all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. In this eye-opening and poignant portrait of Gore and his “traveling global warming show,” Gore also proves himself to be one of the most misunderstood characters in modern American public life. Here he is seen as never before in the media – funny, engaging, open and downright on fire about getting the surprisingly stirring truth about what he calls our “planetary emergency” out to ordinary citizens before it’s too late.

enviornment, climate, al+gore, an+inconvenient+truth, disaster, movie, must+see

Declarative Caching Services for Spring

Declarative Caching Services for Spring by Alex Ruiz — Caching is an essential practice that improves the performance of enterprise applications. In this article, Alex Ruiz demonstrates a declarative caching framework for Spring 2.0, which supports pluggable cache implementations.

spring, spring2.0, caching, aspectj, AOP, SpringAOP, XStream

Java2HTML does XHTML – And it validates!

I’ve been using the Java2HTML library for a while now and it’s been doing a great job in my usage as an Ant task. I discovered Markus Gebhard’s Java2HTML library a few years back and have been very happy with it. Markus has done a great job in creating this open source library that converts Java (and other) source code (complete files or snippets) to HTML, RTF, TeX and XHTML with syntax highlighting. Out of the box, Java2HTML provides a CLI interface, GUI client, Ant task, Eclipse plugin and a JSPWiki plugin.

I downloaded the latest version as I was looking for something that would allow me to create valid XHTML with CSS and I have been very impressed with the quality of this library. In addition to all the stuff that comes out of the box, you can use Java2HTML programmatically to take Java, XML or any other piece of code and output XHTML. Here’s a snippet of code that takes a String of code and output a XHTML document.

[source:java]
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

String code = “… java code ….”;

JavaSourceConversionOptions options = JavaSourceConversionOptions.getDefault();
options.setShowFileName(false);
options.setShowLineNumbers(false);

JavaSourceStyleTable style = JavaSourceStyleTable.getDefaultEclipseStyleTable();
options.setStyleTable(style);

JavaSourceParser parser = new JavaSourceParser(options);
JavaSource javaCode = parser.parse(code);

JavaSource2Xhtml11Converter conveter = new JavaSource2Xhtml11Converter();
String header = conveter.getDocumentHeader(options, “Java2HTML now does XHTML”);
String footer = conveter.getDocumentFooter(options);
StringWriter sr = new StringWriter();
sr.write(header);
conveter.convert(javaCode, options, sr);
sr.write(footer);

System.out.println(“sr.getBuffer().toString() = ” + sr.getBuffer().toString());
}
[/source]

The snippet has been edited for brevity but you can see the complete class here, rendered out as an XHTML document. Here’s a link to W3C’s validator.

Blog Vacation

My self-imposed blog vacation is over and I hope to start blogging with gusto again. Now I can’t make any promises about blogging about stuff that is useful or interesting to read. 🙂 Work has been really hectic as of late and my daughter is at that age where everything she does is just so cute that I can’t help but spend every single moment she’s awake with her.

I’ve gotten quite a few emails about the lack of posts in the recent weeks and I know it’s the ‘cool-thing’ to do nowadays – Hang up your blog and feed that is but I am not doing that. Dave Winer talked about doing it, Russell just did it but Mark Pilgrim is back and so I guess the universe is balancing out again. Great to have someone like Mark blogging again.