Blog for June 2007
28/06/2007: demiblog 0.2.0 Released
demiblog 0.2.0 is now ready for public consumption. Although I do use it on my own website, I still wouldn’t recommend it for use on live, production sites. It’s good for playing with though.
The big new feature is support for MySQL 5 as a backend database — worry ye not, as PostgreSQL is still supported (and recommended)! Also new is official support for Mac OS X as a server platform — I recommend using MAMP for a fully integrated Mac server solution. It still supports Linux of course, which will continue to be the primary target platform. (Windows support is planned too.)
Moving on to the front end, photos and photoblogging are now partly supported. It is possible to designate particular tags as “galleries”. When these tags are viewed, a thumbnail will be displayed for each article instead of a summary. There is also preliminary support for calendars. Again, a calendar is just a special form of tag. Each event is a special type of article. Thus an event can exist in multiple…
27/06/2007: Long-Awaited Zeldman Article
Jeffrey Zeldman has posted a long-awaited article on the problem of ‘maybe’ options on forms. So long awaited indeed that many of the comments are dated over 37 years ago.
26/06/2007: The End of an Era
Tony Blair is to step down as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, and it looks like he’ll soon be taking a job as Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds. He’ll also apparently moonlight as a Middle East peace envoy — in other news, outgoing Deputy PM John Prescott will be taking up a position as head of Weight Watchers.
Here are a few Blair links…
22/06/2007: A New Look for TobyInkster.co.uk
This site has had a few facelifts recently. Hopefully this one will stick. It’s based on two main principles:
- Use Hoefler Text for copy. It’s an absolutely gorgeous font which comes with Mac OS X that I was recently using on a printed document. Hoefler has a delicious set of italic glyphs — they were properly designed in their own right — they’re not just sloping versions of the roman (non-italic) glyphs. It also uses ascending/descending numerals, which look a lot nicer in the normal flow of text than block numerals do. Garamond and Georgia are reasonable substitutes when it’s not available.
- The Guardian (newspaper, not website) looks good; copy it! That’s where I got the idea for the small blue “TobyInkster.co.uk” heading at the top of each page.
I’ve combined this with a few other minor ideas:
- Numbers and bullet points from lists hang into the margin. The last couple of versions of my site did that too.
- Use classical ratios for font sizes. Assuming your browser default text is 12pt, then…
22/06/2007: Typography in demiblog
I’ve said it already, and I’ll say it again: typography is a very important and oft-neglected aspect of web design. demiblog is my CMS; although great typography requires the conscious effort of the author/typesetter, and can’t be handled automatically by a CMS, there are certainly steps a CMS can take to ease the burden on its users; in this article I’ll outline some of demiblog’s features that help typography.
The Asterism
Let’s start with the most suprious of features. In printing, it is common to mark a break in the flow by a centred paragraph consisting of just three asterisks (* * *).
If you create a paragraph in demiblog which consists of just three asterisks and no spaces in between then demiblog will detect this as a dividing mark and can be configured to replace it with a different dividing mark. This can be something as dull as an HTML <hr> tag, which adds a bevelled…
22/06/2007: Political Map of the UK
(Requires Javascript.)
The Axes
A two-dimensional graph requires two axes — that is, two sets of scales on which the data points must be assessed. In politics there are many candidate axes, some listed below, of which we can only choose two:
- Traditional Left–Right division. Left– and Right-wing ideologies encompass a whole variety of different policy areas and are the standard method of classifying a political party.
- Libertarian–Authoritarian. This is a method of classifying parties according to how “free” they aim for citizens to be.
- Environmentalism. You could assess a party by how friendly its policies are to the environment.
- Euroskepticism. You could assess a party on whether it is pro– or anti-EU.
- Atlanticism. You could assess a party on whether it is pro– or anti-US.
I’ve chosen the first two from that list, as I felt they were likely to provide the most interesting picture of politics in the UK…
18/06/2007: dict, thes & ency
dict is a command that is supplied with most Linux and BSD distributions. If you enter dict foo at the command-line, you get back the dictionary definition of “foo”. Normally several different dictionaries are supplied, including some dictionaries of translation, and it’s possible to look up the word on various online dictionaries too.
As counterparts to dict I’ve created thes for looking stuff up in Moby’s Thesaurus and ency for online encyclopaedia Wikipedia…
16/06/2007: You’re Not Allowed to Take Pictures of the US Embassy in Rome
So I only managed to take two…
16/06/2007: Typography Links
Most of the really pleasant web designs I see seem to display more than a little evidence of classical typographic knowledge. Here’s my collection of typography-related resources, including links to some classic (and some common) fonts.
Tips and Tricks
- Mark Boulton: Five Simple Steps to Better Typography
- Richard Rutter & Mark Boulton: Web Typography Sucks
Particular Characters
- Mark Boulton: The Right Glyph for the Job (ellipsis, quotes, ligatures)
- Mark Boulton: Dashes
- A List Apart: The Trouble with EM ‘n EN (dashes, hyphens, spaces, quotes, primes, ellipsis)
- “Jukka Korpela: Dashes and…
14/06/2007: HenPlus
For a while, I’ve been using a great little Java-based GUI SQL client called dbVisualizer. It’s a nifty little database management tool that — here’s the good part — supports virtually every database backend under the sun. I use it to manage PostgreSQL and MySQL databases at home and PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server at work, and I can flit between them, using a consistent interface for them all. It’s great.
However, being a GUI app, it’s a bit slow for when I just want to make one or two small queries, so I went looking for a speedy command-line equivalent today and found HenPlus. Like dbVis, HenPlus is based on Java and JDBC, so it’s able to work with a staggering array of backends. It’s command-line based, so it should work double-fast, even over a SSH connection.
The one problem I had installing it was with libreadline-java, which is a…