Category: Web Development

I’ve been fighting the good fight against RSS bugs in Moodle 1.8.2. The problem isn’t actually with Moodle, but with Snoopy, the PHP class that emulates as a web browser and which Magpie RSS library uses to fetch the feeds.

It seems that the current version of Snoopy has some issues with redirected URLs. It has trouble following 302 Page Moved messages and has an annoying habit of putting the port number into redirected URLs. While it’s not technically wrong to do this, not every web server thinks that the urls foo.com and foo.com:80 are the same (strange but true).

Case in point: The Wall Street Journal. The following feeds involve redirects (apparently served through FeedBurner, so I’m betting any feed using FeedBurner would have the same issue):

http://online.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7011.xml
http://online.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7014.xml

While surfing for information about styling tables using CSS, I came across “css vs. tables”, on which one very anti-CSS layout web designer argues in favor of using tables to control page layout. I’m sympathetic to his argument … up[…]

The Websafe Color Palette (expertly rendered here) — also known as the Browsersafe Color Palette — came about when Web designers tried to figure out exactly what colors could be counted on to render properly on older computers that could[…]

I’m in the process of redesigning my work Web site (and probably the sites for Nuketown and the GriffCrier as well). This time around my goal is to avoid cheating with my code, which basically means I want to avoid[…]

“Plone!” screamed the Tick as he attempted to hack his way through the wilderness of Content Management Software. “Plone!” he shouted, as he finally found a solution that looked like it would work. “… plone…” he whimpered, as he realized[…]

It’s a battle between Man and Machine … and while the Man’s not winning, I’m not doing all that badly. My first encounter with trying to get my Perl scripts to execute on any Unix box was a brutal massacre[…]

I expected learning Perl to be challenging, but I never expected to have to work so hard to get a simple “Hello World” script running. Perl’s a server-side programming language, normally found on Unix servers, which is extremely useful for[…]

Today I had the unfortunate pleasure to have to download and install Netscape Communicator 4.06, a browser which I have loathed since its release back in 1998. As a browser, the Netscape 4.x was slow, buggy and prone to screwing[…]