because a Reverend can't be wrong.
revjim.net now has a RevJimWiki. It’s powered by a customized version of WakkaWiki. The most substantial thing in it, currently, is my RSSAggregatorIdea.
Feel free to poke around. It’s still in the beginning stages, so let me know if anything seems out of place or buggy.
Some friends and I are planning to attend the The Plantersville, TX (Houston, TX area) Renaissance Festival this weekend. Toward the beginning of this week, it looked as though we might be rained out, or treading in serious mud by attending. However, it looks as though things are clearing up. The current forecast shows no rain on Friday, a 20% chance on Saturday, and a large chance on Sunday. It seems to have not rained since Tuesday, which should mean the ground is dry enough to not give us any trouble. Therefore, I think it’s safe to attend. I’ll talk this over with Jess at lunch, but I think we’re in. If anyone in the Houston area would comment on the current condition of the soil in that area, I would appreciate it.
dive into mark has an orange/black face lift in honor of Halloween. Oh the virtues of CSS. I thought about doing this to revjim.net, but got bored with the idea and occupied doing other things.
Movable Type 2.51 released. You can view the Changelog or just go straight to the Download Page.
Along with some bug fixes and few tiny new features, there is one improvement that really makes this release worth the download. During the rebuild process, MovableType will now check to see if the data in the file has actually been updated. If it has, it will replace the file as usual. If it hasn’t, it won’t replace the file, but instead, leave it exactly as it was. This doesn’t save any rebuild time (well… a few microseconds… maybe) but that isn’t the point. The advantage of this is that, if the page hasn’t been updated, your web-server will continue to inform properly contructed clients (web browsers, and RSS readers, alike) that the page hasn’t changed and that there is no need to download the entire thing again.
Thanks again, Ben and Mena.
Paul Ford gives his answer to the question “How do you know she’s the one?” in Looking at the Numbers: “I’d rather make you clothes out of time than play the odds. If I met you in orbit we could touch fingertips, and dive into the atmosphere as meteors. It would be over like that. Instead we’re on earth unrolling bolts of cloth made from time, using trust for thread – trust slowly coming off the spindle, thin, easy to snap, sometimes so tight you can pluck it like a guitar string, running our needles through the cloth, using trust to hold time together.” [via diveintomark]
For Brad.
Here is a PHP function that will grab all the rows from a mysql result identifier:
function mysql_fetch_allrows($res) {
while($data[] = mysql_fetch_assoc($res)) {
# nothing
}
return array_slice($data,0,-1);
}
Or, if you just want one field:
function mysql_fetch_field_allrows($res,$field) {
while($data = mysql_fetch_assoc($res)) {
$rtn[] = $data[$field];
}
return $rtn;
}
Webmasterbase.com has an excellent article on Apache’s mod_rewrite. If you are developing any kind of web application (blog tools, photo gallery, forum software, a guestbook script, ANYTHING), and either don’t know how to use the “PATH_INFO” environment variable or just don’t like messing with it, then mod_rewrite is for you. If you’ve ever migrated a portion of your website from one tool to another, and wished there was a way you could do so without generating 404s for anyone who has linked to you, or bookmarked you prior to your migration, then you too can get a lot of use out of mod_rewrite. [via Keith Devens]
Keith Devens will soon be releasing version 3 of his XML-RPC Client/Server for PHP. His new version, due for release this week or next, promises to be the best available. It will allow (hopefully) client and server creation in one line of code. It uses native PHP variable types and will most likely support SSL.
Clark Hornbell hates baseball as much as I do.
The blogchannel:changes RSS element is an interesting new addition. When I began writing my RSS aggregator, I had wanted something like this. Weblogs.com additional support to show changes to an RSS feed is also a good idea. I prefer Blo.gs implementation of this, as, in most cases, the RSS feed and the weblog itself change at the same time. Additionally, the problem with the weblogs.com implementation is that you can’t define a list of feeds you are interested in. So, in order to see the changes, you have to download all the changes. This isn’t a big deal now, but wait until more people start using it and it will be.
In case I wasn’t clear about this yesterday, cashets.com is a serious waste of time. The fact that Michael Phillips is calling it “the first successful online micro-payments system” [1] is a bit absurd, since I would hardly consider this a success. I signed up for my account, and was user number 116. I managed to steal items that were being sold using this technology. I also managed to make money without ever having had a payment due to abuse of the system. I think it’s getting a little more exposure than it deserves or expected, because it has been showing ASP errors all morning.
LogJam v4.0.0 has been released. LogJam is still the best blogging client I have ever used for any platform. Unfortunately it only supports LiveJournal. If you use LiveJournal, check it out. If you’re writing a client side blogging application, download it so you’ll know how a blogging client should feel.
Brad didn’t get canned. Hang in there, buddy.
[1] http://www.well.com/~mp/host.html: Scroll down to the last item under the “Finance” heading.
Created by one of the co-founders of Mastercard, Cashets.com is a website that allows the payment of dollar amounts ranging from $0.02 to $5.00. There is a 1% fee (billed to the recipient) rounded up to the penny. You can put money in your account from any PayPal or Yahoo! PayDirect account.
At first glance, the system doesn’t seem to be secure enough to use for payments for electronic access to a specific resource. There is a “Marketplace” that provides links to a few items being sold using the system and I was able to easily obtain those items without paying for them. However, to simply pay someone money or to make a small donation, the system is easy to use, and seems (at least from the outside) to be safe for that sort of thing.
It does, however, make me realize how very easy it would be to create a secure, easy to use system like this. One that supported micro (and macro) payments easily, and effortlessly for both payees and those making payments.
Sign up for an account, and then throw a nickel, dime, quarter, or even a dollar into my bucket because God says “freely ye have received, freely give” (Matt 10:8).
[via BoingBoing]