When Anton Olsen and I were at SXSW Interactive this past spring, we decided to propose a class on web application testing. Part of the panel selection criteria is determined by community voting. Voting is open now, but closes soon (Midnight on Friday).
If you have a little time, please consider voting for our panel. (Registration is required to vote).
Our proposal is here:
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/572
The general Panel Picker page is here:
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/
Once the votes are counted the SXSW panel will take 3-4 weeks to decide which panels will get the green light.
Thanks!
I thought this was going to be about going over the success and failures of a particular web app, but instead, this was a discussion of the numbers of income, users, servers, support calls, etc. for several different sites. Represented were:
- Blinksale
- FeedBurner
- RegOnline
- ParticleTree
- Icon Buffet
Universally, December is the worst month and January/February the best.
The presentation can be found here.
Saturday morning came awfully early after being out so late Friday night, but I managed to meet Anton on time.
The first session of the day was “Why XSLT is sexy”. I was curios about this since I had mostly written off the suitability of XSLT as a means of making good presentation of XML. It just always seemed like there were easier ways to solve the problem. My notes were:
Notes:
- First slide: Putting Lipstick on a Pig
- Joe Orr, Lindsay Simon
- XSLT running on XML DOM parser in browser
- Unlike CSS can add new elements to the page
- XSL is a functional language - not procedural
- Fast processor in most browsers (Safari lagging)
- ActiveWidgetGrid
- bandwidth saving advantages - dl the XSL once, process many XML transactions (like AJAX ezchanges)
- AJAX-S
- XML Binding Language
- Freja and Formbuilder: MVC for Javascript, XSL is a View
- Sarissa: presents same syntax for all browsers
- AspectXML
- BrowserBasedXML.com
- detects browser w/ XSL engine and transfers only the appropriate XSL file - easier to keep browser specific XSL separate)
- GRDDL: part of the semantec web project
- simile.mit.edu/welkin
- The functional programming aspect of XSL is the big deal - productivity wise - don’t write the code as though procedural.
- Screenbook maker
- IE crashed on the presenter (oops)
- Uses Xalan, XSLT, XPath
- LEO - Literate Editor w/ Outline (written in Python) - seems like it would be cool for CSS editing also - good code block folding capabilities
- MyTimes.com
- Custom widgets - looks like an alternative to Java Portlets
- Speed advantages compared to quirks mode in the browser
- Michael Kay
- www.screenbooks.net/sxsw
The Interactive side anyway. I’m going with Anton.
Looking forward to hearing Will Wright talk about Spore and lots of cool web tech.
Initially, I installed Wordpress to the /blog directory of my website. After using it a while I decided that I really wanted nothing else at the top level of my website and moved my blog to the top level following the directions here. Things worked just fine after the move except that anyone going to the old blog location http://www.markmorga.com/blog would get the Wordpress header and footer with a 404 error message and no blog.
I played with the .htaccess a bit myself with no luck. What I wanted to do was to have any reference to /blog to be redirected to / but any /blog/… references still go to their destinations. Eventually, I threw the problem over to Anton to have a look at. He poked at it long enough to get angry at Apache and ultimately came up with the following solution:
<IfModule modrewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUESTURI} !^/blog/(.+)
RewriteRule blog/ / [R=301,L]
RewriteRule blog/feed/ /feed/ [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
Here the first two lines turn on the rewrite engine for the base directory /. The RewriteCond line indicates that these rules won’t apply to URIs that match to /blog/* (where the * is one or more characters), The first RewriteRule rewrites the /blog URI to / and the second RewriteRule redirects the old feed URI to the new /feed location.
Thanks, Anton!
