Glad to say I've had a (rare) weekend off the booze and managed to get quite a bit done. Adam Holzband mailed me yesterday to suggest I look in to RSS as an alternative to using SpyOnIt.com, which I spoke about on Wednesday.
I am now an RSS addict and have added two feeds on codestore to supply XML-format lists of date ordered articles and comments. Users of software like Newz Crawler can now see what's going on here without the need to check. Not only here - you can check recent publications from the BBC, Wired, SlashDot, Cnet, Register & more. Brilliant!
To create a feed in the RSS format you need XML similar to this example. This is fairly easy to do in Domino with a page and a view. So I did just that with the following pages:
Add these as new channels in News Crawler and you can keep a local list of documents and update it on a regular basis. The result will look something like the following.
While doing all this I started to dig deeper in to what until now, to me, was just YAA (Yet Another Acronym) - XML-RPC. You can do some potentially amazing stuff with this. Scott Andrew has a JavaScript implementation on his site.
Thanks to Ron Yuen for pointing out that yesterday I was being clever for clever's sake. Here's another way to get round the no-right-click annoyance:
Press right mouse button and hold it down
When the alert appears press the escape key
Let go of the mouse button to see menu appear
On the subject of flag-waving patriotism (see Wednesday's rant), can you guess who this 2 year old boy celebrating the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 is? Something tells me I won't look quite so cute for her Golden Jubilee ;-)
A few years ago I was given the task of spending a few weeks with a VB/Access developer and coaching him while he got to grips with Notes/Domino. It's never easy trying to justify some of Notes "finer" points but I must have made a good start as he now has his own Domino site and has been listed in Internet Magazine. They gave him 4/5 for design & 5/5 for content. Well done Gary.
I'm still trying to convince him that disabling the right-click event using JavaScript is a serious crime against usability. Not only that but all a user needs to do is type this in to the address bar to get past it:
You can pretty much do anything in JavaScript to get round most of the "security" that is implemented in JavaScript. For example changing the value of fields that are made to look "computed" by removing their borders and giving them an attribute of "readonly". Like the field below. It is a field, honest:
You can edit the "computed" field with JavaScript still: . I rest my case...
Update: I've just been to buy said copy of the magazine and found the following quote in their write-up on the site
Unsurprisingly for such a large and complex site , FanZone is database-driven. But rather than using a widely supported language such as PHP or ASP, Gary's used Lotus Domino. This is unusual for a site like this, since Domino is expensive, and so is the hosting to support it. Gary used a US-based host as it's cheaper than a UK-based one. Domino is used mainly for high-end corporate applications and is impractical for most amateur Web developers.
I agree with a couple of his points but most of it is simply the way people without much experience of Domino tend to see it. Why should hosting support for Domino be dearer than ASP or PHP? There is no reason a US based host would be cheaper than a UK one - it just happens to be that way. I agree with his last point though. I'd go as far as to say it's impractical for professional Web developers ;-) I've got the reviewer's email address if anybody wants to put him right...
While surfing the internet there are lots of different sites I like to keep an eye on for any changes and updates. Some of these sites change more often than others and is easy to forget all about those that change on a less regular basis. What would be useful is a system that would keep an eye out for you and let you know of any changes on some of these. Thanks to Brandon Zylstra I now know about SpyOnIt.com. This will monitor multiple site and mail/text/instant-message you when they change.
At risk of creating huge amounts of unwanted bandwidth usage to codestore, here's a few links to help you set up a monitor on this site.
Personally, I'd much rather you just drop in every now and then though. Makes for a lazy-surfer otherwise. A couple of my Spies have failed to tell me about some updates anyway, so be warned, you may well miss out...
On my walk to get some lunch I counted about six Union Jacks at half-mast. Nothing strange in that when the nation mourns.The reason I notice is that I hardly ever see any on other days. Surely you should lower a flag to half mast, not just dust if off and raise it for a few days before putting it away again. I don't know, it's like us Brits seem ashamed to be patriotic sometimes
BTW: Italians celebrated Pesce d'Aprile on Monday ;-)
We have confirmed reports of fools in Australia, Brazil ("Dia da Mentira" (Day of the Lie)), Holland, France ("Poisson d'Avril" (April Fish)), Norway and Sweden. The latter having developed a great way of paying for their newspapers using a coin-slot on the side of their PCs.
CodeStore is all about web development. Concentrating on Lotus Domino, ASP.NET, Flex, SharePoint and all things internet.
Your host is Jake Howlett who runs his own web development company called Rockall Design and is always on the lookout for new and interesting work to do.
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