I was thinking about how facebook updates parse out the url, then construct a nice looking preview. I think what it takes is scanning the textarea for a url, and then using ajax to tell the server to fetch a summary of the page at the url. get the data back, and insert it into a template, and reveal it.

So I was puzzling over how to make the "Well" style layout in Tumblr without Javascript.

I created a PNG that was bright red, but in Firefox, it is a duller red. The fix was to remove the color profile from the PNG by using the tool TweakPNG.

This is an example template file that will export articles from your bespoke CMS to and XML file that WordPress version 3.5 will import.

Xopus is an XML editor, written in Javascript and HTML5. It's not just JS, but it's licensed software for your desktop. I'm blown away. This is Google Docs, Angry Birds, Yahoo Pipes level blown away. Check it out.

I was on the Ralphs website, and found some image URLs that looked like this:

Normally, you should use canned Javascript or canned PHP modules to implement web features, but sometimes, that can suck. Typically, these products, if they're popular, start to suffer from feature bloat. In order to make a popular product, you need to add a lot of features. Customers are looking for three or four specific features, and generally don't care about the other features. The problem is, you don't know what those features are, so you add 20 features, and hope to get those customers.

This script below will accept a URL parameter, download the HTML, convert it to a .mobi file with kindlegen, and copy the file onto your Kindle.

I was having lots of problems with HTML email layouts. After doing some research, I came up with a method to get almost pixel-perfect positioning and sizing. It's not that hard.

I've never put a ID onto the BODY tag, but here's a situation where it's useful.

Normally, an article has an H1 tag that contains the title for the page.  You do this for SEO reasons, as well as semantics.

How many times has this wheel been reinvented? According to Google searches, not enough - because I couldn't find a good one. Over the years, I've definitely build this wheel a few times, so, here goes again. This is a lot better than the stock nl2br() function.

The attached code and test files show it off, and only a description follows.

Rlib is a report writing engine that takes report specifications in an XML language. It emits reports in several formats including HTML and PDF.

Visit RLIB

I stumbled across RLIB while figuring out how to implement some MS Access report writing features in PHP. MSA users will know what writing a report is, but PHP coders probably don't, so I'll explain.

This is a really good presentation about HTML5. It's time to abandon coding for anything less than HTML 5 now. Bye bye cruft.

This is the Hello, World program, written in Javascript and encoded as a data URI.

<script src='data:application/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUoIkhlbGxvLCB3b3JsZCEiKQ=='></script>

if you have an ajaxy library that can edit divs in-place:

<div id="story.1234">
    <div id="story.1234:title">the title</div>
</div>
<div id="story.1235">