I’ve never really looked at the whole BlogShares thing before, and was under the impression that you had to register your blog with it in order to be listed. Imagine my surprise then, to find this blog ranked on blogshares.

What really surprised me was that I only discovered this by finding my weblog listed on organica.us which shows all sorts of information about my site.

In turn, I only found out about organica.us by vanity-googling for “pipthepixie”.

Surprising what stuff you can turn up on the web.

Unrelated, but I was in Waterstones yesterday (a bookshop whose website I’d link to were it not just Amazon ;), and there it was on the shelf: Salam Pax: The Baghdad Blog, which appears to just be a print version of the contents of Where is Raed? during the Iraq war. Of course, everyone else probably knew about this already, but I was hugely surprised. Published in association with The Guardian (well known for their links with the online world – hello Ben Hammersley) it puts the word “Blog” in a prominent position in major book shops up and down the land. It seems, then, that despite all the controversy about whether it was real or just propaganda, The Guardian found out enough, and managed to get in contact with Salam Pax (which is a pseudonym of course), to be able to publish his insider’s view.

I didn’t buy it.

Because I’m in the process of redesigning my web site, I’ve been re-reading a lot of old design articles (mainly a load of CSS articles; the lessons of which, I was quite glad to discover, I mostly knew by heart).

Some interesting new stuff (for me at least!) though: Help the Googlebot understand your site, Nine things you can do to make your web site better and the IBM Web Design Guidelines

Whilst looking around, I also came across this quote:

  • Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
  • The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

Which was apparently published in AppleDirect in August 1989 – I wonder if this is still true? One of the developers at work uses Emacs for everything (motto: if it hasn’t got a fifteen-key macro command it’s not worth doing) in Windows on the premise that it’s much faster than using a standard programmer’s text editor.

The Mozilla XUL Periodic Table is great stuff. If you want to see what XUL elements are available to you, how to use them, and what they look like with different attributes, this is the place to go (via Chu Yeow Cheah).

Mozilla’s XUL is really simple stuff. When you tie it in with Mozilla’s built-in support for XML-RPC and SOAP (check the articles on Using the Mozilla SOAP API, and Mozilla SOAP/Google API Demos), you’re well on the way to creating decent cross-platform applications. The biggest problem of course, is that we’re still waiting for the XRE (although I guess the GRE is usable).

Eclipse and SWT

Despite my earlier protestations ([It] just confuses me with its perspectives and workspaces and completely idiosyncratic method of working with projects), I’ve persevered with Eclipse and it seems OK at the moment. I was mainly swayed by its CVS integration, which is good, and I’ve finally understood that Eclipse is only a project editor, not a text editor, which is how I’d been trying to use it before. In fact, its basic text editing is probably its weakest aspect. Eclipse is written for editing Java, so where’s the JSP support? Why is it so hard to find out which shortcuts keys are already mapped to? Little things like these are really putting me off, and need to get sorted. Yes I know it’s open source and all that bollocks, but if you think I’ve got time to wade through hundreds of thousands of lines of source to try and implement what someone else should be being paid to do then you’re very much mistaken.

Oh, and copy and paste is broken; both within Eclipse and with other applications. Very unimpressive.

In developing an SWT app I’ve needed to be able to bring up a webpage, and so far I’ve been using the method Eugene Bayley provided for launching the default browser. Today sees the release of Milestone 3 and with it a new SWT Browser widget (check out what the FAQ says about it and a code snippet).

Nice stuff. I like SWT. Initially it seemed a lot simpler to me than Swing, but I think that’s probably more to do with the very easy to read SWT tutorials I learnt it from, whereas I learnt Swing the hard way – using JBuilder and then seeing what code it generated. I’m not sure if one is actually better than the other, after all Swing provides a native look and feel too.

Nevertheless, SWT is currently my Java UI of choice. I’d prefer to be able to use Thinlet I think, and whilst I can knock up fairly complex UIs in little time using its ace XUL (thanks mainly to my experience playing with Leigh Dodds’ Foaf-a-matic mk 2 I can’t always quite get the functionality I need.

Using Thinlet though, has shown me how quick and easy it can be to use XML to define your UI. Sometime last week I set about searching for an XUL for SWT.

I found two possibilities JellySWT (there’s also a JellySwing for generating Swing interfaces) and Luxor. I haven’t evaluated either of them at all yet, but licensing seems relevant – Luxor is GPL whereas JellySWT is Apache License. Also, JellySWT runs out of Maven (which I’m sure is nice, but which failed my five minute test when I tried it eight months ago).

Overall I suspect I’ll try JellySWT, I think it looks the better of the two, but let me know if I’m barking up the wrong tree. 🙂

The main links I picked up whilst searching:

Your browser is bum

I only have dial-up at home, and I’ve been terribly busy at work, so I’m a week or so behind, my apologies.

Following up on his original CSS tabs (which I copied for the effect on http://philwilson.org), Dan Cederholm shows us how to use images to achieve a very neat effect

Somehow in all my web design wanderings, I’d managed to miss Pseudo/Design and Redemption in a Blog, two weblogs well worth a read.

To finish this post, something from Richard Herring that made me laugh. I suspect you have to be British to appreciate it properly. 😉