Chris Meller

I was looking at the source code of the Twitter Status blog, mainly out of curiosity to see how Tumblr was put together, and the first thing I noticed was this odd block of meta tags at the very top of the header:

<![CDATA[ <!-- DEFAULT COLORS --> <meta name="color:Background" content="#fff"/> <meta name="color:Title" content="#444"/> <meta name="color:Description" content="#777"/> <meta name="color:Post Title" content="#6498cc"/> <meta name="color:Text" content="#444"/> <meta name="color:Inline Link" content="#6498cc"/> <meta name="color:Quote" content="#888"/> <meta name="color:Quote Border" content="#6498cc"/> <meta name="color:Quote Source" content="#555"/> <meta name="color:Link Post" content="#c00"/> <meta name="color:Conversation Background 1" content="#f4f4f4"/> <meta name="color:Conversation Background 2" content="#e8e8e8"/> <meta name="color:Conversation Border" content="#bbb"/> <meta name="color:Conversation Text" content="#444"/> <meta name="color:Date" content="#ccc"/> <meta name="color:Date Block" content="#6498cc"/> <meta name="color:Date Block Text" content="#bbd5f1"/> <!-- END DEFAULT COLORS --> ]]>

Can someone tell me what the hell that accomplishes?

I was playing with IETester, which lets you open Internet Explorer tabs using rendering engines from IE 5.5 up to IE 8 beta 1 for testing compatibility, and noticed for the first time that my blog was throwing a Javascript error only in IE.

Being the pain in the ass IE is, of course the line number it gives isn’t really valid. I looked and looked and couldn’t find the problem. As a last ditch effort, using the IE Developer Toolbar, I hit the menu option to validate the page. Thanks to the W3C Validator, I found that there were some duplicate ID attributes on elements.

After checking out the lines the validator referenced, I found that the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress was improperly tearing apart href attributes for links created by the Footnotes plugin I use, causing it to include long strings of HTML in the onclick attribute for tracking outgoing links¹.

Thankfully, the Analytics plugin has an option to turn off outbound link tracking. I’ll miss those stats, but it’s not like I pay all that much attention to them (or care) anyway.

In the end, I don’t really have anything to test with IETester, it was just a fun toy for a few minutes. It also helped me notice a problem I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, so in the end it was time well spent.

1. Rather than just the link the user was headed for, as it should - and does for regular links. ↩

After a whole week of being sick and generally not feeling well enough to work on anything, I’ve finally gotten back to hacking on some Habari code.

I’ve been up until about 5am the last two mornings working on a variety of things. Yesterday included a plugin directory plugin that hopefully will eventually find a home on the Habari servers providing directory and update notification services. I also had the opportunity to track down an obscure database class error while helping add some new tag merging / renaming functionality.

This morning I’ve been hammering away at a new database schema for Oracle. All in all there aren’t a lot of changes, but things like the lack of auto_increment fields¹ made it a very time-consuming process.

Tomorrow I hope to get some more work done on Oracle support (hopefully allowing me to test a running blog, if not the installation and other backend functionality) and finish some updates I’ve had planned for the Monthly Archives plugin for far too long.

At some point in the next couple of days I would also love to rearrange my desk. Unfortunately that means I first have to clean it off, which is a much larger task than it should be…

1. Or the convenient SERIAL data type in Postgres which emulates the trigger / sequence functionality. ↩

I imagine many people have been confused with the differences between all the myriad open source licenses available. I did a quick Google, and found a very nice basic table listing some of the more popular licenses you might encounter and their key points.

Check out the comparison here, thanks to the KDE project.

The Open Source Initiative also includes a large index of licenses here, albeit comparison is left up to you.

I had the opportunity to do some quick WordPress plugin hacking tonight¹ for Jim Whimpey. As a “payment” of sorts, he gave me a coupon code for the site he was working on: Panedia Desktop Wallpaper.

Being an Aussie company, obviously, most of their wallpapers are from Australia. Boy do they have some absolutely beautiful scenery down under. Check out the two I selected for my machines:

For my desktop, I got a huge 3200 x 1200 pixel version of Brisbane’s beautiful night skyline:

And for my MacBook Pro, I got a beautiful 1680 x 1050 pixel copy of the Robe Coastline:

Stunning wallpapers. Totally worth $25/year to constantly get new beautiful scenes in this kind of quality. I also love the interface that auto-picks the best format for your OS and resolution. Very well done.

1. I added an additional search option to the Search Everything plugin, enabling it to return all posts in a matching category. ↩