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Links of Interest Section Has Been Resurrected

Another change I made to this site recently, which I doubt many of you noticed, is the resurrection of my "elsewhere" links. Both the displayed section and the feed.

"Elsewheres" are nothing more than links to other pages on the internet that I found interesting and think you might like too. They first appeared on this site in January 2005. From then onwards they appeared in the yellow-looking sidebar on the homepage, in their own view and also on the blog document for the day on which I linked to them. They also had their own feed.

Then, last September, I discovered the use of FeedDemon's News Bins. Since then I've still been bookmarking useful pages, just not actually on codestore, but in this feed, as it's so much quicker and easier to drag to the News Bin than to login in here and create documents in this site. I'm assuming some of you subscribe to that feed? If not it's still useful for me personally as an online bookmarking system.

I'd always meant to remove the elsewhere section from the homepage but never got round to it. This made the homepage look stagnant as the last date showing was September 2007. That's not good in webland, is it now!

So, what I've done is write a little scheduled (hourly) Java agent to download the "news bin" and create "elsewhere" documents on this site. Thus keeping that part of codestore alive and kicking.

If you're interested in how the scheduled agent works here's the code.

If you're interested in what I'm interested in then you might want to see the links I, errr, link to. To do this you have three options:

  1. Simplest option is to subscribe to the Newsgator feed.
  2. Alternatively you can subscribe to the feed on this site which is an hour out of sync.
  3. You can visit this site and see them on the right hand side of the homepage. Note that you can also search them on this site to find links you thought you saw at some point (I know I do that still).

So there you have it. Another little change which will hopefully help revive this site a little and is another step towards Codestore v7 (this is 6.5 you're looking at - what, you mean you didn't know that!?).

Comment Icon 1 Comment Read - Add | Fri 4 Jul 2008 | Open »

Codestore's RSS Feed Now Has Full Content

This one is especially for Tim Tripcony and anybody else who prefers to remain in their feed-reader while catching up on new postings on their favourite sites.

Until today on codestore you had to actually visit the site if you wanted to read my posting. If you were lucky I'd have remembered to add a one-liner summary to try and tempt you in, but often all you had to go on was the title itself.

The trouble with using the title alone is that (at least I find) it's almost impossible to come up with one that summarises it all in a catchy way. I spend way to much time obsessing over the title of a post sometimes - changing words over and over.

Well now, due to popular demand (you can probably tell if you've got this far and you're still in Google Reader or the likes) I've supplied the full body of the blog entry via RSS. Unless you want to post a comment (for which I given you a handy "button" to press at the bottom of each item) there's no actual need to visit the site.

So, why has it taken me so long to make this change? The answer's in the last paragraph -- that you don't need to visit the site. My concern with full-content RSS feeds is that my visitors never actually, err, visit. This means they never get to see the site I put so much time in to designing. Purely selfish, I know and no reason to force people to visit.

The obvious side effect to this is that I lose visitors who don't like taking the gamble that something is worth their time to read based on what the title tells them. Hence my about turn. I might as well get the content I write to as many people as possible hadn't I?!

There was another, more practical, reason not to supply full content. All the internal links in my blogs are relative to the BASE href tag in the page's Head. Likewise for inline images. Links start with "unid/" and images with "rsrc/" both of which are the names of sorted views.

The trouble is that once downloaded to the RSS feed it doesn't know what the BASE href is and so links and inline resource files become broken. Take the link in the last paragraph for example. If you examine it on the site itself you'll see it points to unid/EPSD-52UQZJ?OpenDocument. If you examine the link in the RSS feed you'll see it points directly to http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/EPSD-52UQZJ?OpenDocument.

So how did I got about this without using nasty hard-coded absolute links in the actual stored content?

All I did was add an @ReplaceSubstring() to the RSS view. Blog posts on this site are just HTML stored in a plain old text field. All I needed to add to the RSS feed's view was this:

@ReplaceSubstring(
        @Implode(Body; @NewLine);
        "=\"rsrc/":"=\"unid/"; 
        "=\"http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/rsrc/":"\"http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/"
);

It seems safe to assume that any occurrence of the strings ="rsrc/" or ="unid/" are either a link or an image, respectively. Seems foolproof to me and, more importantly, it works. To prove it here's an image, which just happens to be an image of what the feed now looks like in FeedDemon:

Notice the preview image of the laptop that FeedDemon provides when the item is collapsed. All very cool.

So I hope we're all happy now? If you have any more requests just ask.

Comment Icon 18 Comments Read - Add | Thu 3 Jul 2008 | Open »

About Turn: DEXT Download Will Now Be Free

For weeks now I've been promising the details of how you go about downloading the DEXT app. The delay has been due to me not being sure how best to distribute it. My intention has always been to charge a certain (nominal perhaps?) sum of money which goes directly to a charity of my choosing.

I even went as far as setting up a page on JustGiving.com where I'd accept the monies and record the generosity of the donors. The target for the fund raising on that page is a (perhaps) overly-ambitious 10 grand.

Since then I've been doing quite a bit of thinking and have decided to make the charitable donations optional and the download of the application completely free. There are a few reasons for this.

Mainly it's that I don't want to suffer the disappointment of the whole thing falling flat on its face. If this were to happen it would probably make me question my devotion to this site and I don't want that to happen.

What I also want to avoid is starting off with a compulsory donation and then moving to an optional one, thus upsetting those who have already shelled out for it.

Another reason is that I want to make all the code I share available to as many people as possible. Requiring a payment would just mean that not as many people get their hands on the code as possibly could.

Something happened recently which brought home the fact that this site doesn't have the pull it once used to. I probably shouldn't but I use the number of comments posted on blog entries as a (very rough) indicator of the site's popularity. Eighteen months ago when Felix was born the Say Hello to Felix post got 140 odd responses. Last week the Say Hello to Minnie post got a less than half that!

While the Minnie post still got a lot of responses and I'm grateful of them all I can't help but feel the difference between the two number indicates that this site's readership has fallen in the 18 months since Felix arrived. It's inevitable that having children means I don't have the time I used to put aside for running codestore. I've tried my best to keep a certain amount of technical postings and code snippets flowing but there have been the odd week of silence here and there and that's bound to have an affect on the popularity of the site.

My plan now is to try and kick the site back in to gear. Despite the arrival of another child I should now - in theory - have more spare time. Whereas before most of my spare time (including down time with work) was spent working on the house, that's all over now, save for the odd little job here and there. I should then have more time to spend keeping up with emerging technologies and fresh techniques, as before. There should be some time left to put this knowledge on here in the form of demos and "How To"s.

The plan with DEXT is that all new techniques and demos are added to one central database (note that it no longer has anything to do with Ext -- see Ext.nd for that). Each time a new demo is added to DEXT a new release will be made available for download. This will make it easier for you (and me!) to find that demo you knew you saw on here somewhere. I too forget where a demo database is sometimes and the server is becoming a mess of demo databases that can be a nightmare to maintain and follow!

Stick with me on this. I need to do some house-cleaning but should be able to make a copy of the database available within a week or so.

Comment Icon 36 Comments Read - Add | Wed 2 Jul 2008 | Open »

Any ThinkPad Experts Out There?

My ThinkPad T42 is broken. It happened just before I moved in to the new office. Like an idiot I balanced it on the top of a pair of step-ladders after I'd been testing the wall sockets for the network. Despite making a mental note to remember it was there I came back later and folded the ladders up - completely forgetting it was on top. It fell 6' on to a concrete floor, although I managed to break the fall half way with my foot. Woops.

Testament to the build quality of the ThinkPads is the fact it was relatively unharmed other than a piece of the casing missing on the corner. The only problem is with the screen. It's very, very, very dull. You can just make out the login box if you get to within an inch of the screen. Logging in or using it with its own screen is out of the question. Since I've moved to the new office I've had it permanently on the port replicator with an external screen. It's not been used as a portable laptop since and won't be until it's fixed.

Now that a new baby has arrived it would be good if I could work from the house a little more. Hence I really need to get it sorted. I just don't know where to start. Do you?

At the weekend I finally got round to taking it apart, as you can see. Believe it or not it's on and running in this shot. I even managed to completely re-assemble it without powering down.

In taking it apart I was hoping to find a loose connection and fix the problem. Alas I didn't and it looks like a hardware fault.

Having done a little googling I narrowed the problem down to either the LCD inverter or the CCFL backlight. As the CCFL is the cheapest part I'm going to buy one of them and hope that works. If not I'll try the inverter. If neither work I might have to consider a new laptop (it is nearly 3 years old after all). What's the equivalent of the T42 now? Is it the T61?

Comment Icon 12 Comments Read - Add | Mon 30 Jun 2008 | Open »

Say Hello To Minnie Howlett

A week earlier than expected little Miss Minnie Howlett decided to make her way in to the big wide world yesterday morning, 23rd June 2008, at 8:08 am. Her entry was a little more dramatic than her big brother's 18 months ago. More on that in a mo.

Here's a re-creation of the photo of her brother from the day he was born. See the similarity!?

Things started in the normal way and it looked like our planned home birth was going to go ahead. We probably left it a little late to call the midwife though and before we knew it (and before the midwife had arrived) Karen was in the bath and wanting to push. At this point it dawned on me I could well be doing the delivery myself. Needless to say I didn't fancy the idea and called 999. Within 10 minutes an ambulance arrived. Within another 10 minutes we were in the maternity ward. It's amazing how fast you can get somewhere with blue lights flashing and the rush hour traffic parting to make way.

Within 10 minutes of being in the hosptital Minnie arrived. Daddy was, yet again, reduced to a babbling fool crying like a little baby.

On Saturday night we were next door and the whole of the street was there. We got a sweepstake going on sex and weight. It turns out I was spot on with the weight but got the sex wrong. I'd been convinced it would be another boy. Howlett men just don't have girls. Apparently. Well, I'm glad I did. She's a little beauty and I'm as proud as punch.

Things might be a little quiet for the rest of the week although I'll try and post more techy stuff if I can. I need a couple of days paternity to help Karen out.

Before I go here's a photo of Felix. I promised 18 months ago not to let this site turn in to a glorifed family album, but have realised I hardly post family info or photos at all now. Well, here he is pretending to be daddy:

Isn't he a big boy! You don't realise how much your children have grown until the next sibling arrives...

Comment Icon 67 Comments Read - Add | Tue 24 Jun 2008 | Open »

More blog entries are available in the archive »