Archive for October 2005

The Top 10 Weblog Design Mistakes

Posted by: rkassissieh
October202005

With the rapid proliferation of blogs, it is high time to re-emphasize fundamental principles of good web design.
  • Readable text
  • Pertinent content
  • Effective navigation and search
  • Short and simple forms
  • No bugs, typos, or outdated content.
(source)

Apply these ideas to blogs and you get Jakob Nielsen: Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

1. No Author Biographies
2. No Author Photo
3. Nondescript Posting Titles
4. Links Don't Say Where They Go
5. Classic Hits are Buried
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
8. Mixing Topics
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

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SSI with phpiCalendar

Posted by: rkassissieh
October082005

Here are instructions for including phpiCalendar events in a web page via SSI (server-side include). You may see an example on insideUHS.

Make a new .tpl in templates/default or make a copy of an existing one. Add the appropriate calendar fields and HTML comments. My file looks like this:

<!-- switch some_events on -->
<!-- loop events on -->
<tr><td class=celldivider><P>{EVENT_TEXT}, {EVENT_START}</td></tr>
<!-- switch description_events on -->
<!-- switch description_events off -->
<!-- loop events off -->
<!-- switch some_events off -->

<!-- switch no_events on -->
{L_NO_RESULTS}
<!-- switch no_events off -->

If you want to include more fields than this, then study existing .tpl files to see what your other options are. It is important to include the HTML comments in the file, as phpiCalendar uses them to parse the template.

Make a copy of day.php and rename it to a name of your choice.

Edit line 39 to read as follows:

$page = new Page(BASE.'templates/'.$template.'/yourtemplate.tpl');

(yourtemplate is the name of your template file)

The SSI URL will be something like:

/calendar/yourfile.php?cal=yourcal&printview=day


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UHS iCalendar Launched

Posted by: rkassissieh
October062005

I aam pretty excited about our new, iCal-based online calendar. Multiple authors may maintain it using a desktop application such as Sunbird, and anyone may view the calendar on our web site using phpiCalendar or subscribe to the calendar via an iCal-compatible application or RSS.

This article reviews the basics for parsing iCal data using PERL, PHP, or WML.
In this article, I?ll go over some options for publishing your iCal data through outside services. I?ll then show you how you can start working with code that will let you display your calendars on your own OS X server. I?ll start with the basics of the iCalendar file format, introduce you to some ways of dealing with iCal files in Perl and PHP, and finally demonstrate a PHP-based WML calendar viewer for cellular phones and other mobile devices.
Full Article

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