Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

Blog Archives

Play Ball!

Aug092004

This past Tuesday, we went with some friends of ours to see a Rome Braves (class “A” affiliate of the Atlanta Braves) . baseball game. We introduced our kids to important concepts such as trash-talking (“batterbatterbatterbatterSWING!”), the Tomahawk Chop, and yelling “Charge!” after the trumpet call. Surprisingly, the kids didn’t get bored and ask when we were going home a million times — we actually stayed through the entire nine innings. Of course, there were … Continue reading →

Semantic Web

Jul282004

Paul Ford uses a fictional story from five years in the future to explain the semantic web: August 2009: How Google Beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web. For more info about the Semantic Web concept: W3C Semantic Web SemanticWeb.Org The Semantic Web: 1-2-3 RDFWeb and FOAF Developer Site I suspect that Paul’s story is ispired by Perhaps Paul’s story inspired some actual events…

Technorati redesign

Jul262004

Thanks to the efforts of Tantek: a new Technorati design. In the words of Scotty, “It’s…it’s… It’s green!” By rewriting the vast majority of the markup (both from the old Technorati site, and the mockups from AP), I was able to simultaneously reduce the size of the HTML, while significantly increasing its semantic fidelity. The result: I cut the size of Technorati’s home page in half, made it Valid XHTML, with a style sheet that … Continue reading →

Second-hand ego surfing

Jul252004

So, after we took the kids to the mall yesterday, we went to the Borders bookstore across the street. Of course, I headed straight for the computer books section. I saw several titles that I’d like to have, but nothing that I just had to have right then. But I did indulge in a little second-hand ego surfing. As I perused the authors of various books, I thought to myself, “He runs WordPress. And so … Continue reading →

Status Report

Jul242004

I’m customizing an install of the Mantis bugtracker for my contract job. We want to modify it to authenticate against our own user database. Fortunately, the Mantis code is pretty well modularized and abstracted, so it shouldn’t be too hard. I’m also going to try to integrate a way to submit new issues by email. My employer has already suggested that when I get that working, I could submit the modifications back to the Mantis … Continue reading →

Work, work, work

Jul212004

No, the storms didn’t wipe me off the face of the earth. I’ve just been consumed by work. Plus, we had out-of-town relatives visiting last weekend, so some of my “free time” (ha!) got subsumed into my “family time”. Even so, I still haven’t gotten myself into the daily schedule that I really need to be on, as Susan has had to remind me several times lately. I’ve been meaning to get up early enough … Continue reading →

Weather

Jul142004

As I write this, there is severe weather about to head through my area, including the possibilities of tornadoes. I’ve seen some pretty spectacular lightning strikes in the distance, so I’d better shut my computer down before something bad hap&@~v7#;+rk*

A PHP Question

Jul122004

Okay, here’s a question for some of you PHP OOP gurus out there: How can you use the preg_replace_callback() function from inside of a class method? I even tried using create_function() to make a self-contained lambda, but it seemed like it couldn’t access class properties via the $this variable.

The Cookout

Jul072004

In my last post, I mentioned that we were running a little bit late getting to the movie theater. Let me go into a little more detail. See, these events took place on July 4, Independence Day. It’s traditional to have a cookout on Independence Day, right? So we had planned to grill hamburgers, hot dogs, and corn on the gas pit grill that our rental house has in the back yard. The forecast called … Continue reading →