You learn something new every day

Last night, I was helping my wife with some PHP code for an email form. To create the email message, I had her use a heredoc, which is a convenient way to put a large block of text into a variable, while interpolating other variables into it. But it was giving us errors. What we discovered is that you can’t do this: 


  $message = <<<MSG
  Hello $postvars['FirstName']
  MSG;

Even though heredocs can accept other complex variable substitutions, like $var->foo[1], it seems that the quoting on the index messes with the interpolation. So you have to use a more explicit syntax to help PHP figure out where the variables start and end: 


  $message = <<<MSG
  Hello {$postvars['FirstName']}
  MSG;

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to heredocs, it applies to any interpolated (e.g., double-quoted) string in PHP.

I’m posting this as a future reference for myself, and for anyone else who might run across this problem in the future.

Blog Service Pinger Enhancements

Doc has suggested that I add an XML-RPC interface to my Blog Service Pinger. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself.

When time allows (i.e., I’ll work on it in my Copious Free Time), I’ll add a weblogs.com compatible ping interface that will allow you to ping all supported services in one fell swoop. I also plan to add an introspection call which will list the supported services, and another call which will allow you to ping a subset of the services.

It’s the little things…

I am constantly surprised at the number of websites out there that don’t bother to set a background-color on their pages. Why do I care? I don’t know. But it just seems to me that it’s a detail that every web designer should attend to.

Portions of the Microsoft Developer Network site don't set a default background color

Here’s how a web site without a default background color looks to me.

You see, I like to be sure that I don’t forget to set the background color for my own sites. So, I’ve set my web browser’s default background color to a rather unattractive shade of light green. This way, I can immediately spot when I’ve forgotten it, and I can correct it right away. And, of course, it means that I also immediately spot it on other sites that I visit.

Let’s step back in time a bit — back to when the web was new, Netscape was a hot item, Internet Explorer was still trying to get its act together, and every page out there was displayed on a gray background. Then, Netscape introduced some new features which allowed web page authors to set the colors for their page background, text, and links. Colorful pages abounded! Nobody wanted to have that drab default gray anymore, so they all set their background colors to something different. (some using garish tiled background images to achieve nauseating effects). Eventually, a great number of sites settled on plain white as a background color, because it mimics the printed page, and gives the best contrast.

Now, step forward a few years, to somewhere between then and now. Internet Explorer 5.x is now on top of the heap in browser market share, Netscape 4 is all but dead, and Mozilla or Opera is the browser of choice for the web designer elite. Somewhere in there, the browser makers decided to make the default background color be white, rather than gray. This was a good thing, as now all of those pages that hadn’t been updated in years, or that had been authored by novices who didn’t know any better, or by techs who couldn’t be bothered with style, were much easier to read. But then some portion of the web designers (mostly the ones who were just coming into the game after this time, I’d guess) got lazy. If you want your page to be white, why bother setting it in your stylesheet? It’s already white in the browser, so we’ll just skip that. Even though all it would take to fix it is something like this in a stylesheet: 

background-color: white;

Maybe I’m too picky. Maybe in the great overall scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. Maybe I should just set my browser’s default background color back to white and quit worrying about it. But I don’t think I will. I just want to know if the designers for the sites I visit are paying attention to the little details.

Site Updates

I’ve made several new updates to this site over the last few days. There’s nothing major, but I thought I’d point them out.

Someone else’s shoes

I haven’t really talked much about religion here before. I mostly stick to technical or fun themes. But I ran across this great post earlier today when I was surfing Eric Meyer’s blogroll:

I’d like you to imagine something for a moment. Take a relatively close loved one – not your closest loved one, or your best friend, but someone who you like a lot and have affection for. It could be your brother, it could be someone you really like at work. Hell, it could be your mom or your daughter.

Okay. I hate to break it to you, but they’re on heroin.

Not really, of course… But take a moment to imagine that you’ve just discovered this person has been snorting drugs whenever you’re not around. They have a real problem with H – one you can’t imagine that they should have, since he or she seems like an intelligent person. You like them, maybe even love them.

[….]

Think about what you’d do. This is a serious question. How would you handle someone who was endangering their life (and possibly the lives of their children) and refused to admit that they had a problem? Where do you draw the line between respecting someone’s boundaries and leaving them to die?

Okay. Got your answer?

Now, replace the word “heroin” with the Christian sin of your choice – “gay,” “pagan,” or any other non-traditional way of living. And replace the word “life” with “soul.”

Read the whole thing. It’s good.

I’m a Christian, myself, but even I can get annoyed when people proselytize at me. If you’ve ever been mad at somebody for “preaching” to you, try to keep theferret’s words in mind. This is a really good analogy for why Christians will try to get you to “change your ways” if they think that you’re going down the wrong road.