customized rants from a PHP dev's viewpoint

Have a look at the image below – a screenshot from a website I came across. It’s a quite clear, massive fail (unless you’re fluent in whatever font is used). This is something that can happen to any site, if you’re messing with I18N or L10N – something goes completely screwy. However, it’s also one of those things that – when using a professional CMS – just should work without massive headaches or hidden traps. Typo3 wants be a professional CMS, so, following the logic, this shouldn’t happen (or the site author should have massive warning bells ringing).

What went wrong here? Well, several things. First off, the site uses Typo3 to generate images containing text – and uses that for links. In itself a horrible idea that’s very bad for SEO but is used by Typo3 so users can get “that special font”. It wouldn’t be so bad though if it wasn’t for the fact the there’s either a mismatch between encoding somewhere in the system or the font needed can’t be found or used (I’m assuming that the install hasn’t been hacked and someone switched the font used to wingdings). If the system had just been outputting text and setting the wrong encoding then at least users would be able to manually switch. As is, there’s just no way of figuring out what the text is supposed to be. Your best bet is looking at the html source and trying to find out by looking at the link titles – not exactly what you want users to do.

Now, to add an extra bit of irony to this: the site name is Typo3 Experts and they’re hyping their Typo3 cookbook. Would you buy it after seeing this site?

Not the books referred to in my last post although it could be (once I’ve read them :) ). Nope, I’ll be reviewing another book from Packt Publishing (my previous review was of TYPO3 Multimedia Cookbook): this one is Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook by Juan Pablo Giménez and Marcos F. Romero. It looks very interesting as far as I can tell: the strategy of the book is to create a working news site step by step, with each step being a recipe. So you can use bits from the book if you just happen to have a specific problem but your site is doing fine otherwise, or you can take it as a guide on how to go about creating sites with Plone.

With a bit of luck, I should have the book in two weeks and knowing my schedule it’ll be between three and four weeks after that before the review is on the site here.

As a kid I always liked the hard packages the most, for birthdays and christmas. Those were the ones you could play with and immerse yourself in right away. Fun fun fun! As opposed to clothes, which you can … wear. And that’s about it. As I grew older, the softer presents got more interesting, but there’s enough of the child left me to appreciate a gook set of hard, geeky birthday presents: books! Strictly speaking they’re not entirely hard (a bit wobbly, I suppose) but they’re firmly in the “hard” packages category.

So what am I on about? My recent birthday, I got designing with web standards by Jeffrey Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte, Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl, and Learning Python by Mark Lutz. I’m a happy little boy :D If I manage to, might write a review or two as well :)

A good friend of mine mentioned that SSH supports escape sequences – something I had never thought of. Or rather, something I had wished for every time I’d been faced with a dead SSH connection. Turns out, you can easily close any SSH connection (dead or alive) by issuing the following sequence:

<CR>~.

The CR in there is a carriage return, i.e. pressing the enter key to create a new line. One caveat though: the ~ is the default escape character for SSH but it can be changed (or removed) so you need to make sure you’re using the proper escape character when issuing escape sequences – otherwise, no fun/profit.

Closing an SSH connection is not the only thing you can do: you can also suspend an SSH connection by doing

<CR>~^Z

where ^Z is <ctrl>+z. But wait, there’s more! You can also change the SSH connection you’re in to add or remove port forwards, by opening a command line:

<CR>~C

And a personal favourite: if you’re using several SSH connections in serial, you can forward an escape sequence by adding another ~ after the first. Closing connection #2 then becomes:

<CR>~~.

And in the same fashion, suspending the second connection becomes:

<CR>~~^Z

This, dear reader, is awesome! There’s just no end to the fun :)

The moral: read your man pages (so much good stuff hidden away in there)!

Aaaaaaaaaand … another tool put up for the general public to enjoy. This time it’s PLSEO, and it’s available at GitHub as per usual. It’s a collection of SEO tools written in PHP. Well, for now it’s a collection of one tool: some classes to query search engines to get position of a site given a keyword. You can read more on the PLSEO page.