Should Search Engines Break or Fix the Web?

Here’s an interesting thought. So many web pages are only ever accessed as a result of a search engine query, what would happen if search engines stopped including pages that contained broken code?
On the one hand, the most enormous scream from content providers would be heard. On the other hand, there would be a massive [...]

Amazon S3 Outage (Now Back)

Well I returned to check my giant photos upload that JungleDisk was sending to my Amazon S3 account and it had stopped.
The log showed a whole pile of HTTP error codes which any self-respecting technophile will realise means a serious fault is occurring. The S3 forums document the first errors from 0858PDT although JungleDisk for [...]

New arrival

I have recently been looking into architecture of web applications. It follows some interest in Amazon’s EC2 and S3 products where you rent data center resources.
And as if Amazon read my mind, my pre-order of Baron Schwartz’s (et. al) High Performance MySQL (2nd Ed) arrived yesterday (Saturday). It’s certainly a thick book covering all sorts [...]

PHP Design Patterns

So recently I’ve been refactoring piles of code while providing multiple interfaces to it. It has taught me to separate various layers of logic out and I want to note them down for future reference.
You see, people often read code in books and articles without considering what type of problem the code solves. But understanding [...]

TinyMCE and Scriptaculous – Grr

Thought I’d post this as a reminder, having spent an hour staring at web page source code wondering why TinyMCE wasn’t turning my textarea in a full editor for non-technical staff to use.
It seems that if you use Scriptaculous on the same page, TinyMCE must come first in your ordering of script tags, else you [...]

Fun with text_field_with_auto_complete

I’ve spent the past few hours trying to get my head around Rails‘ text_field_with_auto_complete. Rails, from a PHP background is totally different paradigm and text_field_with_auto_complete illustrates this more so than usual.
So I have a web site home page /home which has a controller named ‘HomeController’ amazingly enough. I also have a complete MVC ‘WebSite’ for [...]

FireBug Beta Screencast

I’ve used FireBug earlier this year to debug some ajax that would have been a real pain otherwise. Now, a beta of the 1.0 release is out and it’s like ten times better. It’s been installed on three machines in the office and that could well increase.
Kudos to the programmers and to the Mozilla chaps [...]