A good writeup on OOP in javascript.
JavaScript objects@Everything2.com

Lots of brain food here - and enough sample code to get you in serious trouble :)

Ah. Not sure if this is work or play, but its great stuff: Vantage Graphics and Design - Mapping the sphere

Ahhh. Light goes on. This post shows how to open a file in perl using a particular encoding, which was a faq I guess I never read. It would explain all manner of weirdness and problems I’ve had with encodings, entities and so on.

The wheel has turned again and my attention has moved on to Second Life

Its a multi-user 3D digital world that's highly flexible and absorbing of free cycles (CPU and brain). For me, its a great way to learn a little about 3D modelling (there are in-game tools for creating your own objects) and yet another scripting language, hooking you into the game's 3d, physics-capable engine. Lots of interesting possibilities.

Kelley (my wife) has bought us some land -she's playing out her home building and landscaping fantasies- I'm studying. Look for us in-game as Viridian and Earnest Clymer.

Knew this must exist somewhere, but didn’t occur to me to look on sourceforge. Add this to my todo list - my resume markup looks like it will map pretty easily to theirs. The project is basically a DTD, with some documentation, and ready-made XSL stylesheets for transforming the XML source into plain text, RTF, HTML and FO (thence to PDF via FOP).

Ha! Ajax. Is that what they call it now? I'm no veteran developer of this stuff, but I've watched it emerge as a solution repeatedly. Kind of like how evolution seems to spontaneously throw up the same answer to the same problem in completely unconnected species. My amusement is just that it is the dubbing of the thing - the naming event - that makes it article-worthy (and blog-worthy).

Well I'm all for giving it a name everyone can agree on if it will collect everyone around some common best practices. And I can think of no better place to start the ball rolling than at Adaptive Path.

Now lets roll up sleeves and make it happen.

This page had some answers to some of the stumbling blocks I’ve enountered while dealing with HTML with XML tools and processes.

Finally I've got most of the "Lentil 1.0" redesign of Sam-I-Am.com uploaded. This blog (and the others) still need proper templates, but its 99% there otherwise.

I've gone with a content-driven model, where the html I store on my server is my structured content, data and meta information all in one standardized and well known format: (x)html. Navigation is built off of an xml structure I build of the directory tree, and transformed via XSLT to make my left nav, and queried to build the breadcrumbs, sitemap and so on.

An apache Handler is defined to route requests for html files through my perl cgi script. It does several jobs, extracting metadata, splicing the content into its presentation template and including the static and navigation pieces. A cacheing layer ensures this expense is only paid when a necessary - checking the content, template and a few other lastModified dates before retrieving the stored, pre-built page from a filesystem based cache.

I got to use a lot of great modules (e.g CGI::Application, HTML::Template, XML::LibXML/XSLT, Cache::FileCache) and wrote a few of my own, gaining significant code reuse across the main handler cgi, the admin interface, 404 handler, directoryIndex handler etc.

Client-side coding: its an all CSS layout; validating XHTML (bar the use of a few iframes); flexible width; highly accessible - with user-scalable fonts, a sensible content flow (roughly: page heading, synopsis, breadcrumbs, main content, main nav and persistent nav) augmented with jump-to links to quickly reach the navigation. Some sparing use of DHTML adds rollovers on the navigation, without cluttering the markup with event handlers.

IA: I've reorganized a little, grouping content under 3 main silos: Work, Personal and Play. The physical directory structure is changed in some areas, others not. My 404 handler uses a moved URL lookup file to attempt to either redirect to a new location or suggest a starting point where a 1:1 match cant be made. Its all a part of my "No Page Left Behind" philosophy, fighting link rot at its source - home pages like this.

Phew. It wont pretend it came easy. But it was fun, I learnt lots, and hopefully it'll make whats already here easier to use and allow for pain-free growth and evolution.

This was new to me. The HTTP Response header can use a status code '204 No Content'. This tells the user-agent not to expect any response content, and so to not refresh the current page. For simple interactions where you want to keep the server current on a users selections it looks useful.

Here's some (old but interesting) browser test results. There's apparently some disagreement on whether response content accompanying a 204 is an error, or should just be ignored. The safe bet seems to be to not send any content body.