David HH has an interesting piece on “The false promise of template languages”. While neither Perl nor PHP may offer the same clean syntax in the code as Ruby can do, it does indeed raise a few interesting questions about how actually benefit from the templates and who does in the space between designers and developers. I do love some degree of separation between heavy duty code and the interface layer, and usually work with HTML::Template or Smarty – they work and the penalty for using a separation layer seems to be the smallest possible (at least in a balanced performance/ functionality view).

Providing feedback in user interfaces is quite important. If you have a task, which may take a while, one of the ways to signal to the users, that the system is working, is by displaying a progress bar. If you don’t know how to make one, we do have one available for you.

It should be a surprise, but most companies moving into the internet space doesn’t seem to get the fact that less is more. 37Signals just announced they cut 66% of the features of their next product giving them:

• faster time to market
• a product easier to design
• lower cost of change

It’s really no surprise - right? Yet so many product managers seem to insist that the 100+ pages specification is the product they need in order to bring the product to the market.

A new group has appeared on the net – the PHP Security Consortium (PHPSC). It is an international group of PHP experts dedicated to promoting secure programming practices within the PHP community. Nice. While many PHP developers make sites people are supposed to use and enjoy, few as actual education and experience in how to make secure applications and websites.

Through projects and articles, they’ll try to educate PHP developers.

Apple choose not to do a live feed from Jobs keynote at MacWorld SanFran this time, but with a little delay it’s available online. Some surprises was spoiled ahead, but there was a number of cool introductions – The Mac OS X Tiger, iPod Shuffle (flash player), Mac Mini (headless computer), iWork (office-like suite) and an update to iLife (Moives, Photos and more). I’m still looking for PowerBook updates though. Where are they?

Most developers and programmers know more than one programming language, but often do most of their development in just one language. Listening in on IRC channels on people using something other than their favourite language is often quite interesting. It’s often a common misconception, that their favoured programming language - be that perl, php or java - is the ultimate tool no matter what the challenge is. When they are forced to use something else, a large part of the development process seem dedicated to (a) bitching about how much easier this and that would be in their favoured language and (b) forcing the language they use into looking like their favoured language.

It seems any one can become a self proclaimed internet project manager. It really isn’t so, but if you choose to try your lucky anyway here’s a bunch of tips and insights, which may help you along.

Step one) Know thy domain

Being a project manager requires some domain knowledge. Not always deep insights, but a basic understanding of the elements you encounter - what’s a web browser, what’s DNS, how does HTML look like (raw, unrendered) and so on. To be a capable project manager you must be able to “speak the language”.

I’ve been toying slightly with the design recently, and I just noticed today that it’s pretty obvious that almost any browsing I do happens in Firefox. The site (well top menu anyway) looks awful in Internet Explorer – auch. Better fix that some time in 2005.

It’s been awhile since Stuart Langridge released some cool javascript which allows you t do client-side sorting of tables in an unobtrusive manner. Soon after Andy Edmonds released a merge with a function to made alternating row coloring he had made. Now Caspar has done a little magic and added (cookie) memory to the script – so it remember you most recent sort from visit to visit. The code is in my pre-alpha markup area.

So I thought I did a decent job of cleaning up and recovering the site after the evil crash a few months ago. Browsing through the 404 (file-not-found) logs sadly tells a different story. Damn. I was hoping to be fully recovered by New Years Eve. That’s probably a little too ambitious.