I’ve been busy hacking away on a script which would read the XMLTV format and pour it into a mysql database. It’s fun but nothing is quite as easy as it should be. I’ve rediscovered it once again. I had never before tried to parse XML data from Perl, but a quick google visit suggested it should be a breeze as everyone else seems to do it. I haven’t done my homework and really figured out what the various differences between the many methods you can parse XML is – so I basically found a few examples and picked the one the example used (XML::Parser) that.

There are quite a large number of tools available for testing and checking a website, but the most valuable is (without doubt) the Web Page Analyzer – as it does tell (and help) you optimize your site in ways you may not have thought of. I am assuming that the site in question is either valid HTML (as any good site should be) or at least tested and found working in the browsers it should work in. The tool is for the “post design” process.

If you’re php developer you should check out php | architect. It a monthly magazine aimed at PHP developers and actually quite good. It used to come in PDF-format only, but has recently also launched a dead trees version. It’s a nice mixture of tips, software reviews, interviews and programming techniques. While all articles isn’t equally interesting, it is certainly well worth the US$2.09 which the PDF-version cost. A free copy available from their site.

Now usually spam is evil, annoying and a bloody pain. It does however have rare moments of actual usefulness. On an average day my mailbox seems to be stormed by more than two hundred spam mails from just about every where on the planet. Thanks to server-side filters combined with mozillas learning filters, they all seem to disappear into a consolidated spambox. I can check the box (too look for any false positives), and if the box hasn’t gotten any new mail for more than an hour, something is most likely wrong in my mail setup.

In Denmark most of the major websites are members of the FDIM - the Association of Danish Internet Media - and thanks to this association there’s a weekly hit list which provides a comparable overview of the traffic and users on Danish websites. An article (in Danish) at Vertical made an interesting observation - on the Internet function, not content, is king.