Raible Designs

A little cold for a golf tournament.

Change the entire look and feel of your site with CSS

Dave Shea of Mezzoblue recently unveiled his CSS Zen Garden, intended to demonstrate how CSS can be used to present the same content in beautifully different ways. Dave was inspired by Chris Casciano's similarly experimental Daily CSS Fun and the recent Hack Hotbot contest. Currently, one or two of Dave's layouts display incorrectly in Safari, but they work perfectly just about everywhere else, and Safari workarounds are apparently in the works. [Zeldman]

The CSS Zen Garden rocks IMO!

Linkbacks are on!

I was wondering where my linkbacks went - and I figured it out this morning! They have to be enabled with the latest version of Roller - I believe they were on by default in the 0.9.7.1 release.

Formatting Comments Correctly

You can see from Matt's comments on my last post that my handy-dandy comments feature is not formatting comments correctly. Basically, if you put a line break in the textarea below (by pressing return), there should be a line break (<br />) in the rendered comment. The reason this is broken seems to be because the following Velocity code doesn't seem to be functioning correctly:

#set($content = $comment.content)
#if($escapeHtml)
    #set($content = $utilities.escapeHTML($content))
#end
#if($autoformat) 
    #set($content = $stringUtils.replace($content,"\n","<br />"))
#end

You'll notice that it's not working on my in-page comments either. But it is working for the pop-up comments. However, the pop-up one is doing the StringUtils.replace in Java code, rather than Velocity. Hopefully someone will have a tip for me to fix this.

How to control access with Jabber?

So know that I've got a password-embedding scheme worked out for e-mail and moblogger, I have to figure out a way to do something similar with Jabber. Currently, in what I have working, there is no password verification, but it is needed. It's necessary to prevent just any-old-Joe from posting to your weblog. Of course, they'd have to know the username for your blog IM user (this listens for new posts), but it probably wouldn't be hard to figure out. My first thought is to have the password as the first part of the message, and then the message after that. For instance:

mypassword / Here is the rest of my post

I'd suggest doing this in the subject, but the problem with this is that you can send an IM without a subject, and I still want posts to succeed even if there's no subject (a.k.a. title). So whaddya think - would you be willing to type "password / rest of your IM" everytime to wanted to post to your weblog via IM?

BTW, the new server seems to be holding up quite nicely, eh?

I dig the redesign...

... going on over at Surfin' Safari (Dave Hyatt's weblog). Very clean and professional, with a bit of beauty mixed in.