Raible Designs

Great hints for OS X.

I called the local Apple store tonight to see if they had any Bluetooth USB adapters in stock. They did (sweet). So I cancelled the Mac/PC Bluetooth adapter I've had on order for over 5 weeks from CDW. While on the phone, I asked if the guy if he knew of a way to export my contacts from Outlook XP -> Entourage -> Address Book. He said I should check out www.macosxhints.com. So I did, and with a quick search on Outlook, whalla - I found Outport which allows you to export all your contacts as vCards. Then Apple's Address Book allows you to import vCards - so now all my contacts are synched up. Too bad Entourage doesn't appear to be as easy to synchronize. In fact, the only method seems to be exporting from Outlook as CSV and importing using a script from http://www.applescriptcentral.com/. I guess M$ doesn't want you to migrate anything from Outlook to Entourage - but what if I just want to "share?" I also found some good general hints on using Entourage.

Earlier today, I discovered Inbox Buddy from The FuzzyBlog!. I downloaded and installed in about 30 seconds - very cool - it's working for me so far. It's takes a little while (est. 15 minutes) to setup, but it's nice to see only the important e-mails at the top of your inbox, and all the spam get shoved to the bottom.

I did manage to stop by the Apple Store tonight and pick up the bluetooth usb adapter, and now I can iSynch my T68i with my Address book - I love it!

Cool Roller Theme.

I spotted a new Roller theme this morning at PSQuad's Corner. I found this via Dave's post, whic mentions that some people are not happy with Roller. For not liking Roller, it seems that Pat has put some time into customizing it - or is this a theme that freeroller.net provides? The CSS even validates! Too bad the html doesn't.

Buying a Digital Camera?

If you're considering the purchase of a new digital camera, you might want to read this article from PC Magazine. The Editors' Choice winners are:

For $300: Nikon Coolpix 2500
For $500: Fujifilm Finepix F601 Zoom

I'm planning on buying one in the next few months for the arrival of the little one. Hopefully this article will make my decision easier - more research needed.

Struts vs. Java Server Faces.

From www.theserverside.com:

Many have have wondered at what the future holds for Struts, now that an early access release of JavaServer Faces is available. Craig McClanahan, JSF Spec Lead and Lead Architect for Struts has recently commented on the subject. Craig is working on an integration library for JSF and Struts 1.1 that will allow migration to JSF without major code changes to existing struts apps. [ Craig's email on Struts + JSF integration ]

I'm smack dab in the middle of a major time crunch on my current project, or I'd review the above article and post my opinion. Maybe in the next few days.

Bad Search Engine URLs.

As I learned in the last session I attended today, this site has bad search engine URLs. For instance, I used to have my entry page (home.jsp) defined as:

<%
response.sendRedirect("page/rd");
%>

The problem with this is that the search engine sees the redirect and goes, uh oh, a redirect - that's bad, and may fail to index your site. Check out what a search engine sees via Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer. So I changed it to use a little JSTL:

<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/c.tld" prefix="c" %>

<c:import url="http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd"/>

I've found this to be a little better as this site shows up as http://www.raibledesigns.com/home.jsp rather than http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd. However, it still doesn't seem to work well with the HTTP Viewer I referred to above. When I type http://www.raibledesigns.com into it, Tomcat returns an HTTP 302 error saying "this page has temporarily moved to http://.../home.jsp - so I think Tomcat might need to work on it's <welcome-file-list> to just forward directly to the page. If anyone has any other solutions, please let me know.

Pop Quiz: What's the easiest way to get "http://www.raibledesigns.com" into my c:import tag? request.getSchema() + request.getServerName?

Yesterday's Web Builder Notes.

OK, I'm not going to review every session that I attend because I don't want to end up with the awful feeling I got yesterday. So I think I'll just write about the sessions I actually learned something from. I'm not connected right now, and I'm typing in Dreamweaver instead, so maybe this is my new blogger client. This is probably the best client I could use now that I think of it. Noteworthy: I've seen more browser crashes on Mac's (OS X) this week than on Windows. So far, 2 browser crashes (my Mozilla debacle and IE) and one Windows BSOD.

Building, Testing, and Debugging Client-Side Web Applications by Porter Glendinning was probably my favorite. He was a pretty good presenter, but I was more impressed by his knowledge of the DOM and the demos he showed (might not be posted yet). My two favorite demo's where (1) showing how to do client-side sorting with DOM-compliant browsers and (2) how to do remote scripting using a javascript's "src" attribute. To do client-side sorting, you basically take all the rows in a <tbody> (note-to-self: start using <thead> and <tbody> tags in tables) to sort and reverse by clicking on the table heading. I hope to add this to the display tag library when the browser is capable. I think this could be fairly easy by building in a dom-compliant sniffer, doing it client-side if capable, otherwise passing it back to the server since this functionality already exists. I just hope Porter's demo works on the latest IE/Mozilla on Win/Mac - otherwise, all this motivation will die quickly.

Low-Cost Web Site Traffic Generation by Barbara Coll from WebMama.com. This lady was a great presenter and I became quite motivated to attempt to increase my search engine rankings for this site. Did you know that search engines hardly even look at the "keywords" meta tag anymore? Good to know. The most important areas for keywords now are (1) your domain name, (2) the title of your site (notice I changed mine from "Raible Designs · v2.0") and (3) the names of your directories and files. Maybe I should add a bunch of symlinks (i.e. j2ee-development, web-applications, struts, etc.) that point to my homepage. Not a bad idea. Other things I hope to implement are:

1. Add a sitemap (should be at the root of your site) - maybe a good Roller feature?
2. Add 404/500 pages - I hope no one is getting these, but if they are, I've got to still help them out.
3. Shrink the content between my <head> tags. Who knows how deep those bots go.
4. Add a menu at the bottom of the site. My top-right menu is kind of inconspicuous. This brings up a couple things I'd like to see in Roller:
   • The ability to hide the login/logout links - I think this is in progress. I'd actually like to hide it for everyone but me, maybe checking for the "username" and comparing it to the user would work.
   • Hiding the link for the page you're currently viewing. No need to show the "About" link when I'm on the About page.
   • The ability to change the delimiter from | to other text or an image, for instance, · might be a good one (this is · for those wondering).
5. Registering my site with dmoz.org. Barbara actually recommended registering with a new search engine everyday.

And as you all probably already know, the best way to get higher rankings is to pay for them. Here is the full presentation which has some good stats on most popular search engines and stuff. Basically, most traffic is coming from Yahoo ($299) and Google ($0).

Roller Bug Tracking

has moved from SourceForge to JIRA . I used JIRA a couple of times today and it's a way cool interface and very easy to use. Nice job Atlassian and Mike! I've used Bugzilla a lot in the past, and briefly looked at Scarab, both of which are free. I like Bugzilla a lot, but it can be a little intimidating to setup and use for the first time. As soon as you get that first 1/2 hour over with, you're good to go. It's always nice to learn new products, but with JIRA's price tag of $800, I doubt I'll ever get to use this beyond Roller. However, if it's good - I'll recommend it to my clients and maybe I can get some kickbacks ;-)

Roller 0.9.5 is Released!

From the Roller Development mailing list:

This new Roller release includes some enhancements to XHTML support, bookmark management, database support for PostgreSQL and HSQL-DB, and some bug fixes. Thanks to new Roller contributors Lance Lavandowska, Matt Raible, Simon Stewart for their work on this release. New features:

* Support for XHTML and CSS in generated weblog pages (Matt)
* Better Page URLs in the Navigation Bar Tag and PageServlet (Lance)
* Support for HSQL and PostgreSQL databases (Lance and Simon)
* Export feature for backing up website (Dave)
* Bookmark import by file-upload of OPML file (Dave)
* Multiple bookmark move and delete on edit-bookmark page (Dave)
* Some bug fixes

Download it here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=47722&release_id=108217. Thanks to Dave and everyone else for getting this release out. I'll attempt an upgrade on this site this weekend. Maybe I'll even add a little footer with the version number so you'll know if I succeeded.

A good story.

A friend of mine, Cliff Nellis, is riding his bike across America for charity and fun. He left last weekend, and had an opportunity to send us (friends) an e-mail today.

Towing 50 pounds of gear, the heat, no clouds, no shade, no breeze, running out of food and water with 15 miles left, and ending with one climb after another heading west into Walsenburg proved to be a test to say the least. FOUR miles outside of Walsenburg, I finally passed a house, and even though there was only four miles left, I knew I had to stop for some water. The lady was really nice...gave me some cold water and a popcycle. Still those last four miles were tough. I completely BONKED.

It was very enjoyable for me to read, so I asked him if I could share it. He said sure - [ full story ].

From Denver, I will bike to San Diego, and from San Diego, I will bike across the southern coast to Miami, FL. The total distance covered will be roughly 4,600 miles. On the way, I will bike through some of the areas that have been hit by wildfires this summer. I will pitch a tent at campgrounds most nights. I will carry my gear in a one-wheel B.O.B., which is essentially a trailer for a bicycle. I am excited to bike through many scenic parts of the country, including Moab, Lake Powell, the Grand Canyon, Lake Mead, the Mojave Desert, and the Rocky Mountains. I also look forward to biking through major cities, such as Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Houston, Mobile, Biloxi, Orlando, and Miami. Mostly, I look forward to meeting the people. On a previous cross-country bicycle trip, I found that the people make the trip. If all goes well, I am registered to compete in the Great Floridian Ironman on October 19, 2002, in Clermont, FL. [ Website ]

XDoclet and Struts Validator

From the struts-dev list and Erik Hatcher:

My XDoclet Struts Validator validation.xml (for Struts 1.1) has been posted to the XDoclet tracker.
I'm hoping it will be added to the codebase and put into the upcoming new release of XDoclet (although I'm using XDoclet from CVS builds). Read the HTML file attachment on the issue page above for an example of how it works. If you're hand-coding validation.xml and using ValidatorForm extensions then this is for you!

I can't wait to use XDoclet in my next project! On my current project, I've already written most of the ValidationForms I need. I used the Generator package to do this, but I hope to either (1) refactor my current project to use Castor/XDoclet like Roller, or (2) use it on my next project.

I ordered an Ant book this evening in hopes of learning a lot more about Ant. I think I know a lot, but there's always room for more knowledge.