mysiteonline™

While using Mon.itor.us to monitor the uptime of my websites' uptime, their IM messaging has not worked for me for quite some time now. They offer SMS messages for a fee as an alternative, but that's no fun considering it costs me $0.15 per SMS as it is. I just came across Pingie, a FREE service that will send an SMS to your phone when it encounters new posts from any feed. Lo and behold, Mon.itor.us provides an alerts feed. Yay.

Pingie.com

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

While using PHP5, almost everyone knows that SimpleXML is the easiest class to utilize when absorbing data from an XML source (be it XML, Atom, RSS, etc...). But, there are instances where things aren't as smooth as one would hope. I was reading in some RSS feeds from WeatherBug the other day, and was all fine and dandy, until I came to an annoying little snippet of code within the feed.
<![CDATA[ <description><img src="http://deskwx.weatherbug.com/images/Forecast/icons/cond077.gif" align="left" hspace="7" vspace="2" alt="" /> Winter storm watch in effect from late Thursday night through Friday evening. <br /><a href=" http://web.live.weatherbug.com/forecast/forecast.aspx?zcode=z4641&zip=12866&units=0"> 7 Day Forecast</a> <br /></description> ]]>

When I got to that data, SimpleXML couldn't retrieve it. When I did a dump of the entire feed, SimpleXML expressed the description tags as being empty. Ok...so how the heck can we get at it?

It's much simpler than one would expect. You forcibly convert the value of that field to a string. That's it.
$desc = (string) trim($feed->channel->item[0]->description);

The annoyingly difficult thing about this, is that I knew I wouldn't be able to figure it out on my own, and the PHP docs didn't help with that one. I went to Google, and that took a few tricky searches to find what I needed too!

Source: Using SimpleXML to Parse RSS Feeds

Tip: That link also shows how to traverse different namespaces, just in case your RSS or XML sources use namespaces, which the last time that happened I used a DOMDocument object, which was a little more work than necessary. I wish I knew this back then!

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I know I've read this article about 10 times over, and yet I always seem to keep forgetting about it. Everyone always suggests, "in order to keep a floated image from floating over its containing box, add a 1px DIV, or BR tag that uses a style of clear:both". This is what I always remember, simply because it's the most prevalent solution.

However, thanks to my CSS love in Paul O'Brien at SitePoint, there's a much, much simpler solution. Apply overflow:auto; to the containing element. That's all there is to it. I love that man!

Source: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/02/26/simple-clearing-of-floats/

Continue reading "Simple Solution for Encapsulating a Floated Image"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

OpenID, a way for website visitors to easily identify themselves without giving up personal information, has been adopted by Yahoo, and one of Yahoo's subdivisions in Flickr. If you own an account at any Yahoo or Flickr site (mail.yahoo.com, Geocities, Flickr, Yahoo! Stocks, etc...), you can now use these accounts as an OpenID server!

What's this mean, exactly? Well, I won't get in to the technical details (or the "cool" factor), but it means, to me, that most likely other competing companies (Microsoft, Google, and a few more) will be jumping in on the bandwagon to provide OpenID (and hopefully OpenAuth) functionality. Microsoft's Live database would be easily used for this, and we all know the think tank at Google will have this soon enough - I'm actually surprised Yahoo! beat Google to the punch.

Regardless, this is good news all around.

Source: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/009856.html

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I've been rather quiet on my blog for the past few months, and I might be for the next few as well. The reasoning is simply because I haven't had a whole lot of interesting things to talk about, I've mostly been designing and redesigning our "new" website's look and feel. I've been quite embarrassed to tell people where I work simply because the website was not of my own creation and did not reflect my talents. As I am a one man band here (except for PC repair and networking, my boss does that and I assist him), I do graphic work, design, programming, cost/benefit analysis, future planning/research for technology, and a slew of other mindless yet time consuming things -- I haven't been able to work through this as quickly as I had envisioned. Not only that, but getting a consensus in a new design, knowing that everyone deciding on it had liked it (and not just thought that anything is better than our current design) was a difficult task. I'm still having trouble getting any help on actual content...due to this fact, it's more of a visual redesign than an overhaul, which is quite unfortunate.

Regardless, since I'm itching to show off the website, I'll give a small treat in its place...

Continue reading "Coming to a Library Near Me!"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski