Essays…

Thu Aug 25

It’s long, I won’t tell a lie, but it’s worth it. This essay by Paul Graham sets out some of the advantages of web applications over traditional desktop software, likening it to the last time there was a major revolution in software back in 1975 when a bloke called Bill Gates decided to start a little company.

In that essay he talks about the need for a simple, powerful, open source and free browser before web applications can truly go universal. That browser, I believe, is Firefox. The article was written in 2001, and it’s great to see how so many of the pieces Paul believed would need to be in place before the moving of software to the web could take place are there. Broadband, open browsers, sensible JavaScript support, more advanced display techniques and much more.

It’s a great read, and I’ll be working my way through his other articles shortly, especially the ones about startups.

(Honourable nods of the head to Kottke, who linked to this essay from his own treatise on the future of the web. That’s also well worth a read, and I may well be putting my thoughts down here about Google very soon.)

Jumping on the bandwagon…

Wed Aug 24

Well, everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I? (I know an album nearly called that).

One of the biggest and most influential web design magazines has had a facelift, courtesy of golden boy Jason Santa Maria. It’s nice, very nice. Understated and classy, easy to navigate and only a snip away from validating perfectly.

However there are a few points that make it really special to me. Firstly is the hover underlines on titles - how do they get it to look so neat, multi-line titles underlines don’t cross over each other! Great stuff. Secondly there’s the fantastic use of serif fonts (as someone said recently, “serif is the new sans”). And thirdly, you need at least 1024×768 resolution to view it. That, to my mind, is another large nail in the coffin of 800×600.

Easy multi-word searching…

Mon Aug 22

This SQL thing just keeps on getting better. After looking at the link I provided in my last post, I though that I could do something like that but which uses multiple tables and/or search words. Not particularly hard, I know, but very useful when it comes to databases that may or may not have full-text searching enabled.

Here’s the code:

select title, keywords
, (
ISNULL((len(title) - len(replace(title,’search1′,”))) / len(’search1′),0) +
ISNULL((len(keywords) - len(replace(keywords,’search1′,”))) / len(’search1′),0) +
ISNULL((len(title) - len(replace(title,’search2′,”))) / len(’search2′),0) +
ISNULL((len(keywords) - len(replace(keywords,’search2′,”))) / len(’search2′),0) +
0
) as occ
from table_name
Where
title like ‘%search1%’ or keywords like ‘%search1%’
Or
title like ‘%search2%’ or keywords like ‘%search2%’
order by occ desc

As you can see, it is pretty easy to use some simple string concatenation to loop a number of search words, and even loop several search fields as well. I will probably end up using this method to provide much better quality search results in almost every database search script I write. However there may well be a better way to do this, let me know if you use something different.

More SQL goodness…

Mon Aug 22

Searching for some code to help me provide better searches of a database, I found this little gem. For single-word searches it’s pretty useful, and it works with SQL Server and MySQL.

Out and about (19:45 pm)…

Sun Aug 21

Memories, eh? Wonderful things. Like Keith describing Christian music as “the sweepings up from underneath Barry Manilow’s piano.” Classic :0)