Jeroen Sangers

One of the biggest problems in scripting and programming is escaping quotes. Quotes have a special meaning, they are usually used for specifying the start and end of a string, such as in <abbr title="eXtensible Markup Language">. But what happens when the string between the quotes also contains quotes? …Errors!

There are several ways to prevent this situation. The two most common solutions are escaping the quotes by placing a special symbol in front of it such as " and replacing the quote by its character entity reference &quote;.

Why am I telling this? Well, this morning I was looking at Technorati’s Favorites function, and noticed that something went wrong. When adding a site to your favorites, you have the posibility to attach tags to that site. The instructions for adding tags are clear:

Separate tags with spaces: cooking indian recipes. To join words use double quotes: "san francisco".

But it doesn’t work that way! When I tried to add “point of sale” as a tag

The following happened:

Technorati obviously tried to solve the quoting problem by replacing the quotes, but this change has a nasty side effect. Of course I have contacted Technorati about this issue, and will update this post when they reply.

Only a week after I closed down Brain Links, Brain Links is back, albeit in a more simpler form. Before, each link had its own page, with a description and the possibility to comment on the link (which was rarely used). The new Brain Links is only visible as a linkroll on the sidebar of the main page of Brain Tags.

To power Brain Links, I no longer use Movable Type, but created a new widget that fetches the last ten links from my del.icio.us account. There are no archives, no overview, no categories, no comments,… just ten interesting links.

In case somebody also wants to create a del.ico.us widget, this is the code I used:

<div class=“module-delicious module”> <h2 class=“module-header”>Brain Links</h2> <div class=“module-content”> <a href=“http://del.icio.us/beltza"&gt;my del.icio.us</a> </div> </div>

Insert the code above into a new system template called Widget: del.icio.us linkroll, and add the widget to a widget manager. Do not forget to replace beltza with the name of your del.icio.us account!

After reading the lifehacker desktop blog editor comparison I decided to give performancing for Firefox a try. I am a happy user of Ecto (number three in the comparison), but the performancing editor has WYSIWYG functionality, as well as Technorati and del.icio.us integration.

So I installed the plugin, and am now writing the first post in my new editor. So far I like it. It is easy to use, and it has more than enough functionality.

When its latest stand-alone browser ships in Q4, Microsoft plans to use its patch-distribution mechanism as its primary delivery vehicle. But businesses will be able to control distribution via a Microsoft-provided blocking tool.

Though a new version of the most popular web browser is definitely needed (the rendering engine is more than 6 years old, and there are many security problems) I wonder whether it is a good iedea to push it through the throat of so many people. This is going to lead to a lot of problems.

I am not afraid of websites that suddenly don't look so nice as before or that even stop working. The webmasters of such sites already had the chance to improve that ever since Firefox became popular, and if they still haven't updated their sites they will soon enough as visitors start complaining.

No, the main problem lies in the tight integration with the operating system, and the many third-party applications that make use of IE functionality. Though websites can be updated on a single place to fix the problem for once and ever, this is a lot harder for applications installed on millions of PC's.

A few months ago we have found that some of our applications are incompattible with IE7, giving an ‘Invalid URL format’ error. We quietly started looking for a solution for this problem, expecting that IE7 would be released together with Windows Vista or as an optional download. The announcement that Microsoft is going to push IE7 as an automatic update surely is going to give us some problems, as we are going to have to solve this bug and update all our customers before the end of Q3!

After the succesful redesign of The Wizard of POS, I had gathered some momentum, and continued with the redesign of Brain Tags.

First of all, I reverted back to the basic Movable Type templates, as I had hacked the old templates to a level that made it very difficult to maintain and update. Actually, the latest update to version 3.31 broke my site at several parts.

When all templates were more or lass back to basic, I used the fantastic StyleCatcher plugin to change the look and feel. I selected a style called Make my way from the Movable Type style contest. I know it is not very original, as there mioght be dozens of other blogs using the same style, but it is far better than I ever could make.

This is where it stands now. I still have some minor issues to fix, which will probably be done next week. What do you think about the new Brain Tags?

Since June 2004 I have posted 953 links to interesting, new and funny sites in the Brain Links section of this site. Today I have decided that I will stop adding more links.

I noticed the last months that little by little I am adding less links, and I started to wonder why. I started collecting the Brain Links as a reference site for myself; a place where I could look up those handy sites I saw a month ago. But the reality is that nowadays I hardly look back at all those links. It has literally become a link dump, a black hole for interesting stuff. I guess that subconciously I already figured out that it is not worth the effort anymore.

So exit to Brain Links. Soon I will start remodelling the Brain Tags site, just as I have done with The Wizard of POS, which will probably result in a leaner site that is easier to maintain and update. At that point, the Brain Links will probably disappear completely, though I know that you should not break links..

After the latest release of Movable Type, I wanted to have a look at the new Widget functionality. The result: a redesigned version of The Wizard Of POS:

A few days above 30° and Holland grinds to a halt. I wonder what would happen if they would also have two months of really hot weather…

It has been very quiet on this site, and that usually means that I am working on something. And indeed, I am working on the new site for Fimcap.

Besides that, the temperature in Lleida, almost reaching 40 °, makes that I don’t want to spend too much time behind the PC, but rather stay in the water of the swimming pool. As you might be worried what is going on here, I deceided to write a little bit about the new fimcap site.

We decided to implement the new site using the eZ Publish CMS, which allows for multi-lingual content and custom defined content types. This flexibility of course has a price: a steep learning curve. The basics are quite simple, but problems start when you want to modify templates. You literally can control everything, but you have to find the right template. Each page is made up from dozens of little templates, each of which can reside in several places.

Let me explain that in more detail. If you do a fresh installation, your site is configured to use two sets of templates: standard, which contains some bare-bones unstyled templates that make sure eZ Publish outputs at least something, and base, which adds a little bit of style. Of course, for your own site you want to use your own design, and you can either replace the base design, or add your own design, which is what we did. Now every time a template is called, eZ Publish first looks in the Fimcap design. If it can’t find a template, it will search in the base design, and finally it will fall back to the standard design. So if I want to modify a template, I have to search in that order as well to find the currently used template. After a working for some weeks with the template system, I finally got the hang of it, and am able to find the correct templates quickly…

In case you’re interested in the progress we’re making, have a look at new.fimcap.org.

Our old APS camera has become useless now that we have a brand-new digital camera. It has been lying in a drawer for some weeks now, and I know that I will never use it again. So I decided to sell it before it becomes completely unvaluable.

If you are interested in this camera, you can bid on it on eBay.