Connections

With all the 'Web 2.0' services come 'Friends'. They aren't necessarily people you've met face-to-real-face or even people you might want to ever meet, but the standard phraseology appears to be 'friends' nonetheless. Today, therefore, I added some new friends to my Twitter stream and to my Blogroll. Some of them by seeing who had 'friended' me and others on the recommendation of others. An interesting web of connections gets created by all these relationships, meaningless in many ways but indicative of levels of interest anyway. Yesterday's creation of a short-url service has resulted in my updating my ReadTwitter module to recognise links in a twitter post and convert it to a link. The new version will be available for download later today.

Another module

Say hello to another Chyrp module, 'ReadTwitter'. Last week I added in the — JavaScript — code as made available by Twitter to download items from your feed and display them on your site. Thing is, I personally often have scripting locked out on security grounds and I'm sure others do too. Taking into account that Twitter's code also includes the personal replies I make to other people in addition to my own posts and I realised I needed to write some code that would do the retrieve and display code on my server. Hence ReadTwitter! It retrieves the feed, disposes of the direct replies and caches the results (meaning that if Twitter is unavailable the 'latest' still is). Because I'm still not happy with the stability of Chyrp 2.0 RC2 yet, this module, like all of mine released so far, is presently for RC1 installations only.

DOCTYPE

One can make good arguments about when to be 'Transitional' and when to be 'Strict' and whilst ever site should be one or t'other which one you should aim for is sometimes like asking to you prefer the American league or the National league^†: they are both great, but slightly different. Anyway, after developing for the last week or so it was time to hit the W3C validators and get the XHTML and CSS which provide this site to validate cleanly. Getting to 'Transitional' didn't take too long, thankfully, even though the usual "you have 400+ errors" is a little startling at first (as per usual they boil down to a couple of dozen simple things that are repeated) and the CSS about another half-hour. Getting to 'Strict' though, well, that was more of a major task, requiring quite a bit of re-writing both in the modules I've written but also in the main sections of the site. Anyway, it is now *perfect*. Well, it meets the standards, anyway. A bit more work to do though, maybe, on some of the ideas I've been working on … ^† Major League Baseball - let's hear it for Redsox nation!