Web Coder Plus

Tantek Çelik has written an interesting post on CSS hacks entitled Pandora’s Box (Model) of CSS Hacks And Other Good Intentions. Definitely worth the read.

It is a problem with all kinds of programming, that when people initially start to learn, the idea of the hack is one that has much appeal. Pushing the limits, doing more than can be done normally, seems like such a good idea. Yet the more you hack, the more your applications become unmanageable and at the mercy of external future upgrades. While your validated, non-hack CSS will most likely be supported by browsers way into the future (much longer than it will be needed); those hacks have no such guarantee.
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I ran across this very interesting page detailing a simple way to do AJAX style pages, called AHAH: Asynchronous HTML and HTTP.

Now AJAX has many issues, but most of them are to do with the way people program/design their AJAX applications, rather than the underlying technology. However, the underlying JavaScript that is in any AJAX application often causes complications with browser compatibility, which of course is a major stumbling block with AJAX.

AHAH limits this problem by sending (X)HTML clips directly to the browser, ready to be inserted into the DOM with no additional parsing. This reduces complexity in a number of ways and has the following useful properties:
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PHP 5.1.0 has been released. Some of the key features of this version are:

• A complete rewrite of date handling code, with improved timezone support.
• Significant performance improvements compared to PHP 5.0.X.
• PDO extension is now enabled by default.
• Over 30 new functions in various extensions and built-in functionality.
• Bundled libraries, PCRE and SQLite upgraded to latest versions.
• Over 400 various bug fixes.
• PEAR upgraded to version 1.4.5

The full change log can be found here.

Well it’s now been over a week since Google Analytics was released free to anyone who wanted it, and although they experienced a rough start, they appear to now have it at least sort of under control. No new users can sign up, and existing users cannot currently add new profiles. Thankfully however, I managed to add all the profiles I wanted before the limit was imposed. With the data updating roughly once a day, I have had a chance to look at the results and develop an informed opinion on the usefulness of Google Analytics.

Update Frequency

While many people have complained that the update frequency is terrible and they wouldn’t be willing to use it unless it got closer to real time, I have been surprised at how I stopped missing my up-to-the-minute stats. Until Analytics got released, I used to check my stats far too regularly, and this resulted in me looking at the data in small chunks for short periods of time. This in turn created a situation where I didn’t notice patterns as much as numbers, and if you only have stats as a complicated hit counter, you are missing out on a lot.
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Well I’m taking a long needed holiday, though it won’t be a long as is needed, just this weekend and Monday. So Christa and I are off to a farm far away from civilisation, and my computer…

Hopefully the withdrawal symptoms don’t kill me and I’ll be back Tuesday. Hey maybe Google Analytics will actually be updating more than once every two days by then.