Angus Thinks

Category: Company News

  • Site redesign

    So, if you’ve visited the MalcolmHardie.com site today you’ll have seen the new site design.

    It’s Blue.

    But that’s not all. The layout structure of each page has been substantially changed (for the first time since 2004, I think)
    . The new 2 column design is also wider (960px) and offers more flexibility than the old 3 column design. There are new graphics and section headings and a new about page (with a message from me!).
    The MalcolmHardie logo has been used in a reversed white on blue form, which I think worked out quite well and the main body is black/dark gray 13px Lucida Grande on a white background. (With Verdana as the second choice)

    The content management has also been improved. The whole site is now a sort of wiki. Although it is somewhat static as wikis go. Each web page is now a wiki page that is rendered when necessary to deliver the page. Page expiry dates match the wiki source document expiry and all of the meta-data is cached into a database so that things like recently changed lists can be generated. The next iteration of the system may also cache the text as well.

    Apache is configured to serve the wiki pages only after any existing index pages, so the whole thing can be switched to static html without recoding (if necessary).

    There were several things that I really wanted to do with the re-design.

    The first, obviously, was to get the web2.0 thing going. The first step in the design process was therefore to identify the gradient that I wanted to use. The blue/blue gradient seemed to be a good choice here. Although I didn’t in the end go for reflection or glass effects, several prototypes had glass effects. 😉

    The second was to serve html pages as html pages with a .html extension. Which was achieved (mostly)

    The third thing was to clean up the arrangement of the site, previously there had been a mix of systems used to generate content from an interesting (but probably obsolete) attempt at a php visual class library, through ordinary php to finally plain html. The new wiki style system is consistent across the site. (I’m hoping that this will last)

    Software

    The site is written in php and uses a mysql database (standard, boring even!)

    I used the PEAR Text_Wiki classes to handle the wiki side of things.

    The wiki dialect is Text_Wiki default with extra classes to do php includes and page meta data in the same document.

    Things I hope to improve

    At the moment there are some limitations to the wiki syntax. This means there are more blocks of raw php and html than I want. Eventually I hope to write some more wiki plugins to reduce this

    Another area that could be improved is the concept of relative pages within the site. Currently the wiki links are hierarchical with the full link required each time.

    I’m very interested to know if you like the new design. Feel free to send me email or add a comment below.

  • HTMLValidator 1.0

    HTMLValidator 1.0 is finally released.

    As I write this, it’s been out since Friday, so I guess I’m a bit late in writing this. HTMLValidator 1.0 is identical to HTMLValidator 1.0b8, except of course that it 1) doesn’t expire and 2) asks for registration.

    The first non-beta release seems to have gone reasonably well. People are downloading it, trying it and some are starting to buy it. (If you’re reading this, then thank you!).

    Oddly enough the most difficult thing about the whole thing was making sure that the order processing system could correctly deal with more than one product. We have a system that interfaces with our payment provider and it handles logging orders and generating serial codes. When it was originally written, HTMLValidator didn’t exist, we sold only one product and there wasn’t really a plan to develop others; So there were several areas that assumed that was only one product. The lesson here is to assume that you’re going to expand and plan accordingly.

    Work has already started on the next release of HTMLValidator. The main areas for improvement are speed and memory usage. Plus there are some improvements to validation that the W3C released in their version 0.80 code release that would be nice to have in HTMLValidator. (Which is of course based on the W3C validator).

    If you want to try HTMLValidator then we have a page that tells you all about it.

    [HTMLValidator]

  • HTMLValidator 1.0b3

    A new version of HTMLValidator today. I moved the validation into a separate thread to improve responsiveness. This is also the way that HTMLValidator will be doing multiple page validation. In fact the new release even includes pretty much all of the code necessary to do this, but it doesn’t include the interface yet. The 1.0b3 release actually validates a list of urls, but the list contains only 1 element. The idea is to test that the basic code works as expected before bolting the interface on the top. 🙂

    Also new is a little spinner that spins when the application is doing something, some improvements to error display and handling and a few other fixes here and there. The changelog gives a complete list.

    Next feature is the multiple file validation interface and then probably a 1.0 release.

  • HTMLValidator beta 2

    HtmlValidator beta 2 has just been released. The new version offers assorted fixes and a slightly improved interface (a green tick or red cross now appear in the validation window!)

    There is also a new downloads page which currently offers an Applescript to validate the source of the front page in Safari.

    Usefully it validates the actual source that the browser received, it doesn’t download the url itself.

  • HTMLValidator

    HTMLValidator 1.0b1 has just been released.

    It runs on PowerPC or Intel Macs with Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

    The current version expires 28th February 2007.

    HTMLValidator is a new desktop HTML validator that works on both web pages and files. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while now in between SQLEditor releases. The main motivation is that I often seem to use the W3C validator, but I can’t always do that with files I’m working on locally. I also tried installing the W3C validator on a local web server and although it works, it seems to require a lot of installation effort, with different dependencies. So the idea occurred to me: what if you could have a drag and drop installation. From there came a web version using drag and drop and finally the application bundle version that is being distributed from today.
    The earlier application versions actually displayed the results in an html webview in a window, while the newer releases display the results in a table.

    On the drawing board for future releases are more validation options, the capability to validate multiple pages and the ability to watch pages for changes and then validate. Also better printing and Applescript support (although both of these are present in the current version).

    I’m really interested to know what you think of HTMLValidator so feel free to send in comments, either to me personally Angus [DOT] Hardie [AT] malcolmhardie [DOT] com or to the support [AT] malcolmhardie [DOT] com email address

  • MalcolmHardie Solutions Weblog

    About the new MalcolmHardie Solutions weblog.

    The new weblog will contain posts about SQLEditor and other products.

    If you already reading Angus Thinks you probably don’t need to read the MalcolmHardie weblog as well because all the posts on the MalcolmHardie Solutions weblog will appear on Angus Thinks.

    This mirroring is done using the xmlrpc api and code from the blogger api plugin for wordpress