Vim configuration Tips

Not many of you’d be using Vi, I even try to use it in Win32 System. Without doubt its one of my favourite editors even though if I know only 1% about it.

The vim config file is generally placed in your home directory “~” or “/home/username”

Tidy-ing your XML, HTML

If you ever wonder how would you get your messy XML and HTML well-formatted, Here is the whizard, Tidy tidy is a small but very effective tool written by Dave Raggett.

Tidy can clean, indent XML and HTML data very effectively.

tidy -mi -xml file-name

XML-RPC, SOAP, REST

Hmm, Remote Procedure Call, Simple Object Access Protocol, Representational State Transfer, etc. are all major methods of accessing a sytem, resources which are not locally accessible to you (Provided they are made available).

Consider the famous Google Search Data, What if you want to have all the database access (search results) for your system. How would you use that even if google could give you access to the resource.

URLs

Take a look at the address bar on your browser, And you’ll see a wonderful URL. What is the reason for WordPress.org to have such a long URL.

From a developer’s point of view, it is enough to pass the auto increment id of the post to the page as index.php?postid=23 or something like it.

CMS Tool Requirements

Content Management System, Phew! a big phrase for Insert, Update and Delete !

There are many, rather endless lists of CMS tools that are available freely on the web. Most of them offering a wide variety of features, from simple blog-type, to advanced Menu systems and modules.

My primary focus is the Web. What should you look into a software for CMS ?

Ajax Mistakes

If you haven’t read it here it is Ajax Mistakes

The important point, that we MUST take note.

When calling for a Document, Page, etc. Its best to use a URL (A unique Identifier for that document). Its the way the web is structured. Try using Apache’s mod_rewrite to make the URL readable. DO NOT FETCH SUCH DOCUMENTS WITH AJAX.

Sessions

“Session” as the term suggests is time-period when the client is interacting with the server.

HTTP however is a stateless protocol. i.e. Every request that goes to the Server is treated as a new request from a new client. So to glue the sessions funda with HTTP, the Scripting languages have to come up with something with which it can track the clients.

Multiple Domain Logins

Wonder how your login to mail.yahoo.com makes you logged into my.yahoo.com ?
It’s game of give and take with cookies.

Long Scrolling Blogs

Since the blogging frenzy has started, What I have observed is that the pages of the blogs are too big (At least the frequently blogged ones)

They have atleast 5-10 times the page content that they can see in a view. This is wrong. I feel WordPress.org and blogspot.com should update their softwares to show maximum 10 posts per page. And they should (by default) try to make a “more” like link for each posts if the post is more than 10 lines or so.

This will also help bloggers, blog readers from countries where Internet connection is premium to save their bandwidth for unrelated content.

RSS Feeds

What on earth is this RSS ? Rational Security Service ? what is it ? That was a question that I had around a year back or so. But now its clear.

RSS is nothing but standard XML data. But what does it stand for ? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, which came from a structure of defining a resource. RSS was defined so that the user, client can read any resource available without browsing the particular site. Be it news website, a blog site, a technical resource site, etc. The idea was to syndicate or deliver the content in other manner than the web page.

And then comes the “baaap” (Father) of data structuring format, XML
You may have come across something like this

The orange icon in Firefox notifies that the current website has an RSS feed, or the user can alternatively fetch the content from RSS feed.