Wow, I whole year has passed by since I first fired up this Website. And in that timeframe I also added blogZero, which more or less obsoletes this news and announcements area. So, for more information on this anniversary I recommend you visit the Happy Birthday loadaverageZero! post there.

Oops! I completely forgot tonight is the Blue Moon. I'm an idiot. Some links: Blue Moon on blogZero. My Web-based calendar for August, 2005 and some details on how the moon phase data is implemented via dbrowse: Moon Phase Data.

Well, I broke down and installed some PHP-based blogging software. I've been planning on writing the thing myself, but haven't had the time lately. I probably will someday soon, when I get fed up with the quirks and incompatibilities of the existing systems. For the time being, I'm evaluating and using Serendipity, aka s9y. It's pretty slick actually, the installation is straightforward and the backend is easy to use. It has whole a slew of plugins, and uses CSS and Smarty templates so you can hack it to bits if you want to. Being a tweaker myself, this is already well on course.

If you are sorely missing being at OSCON like I am, in addition to all the regular bloggers I keep track of, Event Blogging Services has an aggregation of many others you can check out online, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Perhaps the terms "aggregator," "autodiscovery," and "feed" are part of your daily lexicon, but I am to understand that as few as 10% of Web users even know what RSS is or what to do with those orange XML chicklets. And worse, clicking on one usually results in a page full of confusing source code or the browser prompting you to download the file. These are not good results for visitors that are new to RSS. So, even though the target audience of loadaverageZero are Web developers, who presumably understand RSS well enough, I felt it was important to author a document that describes RSS in layman's terms, and explains how visitors can subscribe to my feeds.

I kind of like chocolate myself, but this is good too. If you've ever installed phpBB, or looked at it from the perspective of modern Web development, then you know that despite its many features, it falls short when it comes to standards and CSS support. It's also a PITA to install and configure to get it running the way you want it. This morning I installed Vanilla, from Mark O'Sullivan of Lussumo. I had it working and tweaked in less than an hour.

In one delightful afternoon, the pagerank for Web Developer Resource Index (drx) shot from nil to six. The gods at Google sure work in mysterious (and goofy) ways. Now, I'm not sure who should be more pleased with this turn of events, me (as a reward for all the hard work I put into it), or the 700-odd pages I'm reviewing, rating and linking to. I guess some basic arithmetic answers that question.

Over the past few days I've been pondering my next addition to the drx database, because, as a sort of mini-milestone, the author I have selected will mark the 500th contributor to the list. My guidelines are already pretty strict, but this one had to be something special. Well folks, Basecamp is it. After using it for about a week now, my conclusion is this: Basecamp is slick, there is no doubt about it.

And hopefully it isn't the sound of chainsaws. Two big events are right around the corner. If design is your gig, then plan on attending WebVisions 2005, taking place at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. If you're an Open Source/Web developer, then maybe you should hold out until August, when OSCON 2005 will be rolling in the same location. Sadly, I can't make either one. If I had my druthers, I'd make a beeline for OSCON with the singled-minded goal of meeting Larry Wall and shaking his hand. Maybe someday he'll take me for a ride in that old Datsun.

I am pleased to announce that I have accepted an invitation to join the staff of Digital Web. It seems that Cal Henderson is rather busy these days, with a little thing called Flickr. Nick has assured me Cal remains the lead programmer (it is his system after all), and hopefully he will be able to continue his role at DWM when things cool off for him a bit. In the meantime, I will be working on the database backend, and the software that drives the front end.

You will find many Firefox Extensions listed in drx, and they are located in almost as many categories. The goal of this page is to consolidate the best of them into one view in order to demonstrate this diversity. There are hundreds of other fine examples that are not listed here. The ones that are have been selected because they are focused on Web development, like the rest of drx.

By popular demand, I have authored this document to help loadaverageZero visitors understand how the dnews application was built with MagpieRSS, PHP and MySQL. If you are comfortable with these open-source tools, then you should have no problem grasping the logic from reading the source code. I will provide links to the code and data as I describe how they work together to build the interface. There are only two simple MySQL tables that make up the backend of the dnews application: news, from which the "channel selector" menu is built, and feed, which holds some details about each RSS channel. The two are bound together by a foreign key.

Since drx is comprised of only high quality Web Developer resources, this list really is the Best of the Best. In no particular order, other than alphabetically. A tooltip for each review link will reveal the category for that resource. Also included are a complete list of the matching categories, and a "cloud" which displays tags ranked by the number of resources matched. Enjoy!

In my ongoing quest to demonstrate how the resources I review using the drx application are both pragmatic and worthwhile, I present RSS News feeds for Web Developers from several sources and in several categories.

If you thought I wouldn't do it, you were living in denial. That's right folks, just when you thought I'd indexed drx to death, comes drx/tag. Complete with a silly tag cloud and all. But this has very little to do with so-called "social bookmarking", since I'm the only tagger (so far). What it has much more to do with is controlled vocabularies, or cross-referencing the resources. Examples are good: instantly find all Firefox extensions no matter what category they're in. I personally think this feature almost makes drx/search unnecessary. Enjoy.

I would like to take a few moments this morning to apologize to my visitors for the downtime I've been experiencing in the past couple of days. In the wee hours of the morning two days ago, my hosting company initiated a planned infrastructure upgrade, which is just a fancy way of saying they were moving some fiber around.

After spending an hour or so yesterday studying the hReview specification on the Technorati developer Wiki, I quickly came to the conclusion that drx is well suited for testing the new microformat. Since in essence drx is a categorized list of reviews (although I prefer to describe them as resources), and because of the modular nature of the application and its inherent metadata design, I had no trouble adapting it to the first draft of the hReview spec.

New features for drx! Easily find Web developer resources in over 60 different categories. Now with author, category, title and domain indexing. Also added other exciting features: recent additions and search (in beta).

Hey! You got your chocolate in my peanut butter! (You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!) Remember that old Reese's commercial? Contributing author Doug Clifton offers a new take on two great things that go great together: CSS and PHP. His article, "Generating Dynamic CSS with PHP," shows you how to sweeten your peanut butter presentation layer with a little wholesome PHP.

dbrowse allows the user to examine a wide variety of information about a MySQL database including a list of tables, each table structure, properties and metadata, keys and indexing, records in each table, and the server status, variables and threads.

Groundwork. An introduction to the Web site with News and Announcements.

For visitors who would like a better understanding of loadaverageZero, there is a wealth of information located on this page. For programmers and developers interested in automating lengthy technical documents, read the Abstract, the Table of Contents and view the PHP source code and the resulting XHTML.

A series of labs describing the process of building modular, structured and valid XHTML Web pages using the PHP server-side scripting language.

A series of labs describing the concepts and details of using CSS to separate document structure and content from page layout and presentation.

An excellent compliment to the relaunch of SitePoint Reference, this FireBug extension adds quick access to HTML and CSS documentation. The search as you type feature is handy, and the results include code examples. JavaScript is MIA as of this writing.

The relaunch of SitePoint Reference is welcome back indeed. HTML, CSS, and a brand new JavaScript section by "Brothercake," are all covered in-depth, the interface is clean and easy to navigate, and the content is thorough and well written. Nice work SP.

Provides abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, themeable widgets. Built on top of the jQuery JavaScript library, you can use it to build highly interactive Web applications. Hosted by Google Code Ajax API.

Selenium is a suite of tools to automate Web application testing across many platforms. Primarily, it is a Firefox extension that records an interactive user session with your application. You can then play back this session to observe the user's actions.

The wiki engine behind the Trac SCM Project. Also written in Python, is based largely on MoinMoin and other popular wikis. Built on top of the Genshi templating engine, it is extensible through macros and other plugins, as is the rest of the Trac system.

An advanced, yet simple to install and easy to use, wiki engine written in Python. There are a number of ready to install extensions, or you can roll your own if you know some Python. The markup language is also easy to use, an all-around great package.

An enhanced, open-source interactive Python shell and an architecture for exploratory parallel computing. Includes features for object introspection, system access, and its own special command system for adding functionality when working interactively.

An excellent source code syntax highlighting package written in Python and thus designed for Python applications, although the latter is not a requirement. It supports a wide range of languages and markup formats, and new languages are easily added.

A Gnome frontend to GnuPG. It integrates with Nautilus, Gedit and other places for encryption operations. You can create and manage PGP and SSH keys, publish and retrive keys from key servers, cache your passphrase, backup your keys and keyring, and more.

A Firefox extension that adds an interface to encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of text in any Web page using GnuPG. FireGPG supports Gmail and detects PGP blocks in any page (for example a publickey), and lets you easily manage these blocks.

Gnu Privacy Guard is a free command-line implementation of the OpenPGP standard. GnuPG allows you to encrypt and sign your email and data files, it features a versatile key managment system as well as access modules for all kinds of publickey directories.

OpenPGP is the most widely used email encryption standard in the world. It is defined by the OpenPGP Working Group of the IETF Proposed Standard RFC 4880. It was originally derived from PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), first created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991.

There are countless character entity sites out there, and I sometimes forget which one(s) I prefer. This Firefox extension eliminates that issue. Simply open it from the Tools menu and start typing the name or code point and you get a list of matches.

Have a programming question or just want to show off your own expertise? Stack Overflow is a free question and answer site where developers collaborate and help solve each other's problems. Part wiki, part forum, part blog, it's an interesting concept.

First developed for the Trac issue tracking system, Genshi is a Python templating system. Featuring automatic escaping, multiple markup output formats, and if you don't need all the power of the full-blown engine, a simple text-based template language.

Wikitext is the markup language used by the MediaWiki system, which was originally developed for Wikipedia and is now distributed as a sophisticated open-source wiki platform. The language should look familiar, however MediaWiki is a complex wiki package.

A document markup language and preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Used mostly in academia, it's widely known for marking up sophisticated mathematical expressions. TeX was developed by Donald Knuth, if you don't know who that is go away.

An easy-to-read, plain text markup syntax and parser system. It is useful for in-line program documentation (such as Python docstrings), for quickly creating simple Web pages, and for standalone documents. reStructuredText is the engine behind Docutils.

The markup language used by the Texpattern CMS/Blogware package. I'm beginning to wonder when someone is going to try and unify and standardize these languages. Many of them are very similar, it seems silly to have to remember slightly different syntax.

FireBug has become an application within an application, and just like its big daddy Firefox, FireBug supports extensions. The latest addition, from the creator of jQuery, does just what you think it would: brings unit testing to JavaScript development.