Mokka mit Schlag » Software Development

I noticed this morning that the main World of Warcraft site is indeed raw XML styled with XSLT. They’re serving straight XML directly to browsers. It appears to be mostly well-formed HTML (but not XHTML) wrapped up inside a custom page element.

I’m not quite sure why they’re doing this. It seems like an extra burden just for a different root element, but maybe the stylesheet does a little more. Hmm, looks like they’re using XSLT as a client-side templating language. Not bad. Saves them bandwidth and server-side processing I expect.

Interestingly the HTML includes some JavaScript. JavaScript inside XML didn’t used to work, even after a transformation to HTML. I’m guessing at least some browsers have gotten smarter about that.

My PHP error logs are filling up with errors like this one:

[05-May-2007 06:11:56] PHP Notice: Undefined variable: livePreviewDivAdded in /var/www/thecafes/wp-content/plugins/live-comment-preview.php on line 24

so I decided to see if I could fix it. I think the problem is this line:

$livePreviewDivAdded == false;

I’m using this post to test that.

I guess Microsoft didn’t read this article. Silverlight will run on the Mac but can’t be authored there. This means at least half the people who might think about developing for it won’t be able to.
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So I hear about this new Twitter thing, think it sounds sort of cool, and decide to try it out. I cruise over to their web site and fill out the registration form, and here’s what I see:

Believe it or not, it won’t accept “Elliotte Rusty Harold” as a name. It gets stuck right before the d. Seems it believes no name can be longer than 20 letters, and “Elliotte Rusty Harold” is 21.
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On the advice of numerous people I’ve installed WP-Cache here on Mokka mit Schlag. It’s supposed to dramatically speed up performance by caching query responses while still allowing for live comments and editing and all that yummy fired goodness WordPress is famous for. We shall see. If it makes a noticeable difference, I’ll install it on The Cafes too.
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I have written a WordPress plugin to rearrange the buttons in the post editor (the regular one, not the fancy WYSIWYG one) in a way more to my liking. It changes the names of some buttons, removes others I rarely use, and adds a few more I do use.

The code involves some really awful hacks and is a confusing mix of CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. I use CSS to hide the buttons I don’t like, and JavaScript to change the names of existing buttons and add new ones. PHP integrates this whole mess into WordPress. WordPress wasn’t really designed to support this level of customization. That’s why I have to use JavaScript to change the buttons after the page is loaded.
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