It seems that every time I open my email, some generous chap or chapess is offering to translate an article from here. Either that or letting me know they've already translated something. I've long felt that someone taking the time to translate my work is pretty much the ultimate compliment, and always very much appreciated.

• Introducing HTML in Hebrew (original)
• DTDs Explained in Hebrew (original)
• Email Address Validation in Spanish (original)
• Regular Expression Cheat Sheet in Italian (original)

Several people have also taken the time to send me translations of cheat sheets for me to release here, and these are on the way (German and French versions of several are first, with hopefully more to come).

 

Update: Benjamin Wilger came up with an even better solution.

Maybe this will come in handy for someone else. I have a table of products in a database and I want to select from it with the products in such an order that products that are out of stock are last. However, I don't want the in stock products to be ordered by how much stock is available (i.e. I can't just order by stock descending). I don't want to add another column with a bit to indicate whether or not a product is in stock, because ... well, I just don't want to.

You can't do this, which is what I wanted:

SELECT CAST((Stock > 0) AS BIT) AS InStock FROM table
But you can do this, which is the same (as long as you have under ten million of everything in stock):

SELECT CAST(CEILING(CAST(Stock AS FLOAT) / 10000000) AS BIT) AS InStock FROM table

 

Today's comment spam review process:

delete FROM comments WHERE moderation_required = 1; Deleted rows: 9699 (Query took 2.0489 sec)

Apologies to anyone whose comment ended up in the moderation queue. I normally keep on top of it, but a couple of weeks of putting it off and what started as a small pile of comments to manage has quickly ballooned into a 10,000 comment monster. Time for a comment spam prevention rethink, I reckon.

 

I've been having some issues with a hard drive that seems to have packed up. The machine would start fine - no problems in post etc - but just wouldn't boot to an OS. The problem appears to be with a drive, so last night I set SpinRite to work its magic, and was presented with this when I checked the progress this morning:



Darn. 151 hours. What's really annoying is that I was in the process of finally sorting out a proper backup system with CrashPlan.

Update: I am informed by the wife, who is at home watching the progress of this recovery operation with interest, that the estimated time remaining has increased to 842 hours. 35 days. That's more than I'd planned on.

 

I found a small bug.
It is fixed now, thankfully.
It bugs us no more.

 

Dear Blogger,

Please accept this letter as formal notification that I am leaving my position as Reader of Your Blog, effective immediately.

Thank you for the opportunities and support you have provided during my time with Your Blog.

Unfortunately, it has become clear to me over recent months that your goals and mine are drifting apart. I thought I would take this opportunity to offer some constructive criticism, to help you avoid a repetition of this situation in future.

Feed Contents

I, like many Readers in the field, use feeds to keep up to date with websites, including yours. I personally am subscribed to over 200 of these feeds, and I have only a limited amount of time to look through them for interesting updates. You have recently chosen to include your new photos, links and several other items to your feeds, and this has meant that the signal to noise ratio of your feed has swung strongly, in my opinion, towards noise.

I appreciate that many readers may be interested in your personal photos, and others may be interested in more specific areas of your content than I. May I suggest you change your feed structure to allow for several feeds, each with different sections of your content, to allow your Readers to select whichever feeds are most interesting to them?

Author Information

There are literally millions of blogs out there and although I only read a small cross-section of those, there are still so many clamouring for attention that it is difficult to remember a specific blog from one week to the next. Adding a personal touch, for example a profile or biography, may give your blog a more personal identity.

Post Titles

You may not be aware of this, but with so much content out there, many Readers will use your post titles to decide whether or not your post deserves their attention. Post titles like "Dear Blogger", while fine on rare occasions, are not descriptive and offer little clue to the content of a post. Better titles will increase the usability of Your Blog, and that in turn will attract more Readers.

Greed

I have noticed an increase in the advertising on your site over recent months. While I understand that you wish to cover the costs of your site, and even make an income, adding interstitial adverts and those horrific double-underlined inline green popup link things is, in my opinion, a step too far. Text adverts and sponsor links are less intrusive. I have yet to form an opinion on paid posts, however I would expect some Readers to take issue with them.

Originality

Some of your posts have simply been links to other sites with a line of commentary. While I enjoy following recommended links, I am of the opinion that this quantity of content does not quite constitute a "post" in the traditional sense. Is there a way that links could be incorporated into your site in a different way? If not, please take a moment to add to what you are linking to - I read your blog because your opinion on the subjects on which you write is of interest to me.

Communication

I have, on occasion, commented on Your Blog. I appreciate that you are probably a busy person, and that you have a lot of comments to respond to, so I would not expect a reply to each of my comments. However, I have yet to see any replies to comments I and others have left. You are under no obligation to reply, of course, however many of your Readers comment because they want to discuss your content or to add to it. More replies will in turn encourage more comments and that in turn will attract more Readers.

I am certain you will find a replacement Reader quickly. If I can be of any assistance during this upcoming transition period, please let me know.

Sincerely,
David Child

P.S. These are not the only issues I have found irksome with your blog. Rather than expand on them here, I would suggest you read Aaron Bassett's thoughts on the subject in his execellent article: Common Blog Problems.

 

It might be a little sad, but apparently today is 1337 day, or "leet" day. That's right, the date today, written properly, is 13/3/7. I have to confess, I'm not quite sure what would be an appropriate way to celebrate.

 

Everyone seems to have their own idea of what "Design Is ..." at the moment (Ok ... several months ago. I'm late.), so I thought a cheat sheet might be useful.

 

Update 13 Feb 2007: The copied content has been removed.

I'm no stranger to plagiarism. Plenty of the articles on this site have been lifted and reproduced elsewhere. There's not much I can do about it. Usually a quick email to the perpetrator solves the problem. No sense getting worked up about it - it takes a little of my time once in a while to stay on top of it.

Sometimes, though, one of these incidents just surprises me. Recently, with the help of the brilliant Copyscape, I tracked down a copy of my article on the robots.txt file.

The shock? It was ripped off by a University! Indiana University, to be precise - here's "their" robots.txt guide. As with most copies, the person responsible has endeavoured to hide the copy by slightly reworking the content. Copyscape provide a page highlighting the matching passages from the two documents, which shows more or less exactly what was copied and how the duplicate was put together.

Content on this site is released under a Creative Commons License, which allows people to reproduce and build on content here. The conditions of that are that due credit must be given and derivative works must be similarly licensed. Given that the university has failed to give credit, their use is clearly not covered by this license.

I'm surprised that the university couldn't find the time (or maybe they couldn't find a person) to put an article on something simple like the robots exclusion standard by themselves. I can only hope the rest of the content they have in the same area of the site is their own.

 

The Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet and accompanying article have been translated into Italian by Luca Magnani.

I love that Creative Commons licensing can allow, even encourage, this type of thing.

I am aware of other translations in the works too - someone is putting together German versions, and I have a French version of the CSS Cheat Sheet to turn into a cheat sheet and post.

 

I'm working on some interesting personal projects at the moment, including a piece of tracking software that's been in the works now for about 2 years. Every time I start up work on it again though, someone else comes along and releases something that does what I want and my little app is shelved again. First it was Mint, and then Metrics from Performancing, and when that was closed I resumed work. And then more recently came the exquisite Reinvigorate.

However, one of the features I implemented (inspired by the clever thinking from the guys at 103 Bees) was a pane to view questions people typed into search engines in order to find my site. This really is a great idea - you can see what (a small percentage of) people are looking for from your site. And you can tailor content accordingly, as the questions you'll find in your referral traffic are great inspiration for articles.

Inevitably, not all questions lead on to full blown articles. Some only require short answers, and it's those I'm interested in today.

More...

 

John Sheehan has been a very busy developer! He's been working like a man possessed on a selection of .NET Cheat Sheets (ASP.NET primarily). Available for free, as all good cheat sheets should be, and very very smart indeed.