libertus

My friends know that I’m a bit of a political geek and like to keep abreast of what our elected representatives are doing, so I follow the Official Reports of the UK Parliaments with an almost religious fervour, although I’ve been a bit lazy recently and just been watching the BBC Parliament channel.

I’m also a huge fan of theyworkforyou.com, a volunteer-run website which republishes the Official Reports of the House of Commons, House of Lords and the Northern Ireland Assembly in a far friendlier form than the “official” sites, with the added bonus of public commentary and statistical analysis of the MP’s performance.

Missing from theyworkforyou.com is the Official Report of the Scottish Parliament, all the more sorely missing due to the now very interesting constitution of that body with its minority SNP government. Republishing an official record is no easy task, for a number of reasons that I’ll go into later, but I know for sure that I have all the requisite skills and tools to do it.

I’ve had this project on the back-burner for some months now and since I’m starting a new job soon, any spare time I might have to work on hobby projects is going to vanish.

So here I go. I don’t need to get it perfect - just far enough along so that someone else can pick up and complete the task.
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Now that Zeitgeist has been released on WPPlugins.org, its page here has been set aside for the release manual and discussion. This post contains the contents and comments from the pre-release page.

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Last night I received one of my usual junk mails; “Microsoft Download Notifications: August 25, 2006″. Normally I skim then delete but this one caught my eye. Something I’ve been waiting for is now in a state I can download and use - the first “Release Candidate” of Internet Explorer 7.

I’m not fan of Microsoft, having had a long and occasionally arduous relationship with their products. On the other hand, I’m sure the majority of people using the internet do so thorough Microsoft’s magic window, so as a professional web developer I am obliged to investigate and support it as best I can. IE6 was dreadful - it worked but lacked support for some important web standards. IE7, I am told, is standards-compliant, so I am expecting it to work as well as, if not better than, the competing standards-compliant browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Konqueror.

Here are my experiences.

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<span xml:lang=”zh” lang=”zh”>中文</span>

Me too, mate

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Wow! Another thought inspired by The Cathedral and The Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond. This time, lessons 3 and 2. If you are not a geek, this post contains Outreach links especially for you.
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A thought inspired by this message on the wp-hackers mailing list by Mike Purvis, and The Cathedral and The Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond, a few chapters of which I read recently for the first time. Lesson 9 sprang to mind. Then this did. An old defeat.

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Which is better; http://www.libertini.net/libertus/ or http://libertini.net/libertus/ ?

Both are URLs that refer to precisely the same resource: this blog. Given that both are perfectly valid, which one should I use as the address of my WordPress blog? The WordPress documentation for the General Options is vague but on reading it I would conclude that I should enter http://libertini.net/libertus, my latter choice.

The WordPress documentation is out-of-date. The correct answer is: neither.

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stu nicholls | CSS PLaY | experimenting with cascading style sheets

JavaScript beware! Stu Nicholls is the Grim Reaper, CSS his scythe.