Alec’s thoughts

I’ve been working at Macromedia for a month or two now, and I’ve learned to appreciate the coolness of Flash and ActionScript. People may whine and complain that its not open, that its proprietary, that it duplicates some web functionality, but when it comes down to it, its just damn fun. I’m hoping to put […]

So since I’ve been techwriting for a few months, and hating life with FrameMaker, I decided to see what open source alternatives were available out there.
The other day I happened upon DocBook. I had heard mention of it many times before but didn’t really get what it is. Here’s what it seems to be: […]

So in my DocBook exploration, I’ve discovered the beauty of sgml mode on Xemacs. If only I could get it to do validation. For that, I needed nsgmls, which is a part of James Clark’s SP package. But it turns out he’s all but abandoned it and the OpenJade group has taken up the cause […]

This morning I got a private e-mail in response to bug 178809. It went something like this…
Disclaimer: I do not speak for mozilla.org. I do not even claim to represent the views of any other mozilla developer other than myself.

I wrote:

>Reporters, and people on the CC: If anyone wants this bug fixed, they’re
> going to […]

I’ve been doing some contract work at Macromedia and learned a few things about the documentation process. I’ve also discovered a fantastic tool that Macromedia created, LiveDocs.
I’ll write more about some of the techwriting process that I think Mozilla could adapt, but I wanted to post about LiveDocs because it is so simple, but so […]

Last night I saw a truly unique show - one that was more “indie” than any other indierock show that I had attended. The show was a sort of showcase of artists from songfight.org. I didn’t actually visit the site until just hours before the show but I absolutely love the concept.

It basically works like […]

oh yeah, I forgot that I had also added another thing for gallery integration.
I found this neat hack which includes a php file that outputs javascript to display a link. I tweaked the script to look like this:

..
echo “document.write(’<a href=”" .
makeAlbumUrl($gallery->album->fields[”name”]) . “”>” .
$gallery->album->getThumbnailTag($gallery->album->getHighlight() ) .
[…]

For another secret website I’m making for a certain future trip, I needed a way to easily link to a photo gallery (created with the awesome Gallery Project software) in a blog post.
That was pretty easy. I just added
<MTKeyValues source=”[MTEntryKeywords]”> <MTIfKeyExists key=”gallery”> <div class=”blog-entry-gallery”> <a href=”/gallery/<$MTKeyValue key=”gallery”$>”>gallery</a> </div> </MTIfKeyExists> </MTKeyValues>
And now in my keywords field, […]

Today I hacked on MovableType to accomplish two things:

A private category that I could post without worrying that my stuff goes public
Sane URLs instead of those annoying date fields

Ok, really I was just trying to make sane URLs. But then these ended up overlapping and the act of making sane URLs allowed me […]