Wednesday, 24. July 12002
p3k dots

stimmt, so wurden mir die jass regeln (fürs kreuzjass) auch erklärt.

ich lern das schon noch, lieber gozmoz.

content management revisited.

while i am at it, i accidentally found the website of the zentrum für neue medien at the donau-universität krems (via brab.antville.org).

they recently published an evaluation of content-management systems as an extensive pdf piece.

reminds me on what they did at pixelwings two years ago.

keine träne wein' ich "jetzt" nach.

hm, soll ich oder soll ich nicht: p3k.org ein impressum hinzufügen?

der webimpressums-assistent macht es mir ja leicht. aber schon der name dieses hilfsmittels ist so unerträglich doitsch...

nicht nur schumacher, nein: der deutsche an sich lebt deutsches bessersein vor. immer, andauernd, ständig und überall.

man kann mit ihm nicht leiden, deshalb kann man den deutschen auch nicht lieben, da hat der lauda-niki schon recht.

aber ich schweife ab.

henso still suffers from the free bike disease while eva menasse tells her story about viennabike in the faz.

the austrian tax payer comments.

btw. i will support kind of such a project not until it is sponsored by car drivers and manufacturers only, and there are enough (ie. an awful lot of) acceptable cycle tracks available in vienna.

hey, communitybike.org is a wiki site!

monochrom: "ich will planwirtschaft" (mp3, ~ 2.3megs).

please look at these pictures while listening and move around the browser window and its scrollbars (as sort of diy-planwirtschafts-videoclip).

$.O.$. free speech.

quintessenz: "eigentlich darf man E$$O so gar nicht mehr schreiben, jedenfalls nicht wenn man greenpeace frankreich heisst. die ölbarone sitzen auf fantastillionen und dürfen jetzt verlangen: wer 'E$$O' ins netz schreibt, muss täglich dafür 5000 euro zahlen".

how much is "€SSO", then? 2500 euro?

somehow related story (not really, i know): "'silent works' do battle: wombles creator mike batt has been accused of infringing the copyright of american minimalist composer john cage, after placing a one-minute silence on his latest cd – and saying it was a mike batt composition".

welcome to our initiative to stop the pauperisation of patent, trademark and copyright lawyers.

ariadne is indeed an interesting piece of software with clever concepts, too – but... well, more about that later.

i found a lot of parallels between ariadne and helma (don't know zope well enough anymore for reliable comparison), e.g. the object-oriented approach in connection with a relational database, that every object can have a template (or skin in helma terminology) and, as a consequence thereof, the effort to separate the application logic from the presentation layer.

funny is, that ariadne's creators realized something i just implemented inofficially and quite similarly into the antville cvs branch i maintain for the new helma.org website (that's why this branch is called "helmaville"): the storylist macro.

the idea behind it simply is to provide a macro structure which outputs single items contained in a collection (e.g. a child object or an antville topic) as list.

in helmaville such a macro call currently looks like this:

<ol> <% storylist topic="topicName" sortby="title" order="asc" itemprefix="<li>" itemsuffix="</li>" %> </ol>

helma transforms the macro call "storylist" into a function call for "storylist_macro(param)". param is an object containing the macro parameters topic, sortby etc. as properties.

due to a helpful markup framework in antville (or helmaville, resp.), the whole output can be done in the function without pulling up another skin.

ariadne does the same a little bit more elaboratly:

<ol> <pinp> ls("item.html"); </pinp> </ol>

this object template contains special markup wrapped around a function call whose name obviously is borrowed from unix. "ls" applies another template called "item.html" onto each of the object's children (ie. it lists the children in a layout defined by the function's argument). in item.html we then find:

<li><a href="<pinp> echo make_url(); </pinp>"><pinp> echo $nlsdata->name; </pinp></a></li>

here, the url of the child object (ie. one item) is output in a link tag which surrounds the item's name as it was entered in ariadne's (or a custom) browser editor.

btw. "pinp" is the name of the script language used in ariadne, a subset of php functions and statements for safe template logic ("pinp is not php").

my personal conclusion is, however, that ariadne, as well-done and smart it is looking to me, cannot cope with helma's concepts and ease of use. and i think there is actually no way to get around helma when creating web applications (i know i repeat myself).

ariadne's biggest weakness probably is the browser editing "feature" which is too slow and too unreliable as usual. it's so much faster and more comfortable to edit a file, i don't want to miss it anymore despite (or rather: because of) the lack of all these "wysiwyg" options.

furthermore, for small websites which do not need heavy (pseudo) content management features at all (which is the case for the project i did the current research for), i would rather build a custom system from scratch with a scripting language of my choice than trying to learn another conceptual superstructure and to achieve the same aim in twice the time.

what the heck?

searching the web for the term "do the kenosha" i stumbled across an interesting resource. but who is that guy called lemony snicket? and what's the relation to the harry potter hype ("quidditch")? the story about the "baudelaire orphans" sounds much more interesting than the potter tale but i could be way wrong (because of my knowledge deficits in popular culture trivia).

and i still don't know what "the kenosha" is...

Tuesday, 23. July 12002
p3k dots

another great (though not quite intuitive) antville layout at misaki.antville.org.