Everybody else has been writing about the Blueprint CSS framework lately, so I decided I would too. In my case, I have spent several hours using it to create a layout for a customer, and in the process, I feel I have learned a lot about Blueprint’s current strengths and weaknesses, and a little more about CSS best practices as well.

or some time now, I have wanted a better solution for remotely hosting CVS and Subversion (SVN) repositories. Despite its name, I began using CVSDude for SVN hosting, and have been quite pleased so far. Its cheap and dead simple.

As its name suggests, the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) library, HTML_QuickForm, allows you to quickly and cleanly produce validating HTML forms. In this tutorial, I will walk through a basic implementation of HTML_QuickForm to produce a common contact form and explore ways to get the most out of this library.

I am a “dorky white guy in khaki pants” who is staring down the barrel of middle age and is not always quick on the uptake. From time to time I also indulge in the perverse delight of assigning the worst intentions to people’s actions. So, I just had to check out this post about a potentially racist Intel advertisement to see if, and how quickly, I would “get it”, judge how bad it is from my dorky white guy perspective, and try to wrap my mind around how it came to be.

Last year, Bill Kehoe and I created some basic Web Services for creating persistent identifiers using our fledgling Handle System implementation at Cornell University Library, and we have finally gotten permission to release the software under a open source BSD license. We created this software for our own needs at CUL, and our primary goals were to simplify the Handle System API for creating persistent identifiers and to allow the Handle System to be used more easily from within other platforms.