February 26, 2003
10 points to Macromedia: Lots of PHP tutorials at the mothership

Actionscript.com says it best: Macromedia shows love for PHP :-)

Its nice to see them paying homage to PHP with all this good information. Especially useful is the "PHP Server-Side Graphics in Dreamweaver MX"

ActionScript.com has the other links to PHP related stuff @ Macromedia.

Posted by jarle at 12:28 PM
Market share of Internet Explorer inflated?

It certainly looks that way from the small tests that Arve Bersvendsen has done: When is MSIE not MSIE?

It seems a lot of browsers are misrepresenting themselves as Internet Explorer. Probably because a lot of clueless javascripting on the web checks for "Internet Explorer", and excludes other browsers.

It would be interesting to know how those kind of misrepresentations affects "official" browser statistics.

Posted by jarle at 12:14 PM | Comments (1)
So whats so cool about Trackback?

I am sorry for not taking the time to explain about Trackback in my previous posting. Fernando has already raised the question - "explain to me a good use of the trackback feature?"

TrackBack (manual) enables weblogs to ping each-other, so if I am writing about something that Mike has already posted about - I can add his trackback url and his posting will be pinged, and I will be listed among the "Trackbacks". Its a great way to keep track of weblogs posting about the same topic, and adds another layer to the "conversation", at least IMHO.

Here is what MovableType writes about trackback:

Movable Type's TrackBack system allows peer-to-peer communication and conversations between weblogs. Imagine that you write about a movie you just saw in an entry on your Movable Type-powered weblog. Another MT weblogger reads your entry, and wants to write an entry referencing your original post. He could just comment on your weblog, but he'd like to keep the post in his own database and host it on his site.

Using TrackBack, the other weblogger can automatically send a ping to your weblog, indicating that he has written an entry referencing your original post. This accomplishes two things:

On your site, you can automatically list all sites that have referenced a particular post, allowing visitors to your site to read the response on the other user's weblog.

It provides a firm, explicit link between his entry and yours, as opposed to an implicit link (like a referrer log) that depends upon outside action (someone clicking on the link to your entry).

All in all a very cool feature. My blog is configures so that MT will go out and look for Trackback configurations on the pages I link up, and then automatically ping them (Its called TrackBack auto-discovery) - and is a feature that can be turned on and off. It still has its quicks, it won't look at the URLs you add to ping and the auto-discovery urls - so if you add URLs manually and are running auto-discovery at the same time, you risk pinging other blogs twice. Hopefully something that will be fixed in later implementations.

[Update]: Thanks to Trackback, I discovered this link: What is trackback about? which goes into more detail about all the cool things you can do with Trackback. Thanks JabbyPanda :-)

Posted by jarle at 09:45 AM | Comments (8)