But what he doesn’t mention is that it goes both ways. Give other people the benefit of the doubt, because just this one lunch, this one blog post, this one piece of code may not be representative of the whole body of that person’s work. Maybe they’ve got bad allergies and need the drugs to kick in. Maybe they stayed up all night with a sick kid. I say “do your best work, but don’t expect others to do theirs.”

It’s funny, I find myself swimming upstream against Seth Godin on this topic. Is quality fractal? (he says yes, I said no). And now this.

First, write a script, using very clear paths. And use php://stdin to capture the input stream:


#!/usr/bin/php -q
< ?php
include_once( dirname(__FILE__).'/includeme.php' );
$input='';
$fh=fopen( 'php://stdin', 'r' );
while( ! feof( $fh ) ) {
$input .= fread( $fh, 4096);
}
fclose( $fh );


Do whatever you need to with the $input variable. I had subscribed to a newsletter, and was using PHP to parse out the interesting bits of the newsletter (everything between the h1, h2 and h3 tags, so I knew if I needed to read it), and remail that to a more-frequently checked email address.

You can test your file with a shell command of "cat (testfile) | $somescript.php "

When it's perfect, then go to your evolution program and use the "message filters" to "pipe a message to a program." And pipe it to this one (including of course the explicit paths).

The things to take away here are the php://stdin slurp, and the fact that you have to use explicit paths (and you'll have a dickens of a time tracking down any errors).

Hope that helps ya!

I’m not convinced. And this could be because I’m working on my overall consistency. I think this idea requires a consistency that may not be present in the end product. For instance, I might write a glorious function for part of a website but put it together with the rest of the framework and my implementation is less than glorious. You could examine the function and make a judgment that the whole is terrific — but the whole is flawed and weak.

I won’t argue that if one piece is great and another is not so great, that the lower “average” between the two drags the overall quality down. That’s true too; I think that inconsistency is a flaw in a product. ( That’s why I’m working on it myself. ) That’s not what I’m saying; what I’m saying is that it’s hard to judge the whole effectively when there’s different levels of greatness.

Snook.Ca has some great ideas on how to use these optical illusions for a little pizazz with your site. I’ve reused their gradient/fade example over at this site: Footed Pyjamas (need some warm flannel footed pyjamas?) on the “Buy Now” button and it gives me a little thrill each time I slide my mouse over it.

I wonder what would happen with a wavy line, like stylized ocean waves, or maybe something else. I’ll have to play with it some more.

Keep in mind that this should be run at some interval with an average taken. Server load and speed should be taken into effect.

$ time wget –quiet –delete-after –page-requisites http://www.gmail.com

An example output is:
real 0m0.421s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.012s

“time” gives you how much time something took; the command after the time command. You want the “real” number.
“wget” is a great tool for downloading stuff from the web. The –page-requisites flag gets the CSS(link) (Cascading Style Sheets), JS, images and other things necessary for the page to be displayed. The other options (quiet, delete after) are just there to clean up the output.

This also doesn’t take into account how much time a browser might take arranging the pieces into a pie. A bunch of nested tables will cause the client to slow down. Not specifying image height and width will cause browsers to slow down. A slow computer … well, you get the idea. Run this and take an average of the REAL value and you should have a pretty good idea of how slow your site is.

Note
If you’re plugging this into a php script, keep in mind that “time” is outputting that into the STDERR stream.

Skim down to the “txt” areas, and add a text one like this, with your domain as the first textbox.

This one is because this particular client uses google mail for their domain.

v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all

This one is a seriously generic and just allows any server that’s listed as an MX for the domain.

v=spf1 mx ~all

Git’s another beast. Because it’s an distributed system, doing a “git commit” doesn’t send my files to the backup. I have to do a “git commit;git push” for that. I’m liking the .gitignore file (compared to svn propedit syntaxes). And I’m liking the easiness of branching. I’ve got a couple of projects that are pretty much duplicates of one another with different filling. Like making a pie, but this one is apple, that one is cherry. With subversion, it feels a lot more like those projects are full of stuff. But git feels leaner. Which is good, right?

If (cookie does not exist) AND (cache file exists) THEN redirect user.
[code]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*cookiename.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/?original/page/
RewriteCond -s other/page/index.html
RewriteRule .* other/page/index.html [L]
[/code]

Result: 404, file (/original/page/) does not exist (note that /original/page is itself a redir).

So … what am I doing wrong?

And now I’ve discovered “posterous.” and Posterous will feed an RSS feed.. so I could email Posterous (post at posterous dot com), and follow that on an RSS reader and whammo, it’s all done too. More content allowed … maybe a full php error handler? Who knows. Yeah I know I’m cheap for not shelling out for HopToad, but that’s what we get with bills like mine.