Tip of the hat to Gina Trappani for sharing the link via Google+

Wolfram Alpha provides a WordPress plugin that allows the WordPress author to use a shortcode to place a widget in a post. There’s also (separate) support for putting a Wolfram Alpha widget inside a WordPress sidebar or widget. There’s a gallery with lots of pre-created widgets and an interface to create your own. Pretty cool.

Note that you need to specify the units (“lb” for pounds, “in” for inches, or 5′ 7.5″ for typical foot-inches height expressions) otherwise the widget seems to make some really poor choices, deciding that weight of 67 means aged 67 years.

What is it “About Us” you don’t understand? If you have a link saying “Who We Are,” you had better be ready to name names. Who are these people and what are they hiding? There’s no excuse for a web site like this. Are these people in the witness protection program? Do these people stand behind what they build? There’s no reputation to worry about losing because they never tell you who they are.

You can have the stiff corporate “Who We Are” of black and white pictures of the “Leadership Team” in suits, “Our Advisors” to name-drop your VCs or Directors, or a more playful site of caricatures and off-beat bios. Kudos go to the sites that include your Twitter and Github accounts, and let folks share their passion for mountain biking, marathons or matchbook collecting. But denying there are people behind your web storefront tells me you’re not proud of who you are, you’re uncomfortable putting yourself out there, or you’ve got something to hide.

And that’s the real problem with a “Who We Are” site like this: the publishers are telling us much more about themselves than they intend. In a customer-facing industry where personal service and attention is a key determinant in the success of the project, they’re stating they are not comfortable with that level of contact.

Food for thought.

Want to attend tonight or a future meeting? Meetup details here.

I don’t consider this blog to be much of an historical document, so I’m not concerned about defacing it. Google searches are likely finding the keywords on that page and redirecting folks here, which is unfortunately, as the page has really lost its value. Just deleting the page hurts the Google page rank of the domain when the crawlers can’t find it any more. Properly curating the page with editorial notes that summarize what the links were about, that they are dead now, and what the whole point of the post was, would be very nice, but is really more effort than is reasonable to ask, especially when you consider there are likely to be 2,000 other posts needing curation.

The best lesson to take away from this is not to write posts just saying “Check this out” and instead summarize what’s there to be seen, what it means, and why it’s important enough to point out to your readers.

I recently was asked to edit some older PHP code and found it was littered with short tags, both the <? script goes here ?> variety and the shortcut output <?=”Print this string”?> variety, which need to be replaced by <?php script goes here ?> and <?php echo “Print this string” ?> respectively. A bit beyond my search-and-replace regex or sed skills, I found a fairly elegant solution on StackOverflow, which uses PHP to rewrite PHP:

#! /usr/bin/php
 <?php
 global $argv;

$contents = file_get_contents($argv[1]) or die;
 $tokens = token_get_all($contents);
 $tokens[] = array(0x7E0F7E0F,"",-1);

foreach($tokens as $ix => $token) {
 if(is_array($token)) {
 list($toktype, $src) = $token;
 if ($toktype == T_OPEN_TAG) {
 if (($src == "<?") && ($tokens[$ix+1][0] != T_STRING)) {
 $src = "<?php";
 if ($tokens[$ix+1][0] != T_WHITESPACE) {
 $src .= " ";
 }
 }
 }
 else if($toktype == T_OPEN_TAG_WITH_ECHO) {
 $src = "<?php echo";
 if($tokens[$ix+1][0] != T_WHITESPACE) {
 $src .= " ";
 }
 }
 print $src;
 }
 else {
 print $token;
 }
 }

It just needed a little shell wrapper to take in all the files (which I’d renamed *.php.old and archived and made a backup of) and put them out as *.php.old.new. Again, a quick rename and I was in business. I was astounded to find it ran the first time!

#! /bin/bash

FILES=./*.php.old
 for f in $FILES
 do
 echo "phpize $f >$f.new"
 ./phpize.php $f>$f.new
 done

1. “Sorry, but an error has been made.” is atrociously passive grammar. And who has made an error? The operator, the web site?

2. “The information you entered contains invalid characters.” Which ones? The email address or the password fields? The “5″ the “@” the hyphen or the “e” ?

3. “Please try again” How many times should I try again, and what is it that I should try differently?

4. If you have a password policy (like “no punctuation”), you need to tell the person typing it in.

5. If an operator can type it in from the keyboard, it _is_ a valid character. You need to be liberal in what you accept.

Staples, you lost a sale today, and you’ve lost my trust that you know how to run a secure website.