Web Caching

Some resources about Web caching :

• Smart JavaScript Caching
• Google Web Toolkit changes file names for each modifications. I guess it is some kind of time hash. Couldn’t find explicit information however.
• Apache HTTP Server 2.2 Caching Guide about mod_cache, mod_disk_cache, mod_mem_cache, mod_file_cache and htcacheclean. It describes how to use Apache’s caching features to accelerate web and proxy serving, while avoiding common problems and misconfigurations.
• Varnish is a state-of-the-art, high-performance HTTP accelerator. It take full advantage of the virtual memory system and advanced I/O features.
• Squid Web Proxy Cache
• I am not including Akamai …

Post source code on WordPress

Just to remember : Wrap your code in these tags:

 [sourcecode language=’css’]…[/sourcecode]

Currently available : cpp csharp css delphi java jscript php python ruby sql vb xml

See : http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/09/03/how-do-i-post-source-code/

URL utf8

Note about URL and UTF-8 :

• There is a Firefox option (about:config) network.standard-url.encode-utf8 that you have to activate in order to comply to the standard (see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.standard-url.encode-utf8) So you can type in an URL with é and it will be converted to %C3%A9 wich is the expected stardard behaviour.
• According to RFC 3987, URLs must be converted to UTF-8 character encoding. IE and Opera, contrary to the specification, encode the path part of the URL in UTF-8 but encode the query string part of the URL in the encoding of the referring page ! That would be right for POST parameter, but not for GET !!!
• W3C make it clear too that URL should be encoded in UTF-8 http://www.w3.org/International/O-URL-code.html (has some Java example code).
• In PHP you should use :

  urlencode(utf8_encode('großpösna'))  -> gro%C3%9Fp%C3%B6sna : GOOD
  utf8_decode(urldecode('gro%C3%9Fp%C3%B6sna')); -> großpösna : GOOD

Yahoo pipes

This is really great : try it !! For example, I made a Search limited to your delicious bookmarked sites.
OK It is a BETA : a bit unstable or maybe it is my browser and a bit slow and not perfect yet, errors doesn’t seems to be reported, but once it will be reliable, this will be great.
(Looks like it is very server side for now. So maybe they have to much success.)

At least, that kind of tool may drive the adoption of more “processing friendly” techno, like XHTML and other Semantic-web stuff that only geek seems to care about now.

Via Yahoo! Pipes: Unlocking the Data Web. Read it, it gives much more info.

Photo gallery

I am searching a photo Gallery : I don’t need much bandwidth, but a lot of storage space.

• Picasa (Google) : 250Mo (6Go for $25/year)
• Gallery 2 (Menalto) : Seems to be THE solution. There is even an iPhoto plugin !
• Album Shaper 2.1 (04/2005) Qt. Based on XSLT and XSD : 5 themes available. The application is more about tweaking the photo and description than creating album. For example, there is nothing to help you modify the templates.
• ImgSeek 0.8.6 (01/2006) Python/Qt Linux. Not really focused on HTML album creation too.

OpenID, LID, Yadis, Identity 2.0 …

Looks like it maybe time to jump in “Identity 2.0” … look at OpenID, Yadis, LID. So I created an identity on 3 different providers (to test) :

• http://bruno.videntity.org : store many informations about you and creates a vCard and a FOAF profile. (PHP)
• http://mylid.net/bruno.vernay : store no informations about yo, but allow multiple protocols : LID, Yadis, OpenID.
• http://getopenid.com/brunovernay : store only email and public key. One of the few OpenID servers that supports SSL, Secure connexion (HTTPS).
• http://brunovernay.idproxy.net/ : Proxy to your Yahoo! account. Great idea. There is the same for Google, but the server was down when I wanted to try.
• There are many others Identity Providers.

I guess there will be reliability, security and performance problems soon.