Technology Tales

Bumping newly edited older articles in Textpattern

Whether this is intended or not, you can put a pre-existing article to the top of your website’s Atom or RSS feed by saving it as draft while it is being modified before restoring its status to live again. This is handy when you have got permanent articles that you are enhancing over the course of time and you want to give your visitors a reason to return and maybe even prompt search engines too. New articles will achieve this always but it’s nice to see that older articles don’t get lost in space either. This may be a hack but I am using Textpattern for permanent postings rather than blogging and am very happy to see the availability of the feature.

O’Reilly does eBooks…

I have been a Safari subscriber for a while now and access to O’Reilly titles has been the main reason behind it. However, I recently discovered that O’Reilly is offering full eBooks of some of its titles. Why the offering is far from complete, this is progress and the prospect of donloading complete books with proper page numbering and an index is an appealing. Previously, I was downloading the individual chapters from Safari and compiling the books in that way, a less than user friendly approach. So, do I continue the Safari subscription or not?

Safari on Windows?

Steve Jobs recently surprised an audience at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference with the announcement that the Safari web browser is being made available for Windows. While everyone else is awaiting Apple’s forthcoming iPhone, the Safari announcement is a more important one to me; not being big on phones, I will let the iPhone excitement pass me by. Without either buying a Mac or running OS X in a virtual machine, there was no other way for me to test my web pages in Safari bar looking for a rendering site on the web. Now, that has all changed and I have downloaded the beta to have a look; it should iron out any rough edges that Mac users have been seeing.

Update: Safari seems to have got a mixed reaction from Windows users; some have tried it with Vista and cited issues. Another gripe has been its memory footprint but I have seen Firefox take up 100 MB.

SAS books now on Safari

Being a Safari subscriber, I found a pleasant surprise awaiting me in this month’s email newsletter: eBooks from SAS Books are now available on Safari. Having a quick look, I found a small but useful selection. Topics like the SQL procedure, the Macro language and Enterprise Guide caught my eye but there’s more than this on offer. It’ll be interesting to see where this leads…