While YouTube is free (as in money) to use, the cost is paid in terms of privacy and advertising analytics. So I've decided to investigate self-hosting my video content. The Cost of YouTube With YouTube, you sacrifice privacy in favor of cost. YouTube is the very best at what they do (serve video to all resolutions and bandwidths), and they are backed by Google who is the very best at what they do (collect data in order to facilitate selling a primed audience to advertisers).

TL;DR: How I improved the performance of case-insensitive XPath queries by 30–35%, reducing an 8× performance hit to only 4.5–5×. This was originally posted to the SimplePie NG blog. Parse-at-all-costs Most feeds are a mess. The old SimplePie “OG” took a parse-at-all-costs philosophy, and could handle many of the most broken feeds you could find — at a cost. While the early versions of SimplePie supported the letter of the RSS 2.0 specification, there were a surprising number of feeds which didn’t.

Today, I’m introducing a refresh of the SimplePie logo and the most visible part of its brand. I’m calling this new branding style SimplePie Neue. This was originally posted to the SimplePie NG blog. The Icon I designed the original SimplePie logo back in 2005. At the time, Web 2.0 and Ajax were brand-new things to most web developers. Mac OS X “Tiger” 10.4 was the latest OS running on my 17” PowerBook G4, and while the hard glossy feel hadn’t yet taken over the Internet, shadows and gradients definitely had.

After retiring from SimplePie development in 2009, the project more or less went into maintenance mode. While I am thankful to the folks who have contributed to its development over the last 8 years, it’s time for a reboot. This was originally posted to the SimplePie NG blog. SimplePie NG is a modern, next-generation PHP package for working with syndication feeds. It is being re-written from the ground-up to take advantage of the changes that have happened in the PHP community since the SimplePie project was started back in 2004.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about code, so I thought I’d post this little AWS-related tip for OS X and Linux users. If you have the Unified AWS CLI Tools configured, you can add these functions to your Bash profile (typically either ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile) to enable you to SSH into an instance by “Name” tag, or simply lookup the IP address or DNS hostname. hostname_from_instance <instance-name> ip_from_instance <instance-name> ssh-aws <instance-name> Bash code function hostname_from_instance() { echo $(aws ec2 describe-instances --filters "{\"Name\":\"tag:Name\", \"Values\":[\"$1\"]}" --query='Reservations[0].

This is one of a few quick tutorials I’ve had sitting around on my hard drive for a while. I’m posting it now for the sake of anyone who may find these instructions useful. It’s important to note that these are the instructions you’d use for a standalone EC2 instance. If your app is low-traffic enough to only need a single server, a better option would be to leverage a single-instance Elastic Beanstalk environment which gives you more, better and simpler deployment options.

The next version of PHP, which saw its first release candidate today, has some really awesome new features. You can see a complete list of changes in the README, but here are the ones that caught my eye. Classes Support for Traits (i.e., mix-ins; addresses the multiple-inheritance problem). Support for chaining from the constructor: (new Class)->method() Support for Class::{expr}() syntax. Closures inherit $this from the outer scope. Added ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor() to create a new instance of a class without invoking its constructor.

Although the AWS SDK for PHP is growing as fast as Amazon’s breadth of web services, it should still be easy to find the information that you need in order to develop. This is a goal that I take very seriously. Back in 2005, I took a job with Stryker Endoscopy as a member of their Internal User Experience team, where our focus was on Usability and User-Centered Design (UCD). (I take no responsibility for how bad their public website is!

It’s always been a dream of mine to get paid to work on something I love. I spent more than 5 years working on SimplePie, and although it gained hundreds of thousands of users all over the world, it never gave anything back to me. It was a labor of love, and I did it both for the recognition as well as my desire to take something complex and make it simple. In July 2007, while working on my startup — WarpShare — I rebooted my old Tarzan project, which was a wrapper around what is now Amazon’s Product Advertising API.

For the past several years, I’ve been developing a coding style for PHP that all began with SimplePie. Since then, I’ve been polishing the standards from one project to the next to the point where I believe that I have a solid, rational set of guidelines that others can share and re-use. Any feedback that other PHP developers may have is welcome. I’m hoping to incorporate the better bits of feedback into improvements to the standards. http://j.mp/php-standards

Historically, I’ve always preferred to use Apple’s built-in Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.x that comes with Leopard. However, after trying to compile PHP 5.3 from scratch and connect it with Apache, I decided to just use the MacPorts installer instead. That did mean giving up control of a finely-tuned Apache installation, but in the end, I think I’ve ended up with a better localhost system. Prerequisites Install MacPorts Also, make sure that your MacPorts install is completely up-to-date with:

The DOM I hate the DOM. Actually, I take that back. I love the DOM, but I hate the fact that generating DOM nodes in JavaScript is so verbose and unintuitive. You need to construct a new element, then add properties, then construct a child element, then add properties, then append the child to the parent, and the parent to whatever DOM object you want that’s already in the page. A few years ago I discovered Builder.node(), a component of Scriptaculous.

After 18 months of ongoing development, I am proud to announce the immediate availability of Tarzan 2.0! The Tarzan platform has complete support for six different AWS services (S3, CloudFront, EC2, SimpleDB, SQS, and Amazon Associates) and has been built from the ground-up to be fast, memory-efficient, easy to use, and easy to build on top of by providing a solid set of core tools for your (and our) web application. You can download the 2.0 release from http://bit.ly/tarzan2, and please Digg us at http://bit.

Today we announce an updated Tarzan pre-release build for any developers not using the subversion trunk. A lot of work has gone into Tarzan over the past 2 months since the last release, namely: Added the ability to change the content-type of an existing object in S3. Fixed some minor bugs in SimpleDB and S3. Re-wrote all of the documentation in the entire project (which enables us to generate awesome documentation which can be found on the Tarzan documentation page).

If you’ve been following my blog over the past few years, you might remember an old project I was working on back in early 2005 called Tarzan. At the time, the only Amazon web service was their e-catalog (e-commerce) service, and that was was Tarzan specialized in. I ended up scrapping the project around the same time as Geoffrey came to me and said that he wanted to help work on another one of my little side projects, SimplePie. Of course, as most of the web development community knows, SimplePie has gone on to be wildly popular and Tarzan essentially bit the dust.

I’ve spent a bit of time working with Amazon EC2 recently. One of the things I’ve been working on is getting a stable build of FFMPEG and FFMPEG-PHP running on a Fedora 8 image in Amazon EC2. This is essentially going to be a tutorial to get things up and running. Of course, your milage may vary. These instructions apply to a 32-bit Fedora 8 installation. The hardware I primarily use happens to be on EC2, but these instructions aren’t specific to EC2.

Internally known as “Aurora,” the new Yahoo! Messenger redesign has finally launched! I was going to write something up about it, but Ryan Doherty and Adrien Cahen have all written plenty. Check it out! :) Also, Digg it!

When we launched SimplePie Beta 2 last week, we launched with a couple of plugins. The first is a SimplePie Plugin for Wordpress, the ever-popular blogging tool from the fine folks at automattic. This plugin adds a single function to your Wordpress function ensemble that makes it simple to add SimplePie to your Wordpress templates. The other was the SimplePie Plugin for MediaWiki, the wiki software that powers the popular Wikipedia, by adding support for the <feed> tag in your wiki pages.

After several months of toiling over this release, and the past few weekends pouring over the documentation, we are now very proud to release SimplePie Beta 2! Nearly every major feature has been enhanced, as well as the addition of several new ones. Be sure to read the upgrade docs if you’re upgrading from Beta 1 or the Preview Release. People who were using trunk builds should be able to just drop this file in as a replacement for any previous simplepie.

RSS and Atom feeds that aren’t either UTF–8 or ISO–8859–1 have proven difficult to find, so I’m calling out to all of you. If you read or publish feeds that are in a character set other than these two, please post them here in the comments. We’ve just finished adding iconv support to SimplePie, and want to test that support (it’s in the trunk build as of this moment). Any help along these lines would be appreciated.

I had a problem with TinyMCE initializing on a new page today. After about 10 seconds of Googling, I had my answer: If you’re using both libraries, TinyMCE needs to be loaded before Scriptaculous. Thought I’d pass this little nugget along from one front-end developer to another. In completely unrelated news, I really need to fix up skyzyx.com don’t I? Yeah, it’s in bad shape. *Adds it to the list.* I finally have a strategy for it… I just need to execute that strategy.

One problem that I’ve had when working with dynamic DOM nodes is the inability to use entities with document.createTextElement(). I’ve read suggestions about using utf–16/ucs–2 values, but how do you find them and how do you convert them? This led me on a journey to figure out how to handle this. I ended up digging through some TinyMCE source code, and found a gem of a function that I then added a ‘stupefy’ mode to. Here’s the code: function entity(str, mode) { var str = (str) ?

Maybe I’m a little slow, but I’ve found an awesome little trick for people who use Firefox, and who need to dynamically add elements to the page via JavaScript. I’ve been doing a lot of Ajax development lately for an internal webapp where I need to dynamically add nodes to lists. In my source code, I’ll have an empty <ul> tag with an ID, then I use that ID when I go and add <li>’s to it. No big deal, right?

The newest release of SimplePie is here! There is barely a single unchanged line of code in this release, as we’ve been working for months to completely overhaul the entire SimplePie engine, and we’ve added several new features while we were at it. I could sit here and go over each and every things that’s new or better or changed, but I’ve already done that. To find out more about SimplePie, and what all it can do, check out the official SimplePie website.

It’s been a year since the last SimplePie release, but that doesn’t mean the project is dead. Fortunately I was able to get some help from Geoffers, and he actually ended up driving most of the development since he came on board over the summer. I wish I could tell you that a shiny new version 1.0 was available, but alas, not yet. What we do have, however, is a shiny new Preview Release — soon. What is SimplePie?

I’ve been working a lot with Oracle Portal over the last few months. My company is in the process of moving everything over to Oracle technology, and I’m a UI designer on the Portal team. We’ve been in the midst of usability testing over the last week or so, and one thing that has been coming up is the suggestion to make the “Other Tools” list of links customizable in some way. Most implementations typically involve clicking a button or link to go to the Edit page.

If you’re one of the many people clamoring about getting their hands on a Tarzan 1.2 Beta, check out the Tarzan Project Page for a link to the latest Incomplete Pre-Release Nightly Beta builds. Don’t cry if they break your computer. Have fun!

It’s still in the works, but I thought I’d give you all a sneak peek of the new Tarzan Control Panel. Check it out: I’ve still got some things to implement, bugs to fix, design tweaks to make, and API to build, but overall the new 1.2 version of Tarzan is shaping up extemely well. I don’t like to announce timelines for personal projects (as work/professional projects have been known to take up large chunks of time, and I have to dedicate myself to those in order to pay the bills), but I can say “soon”.

Tarzan 1.1 is now available. This release has so many new features, I can’t list them all. For that, you can read the release notes. There are also some minor changes for people upgrading from 1.0.x, so please look over the release notes anyways. Although there are zero API changes in this release, there are lots and lots of web interface improvements for people administering Tarzan installations. I’ve also laid the groundwork for keyword searching, which will be the primary feature of the next release.

Tarzan 1.0.1 is now available. This is a relatively minor update where only three things were changed: I resolved some localization issues that primarily affected France, Germany, and Japan. If you’re currently localized as an english-speaking country, you probably won’t notice anything new. However, setting the character encoding for your Tarzan-enabled pages to UTF–8 is highly recommended for US, UK, and Canadian installations, and required for French, German, and Japanese installations. I also tweaked the get_rating() function to add /5 to the end of the rating (since it’s out of 5 anyways).

Tarzan 1.0 is now available! There were only a couple of minor bug fixes since RC2, so existing installations shouldn’t be affected at all. I’ve also written a custom extension for displaying my own wishlist. If you’re interested in checking it out to build off of for your own wishlists (or whatever else it might be useful for), you can get ryan_wishlist.tzx here. And although I had wanted to add search capabilities to Tarzan by 1.0, I’ve decided to build an extension for that.

Tarzan 1.0 RC2 is now available for download. There are several new things in this version, including: Full support for all of Amazon’s locales (US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Japan), improved error handling, redesigned Tarzan info page, and a new demo page which combines the old sample.php and breakdown.php pages. All you UK’ers should now be set to go! I’ll be converting my wishlist over the next few days in an effort to flush out any remaining bugs before I declare this a 1.

The inital response to Tarzan has been very good! I got a handful of comments and several messages through my contact form about it. Overwhelmingly, people want to see Tarzan localized for their country’s version of Amazon. Initially, I started digging around to start implementing support for the UK. After a while of digging, however, I found out that I’m using an older version of the Amazon Web Services API. Fantastic. The new version (AWS 4.0) supports full localization in all of Amazon’s countries (U.

My birthday is in November, and Christmas is in December, so the “holidays” go for about a month-and-a-half. Every year, I’d start getting these questions like “What do you want for your birthday? What do you want for Christmas?”. Of course, when you’re asked on the spot like that, you can never remember what it is that you want, and you end up like the kid from A Christmas Story telling people you want a football or something. So, a few years ago, I came up with the brilliant idea of making my wishlist available on my website somewhere.

I quietly posted SimplePie 0.96 a few days ago, after having it in place in SimpleReader for about a week before that. So far, so good. For those of you currently using SimplePie, this new version makes more strides towards improving support for sucky feeds, tested support for PHP 5, and other bits of fine-tuning. You can download it, read the documentation for changes in this version, and report bugs and get support.

I know that a lot of people are using Magpie RSS to power their del.icio.us sidebar links, so I figured I’d throw out a code sample showing how you could use SimplePie for the same task. If you need to come to terms with why SimplePie might be a better choice of RSS parser, check out the SimplePie project page. The only other thing that might be worth mentioning is that SimplePie still has a difficult time with non-encoded special characters in feeds and feeds in non-western-european/non-american/non-australian languages.

Rather than completely hold off the next version of SimplePie until it’s totally complete (which appears to be taking some time), I’ve decided to make the current Beta versions available for testing purposes. Although it appears to be fairly stable, I wouldn’t recommend this for a production site just yet. If you’d like to test out the current Beta build (2004.12.03), you can do so a couple of ways: Basic Online Feed Reader utilizing the latest version of SimplePie The SimplePie source file The documentation file for this particular build Please take the time to test it with your feeds that you read.

Paul Griffin has just released SPG 1.1! For those who aren’t familiar with this project, Simple PHP Gallery is exactly that—an easy-to-use image gallery system, written in PHP. There are several new features listed on Paul’s SPG Mini-Site, but there are a few that are my favorites (as I was a beta tester for this and the last versions): Image Precaching This was one of the two features that I actually coded the original code for *grin*. In v1.0 and the early v1.

SimplePie 0.95 is now available. Anyone who is using any other version of SimplePie should update now. Major features/changes in this version include: Much improved support for reading all feeds, resolved display issues with <code> and <pre> tags, and added the ability to alter the display of feed dates using PHP’s date() variables. This version is pretty much feature-complete. The only remaining pre–1.0 work will be testing and catching any remaining bugs. I might add a couple of minor features, but nothing too major.

When I had originally written the SkyGPL license, my intent was to allow people to do all kinds of cool, creative things with my scripts, while still allowing me some sort of ownership and credit for my own work. That has been more or less the case. However, today I was going through the licenses available from Creative Commons, and I’ve decided to drop the SkyGPL all-together. All of my scripts will soon be re-licensed under either the Attribution License, Attribution-ShareAlike License, or the Attribution-NonCommercial License.

The new and improved SimplePie 0.94 is out. Major features/changes in this version include: Better support for non-English feeds, significantly improved support for poorly written feeds, automatic deletion of outdated cache files, and the stripping-out of potentially harmful tags (as per Mark Pilgrim’s suggestions). There’s still a smidge of fine-tuning left to do. Although I fixed a very high number of feeds in this release, I broke a small handful of others. The newly broken feeds include Forever Geek’s RSS (not Atom) feed, Asa’s notblog*, News.

I finally cracked the nut on the problem I was having with SimplePie. The compatibility fix I’ve been working on finally works for the two feeds that I was having a problem with. Thanks to Mark IJbema for nudging me in the right direction. The downside is that it slowed SimplePie down a bit. I think that it’s something I’ll let slide for this version, and try to tackle it for the next. I still need to go back through the list of 300+ feeds to make sure I haven’t broken something else, but assuming that all goes well, I’ll post SimplePie 0.

SimplePie 0.93 is now available. This release adds support for RSS and Atom auto-discovery, converting relative-to-the-root URL’s into absolute URL’s (like web browsers do), an improved caching process, and a variety of fixes to aid compatibility with poorly written feeds. SimplePie takes a very Apple-esque approach to feed parsing. Coming from the use of MagpieRSS, I decided to create a “feed parser for the rest of us”. One that is easy, logical, and doesn’t require too much of a background in PHP to use it.

I’ve been on a roll with SimplePie development lately (if you couldn’t already tell). Version 0.93 will probably be released in the next day or so, and at that point should be feature-complete. The remaining Pre–1.0 releases (0.94, 0.95, 0.96, etc.) will be dedicated to compatibility fixes. There are a lot of poorly coded feeds out there, and I need to know about them to that I can patch them up as best as possible. What I need from you are your reading lists.

In record time, SimplePie 0.92 is now available. This release adds all sorts of things such as better (and faster) caching, a user agent string, smarter handling of problematic characters and entities, and a fix for Mr. Dunstan’s feed. For those who are skeptical of “yet another feed parser”, or are hesitant to switch to (or begin using) SimplePie, let me explain it this way. Most RSS parsers go through this process of breaking a feed down into this big array, which may be fine for some, but can be impossible for beginners and newbies.

…well, their syndication feeds anyways. Here’s the problem: While working on SimplePie initially, I used copies of Dunstan’s Atom and RSS feeds because I felt that they’d be representative of most people’s decently well-formed feeds. I know that some people have worse feeds, and that Mark Pilgrim’s feeds are a bit too “academically” correct. Dunstan has a problem with his feed. He uses the numeric entity for a “smart-apostrophe” in his feed’s <title> tag. This happens to be a UTF–8 character.

SimplePie 0.91 is now available. This release adds support for URL’s with a relative path, better handling of some improperly written feeds, and fixes a problem where feeds weren’t getting loaded all the way before trying to parse them, causing SimplePie to choke.

Responses to the release of SimplePie 0.8 have been very positive. SimplePie has accomplished it’s goal of making it easier to create online feed readers, or anything else that requires RSS parsing. The only complaints that I got were mostly speed-related. Most people who sent me feedback thought that SimplePie was just too darn slow. Unfortunately, the speed issues were directly related to my use of Magpie RSS as the parsing engine. So, I decided to re-write it completely from scratch.

Have you ever wanted to create your own online RSS/Atom feed reader? Did you fiddle around with other solutions that just plain sucked? Did you try to use the awesome Magpie RSS, and just couldn’t get it to work like you wanted? Personally, I’m still fairly new to PHP, but I have a solid understanding of scripting principles and grasp of basic PHP syntax. Even still, I found Magpie a bit confusing sometimes as I was starting out with it. Because of this, I figured I’d try to make it easier for people like me to leverage Magpie’s power with a simpler command set.

I’ve got two posts on my laptop that I simply haven’t had the time to post. I’ll try to get to it this evening. Meanwhile, I recently found out that my cookie script has been recommended on IBM’s forums, my Java detection script has been talked about on Sun’s Java forums, my Message Center 5.5 script is gaining popularity at Coding Forums, and I continue to get help with ideas to improve my Flash detection script (which uses a format that I will soon switch all of my other detection scripts to because it’s more flexible).

Well, I’m getting better at this Mac OS X thing. I’ve been fiddling with it all for far too long today — trying to get some essentials installed — and I’m getting better. There are some things, however, that are irritating me although it’s not really Apple’s fault. The first would definitely be the lack of Feed Demon (my absolute favorite RSS reader) for Mac. I got NetNewsWire Lite installed, but ease of use and features aren’t even comparable to Feed Demon.

Something has just occurred to me: I haven’t had hardly any comment spam for a few months now. Did the spammers forget about me? I doubt it. Does Blocker have another side-effect that I hadn’t realized earlier? I’d appreciate any feedback from other Blocker users on this. Have you guys noticed a sharp decline in the comment spam you’ve been getting? Are you still having problems with certain ReferSpam entries? Are you getting more or less spam email in your inboxes?

Blocker 1.3r2 is now available. Revision 2 includes a few more referrers, and takes into consideration some ideas from other Blocker users. Get it while it’s hot.

New releases of Blocker and Feed Parser are now available. Blocker 1.3 sports the blocking of 120 more bots than v1.2 did, as well as some new referrers that I’ve just been made aware of over the last week. I’ll be releasing point-point-releases to this as I’m able to analyze more Blocker data from users. Feed Parser 0.6 sports support for RSS 0.9x, RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), and Atom 0.3. Support for RSS 1.0 Modules and OPML is in the works.

I’ve just released an update for Feed Parser bringing us up to version 0.5.1. This release sports full support for RSS 1.0, as well as the RSS 0.9x and 2.0 support that’s been there for a while. Credits for the people who’ve helped me get through tough spots are listed in the release notes and in the code (wherever they contributed). If you’re a Gecko/Mozilla Application Developer itching to develop your own Syndicated News Reader, this engine will do the bulk of the dirty work for you.

I remember when I first came across A List Apart. It was a great e-zine that taught me a great deal about web design, web standards, and how to be an all-around better web guy. It was great. I also remember seeing the teaser for ALA 3.0. I couldn’t wait for the awesome design that would come out of the mind of my favorite web guy, Jeffrey Zeldman. Then it debuted. Ugh. Are they serious? But, as many people commented, the content is key.

I’ve been using a PHP script called “Blocker” to block unwanted visitors to my website for several months now. It started out as a way to block refer spam from my refer list, and has grown to a full-fledged blocker of IP’s, Hostnames, Referrers, and User Agents. About once a month, I go through my raw access logs and check to see who’s been visiting me (and who I need to block from visiting me again). This morning, I’ve added several new spambots to the list of things to block.

Joe Lieberman spammed me today! Well, kind of. He’s apparently using the very-evil “StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004” to spam people’s Refer lists so that he can rank higher in search engines, or at least get people to click through to his site. Y’know all of that comment spam going around? Yeah, well this is the same thing, except for referrer lists. Lucky, I have “refer spam” countermeasures in place. I’ve got a series of IP’s, Referrers, Hostnames, and SpamBot User Agents that have been blocked for one reason or another.

After going back and checking my referrers over the last month, I’ve noticed a few spam bots coming to my website, I assume trying to harvest email addresses. I’ve encoded mine as unicode, so I haven’t been too worried. This past Saturday I received my first spam email on my oh-so-secret personal email account. I was rather irritated to say the least. Also, this morning, I got some comment spam on one of my earlier posts. Luckily, Movable Type emails me the IP of people who make comments on my site.

I’ve made a few subtle changes to my CSS stylesheet. The yellow I used for quoting and noting code was beginning to hurt my eyes. So, I’ve changed a few colors to make it all blend a little better. I’ve also done some fine-tuning on the spacing of certain elements (namely <h?> tags). I also released the new version of my calendar script tonight. It’s a shiny, new version 1.2 and a whopping 7.19k for the JavaScript library, the CSS file, three (count them, three) demo files, and an XML document.

I got a message today from Henrik Gemal. He pointed out to me that there are differences in how my Flash Detection Script displays the Flash Version. Flash 7.0 r2 displays as “7.0.2” when flash.version is called. To me, this makes the most sense, since that’s what an “r2” would mean anyways. It also makes it easier when comparing Flash versions to do a String.split() followed by a parseInt() on a particular section of the version string. However, I didn’t know about the occasional developer’s build, namely “Shockwave Flash 7.

I’ve been eyeing PPK’s Flash Detection Script for quite some time now. The only problem is that the IE part is written in VBScript, and I’m not familiar with the nuances of VBScript yet. After taking a look at the security hole in Internet Explorer posted below, and looking at the VBScript version that I’ve posted as “CD Voodoo”, I managed to figure out (with the help of try-catch error handling) how to re-write PPK’s script in JavaScript/JScript, thus enabling the script to live happily inside a JavaScript Library (.