Ben Nadel declared June 1, 2008 the first National Regular Expression Day, and to celebrate he hosted a giveaway of regex-related prizes, including Jeffrey Friedl’s Mastering Regular Expressions. As you can see, I won the book and got it in the mail yesterday. I use regular expressions all the time—in PHP, JavaScript, Perl, sed, [...]
In honor of WordPress’s fifth birthday, I’ve surveyed about 6000 blogs to see how many are running WordPress. This is the same group that I queried back in January, when I created a spider that harvested the blogs from all of Technorati’s main blogging categories.
CMS
Count
Percentage
WordPress
2178
34.3
Unknown
1523
23.98
Blogger
1207
19.01
Typepad
340
5.35
Movable Type
338
5.32
WordPress.com
136
2.14
As you can see, WordPress dominates the known [...]
When I was first learning web development about ten years ago, I frequently consulted Webmonkey.com for tutorials about how to do all things “DHTML.” I still remember how an article comparing frames to a cafeteria tray made it all click for me, for some reason. I also picked up some bad habits that I [...]
A friend and I keep having different permutations of the same conversation, which revolves around this question: what is the essential explanation for Islamic terrorism? My friend’s answer is that it’s primarily religious; in other words, that something intrinsic to Islam spurs on suicide bombers and the like. I disagree for a number [...]
That’s the lesson I take from Kyle Neath’s critique of OpenID (HT: Ma.tt), from his first point, the one that I think has the most traction. OpenID servers should allow users to associate their account with several OpenID providers, if they want, and/or an email address.
I’ve been experimenting with getting regular expression patterns to match over multiple lines using sed. For example, one might want to change
<p>previous text</p>
<h2>
<a href="http://some-link.com">A title here</a>
</h2>
<p>following text</p>
to
<p>previous text</p>
No title here
<p>following text</p>
sed cycles through each line of input one line at a time, so the most obvious way to match a pattern that extends [...]