AltME groups: search

I would like to see more examples of how this works. I kind of get 
why its nice to seperate tasks on a large scale site but is there 
still an advantage for a small self built/maintained site.

Perhaps that is a secret code.  what's the tuple for lemon-juice? 
RGBA = 255.255.00 ?

Thanks Peter, I'll give those suggestions a try..

Has anyone written a web-shopping cart system using Rebol? So a simple 
CGI api to add/remove stuff to a shopping cart? Felxible enough so 
that it can be integrated with existing web-pages and shopping cart 
content can be forward to different check-out system?

Robert I don't know of any and ask this same question long ago which 
is why I came up with the idea of Rcommerce which would be a REBOL 
based solution similiar to oscommerce.  Many here were vocal about 
it not being something that anyone would trust so I let it the idea 
die.

I do have experience using oscommerce and it worked very well but 
again not a REBOL solution but is at least an open source solution.

Robert, if you just going to forward your items to another check-out-system 
then I thing that is something rather simply to implement via REBOL 
and CGI.  It is when you want to use REBOL to handle the check-out 
system also with the interface to the payment gateway system is where 
I think many people had reservations about using a REBOL solution.

Yes, I know oscommerce (or xtcommerce which is IIRC a fork). I use 
Rapidweaver for Web-Pages so I would like to integrate all this.


The problem I have is, that all these shop system push you to use 
their layout engine etc. There is none I know, that just does the 
non-gui backend part.

I used an oscommerce customer package that I payed for from a service 
which populated my distributers content.  they didn't support all 
my distributors which left me doing a lot of work.

I made the mistake of enabling my entire inventory on Shopzilla once. 
 Needless to say I had a LOT of traffic to mysite.  I had a lot of 
order but I had my competative pricing on and ended up losing money 
in advertising costs because of it.

Now, I'm a lot smarter ;-)

Ok, thanks for all this input. I will think about this a bit and 
see where to go. For me an online-shop system has to be made of independent 
modules.

From the dark ages long gone; 

did not Ralph Roberts a shopping system in Rebol for his book Rebol 
for Dummies ?

Anyone know how to view a website you are are self hosting. I know 
you can view it using localhost but I want to use the url. I remember 
reading somewhere that it was possible but I can not find it now. 
Something about the DNS...

this is a guess,  http://domainName/virtualFolderPath

do you have a domain name assigned to your computer? if it is then 
you can access it as anybody else ... I am not sure I understand 
... if you have a virtual host set and you want to test if it works 
(and are on windos) you can add www.yourdomain.com  to hosts file 
in winnt/system32/drivers

I'm using dyndns as I have a dynamic ip. 

If i type my url into the browser from a macine outside my local 
network I get my web page. If I do it from within my local network 
(even on a different machine) I can't not get through to the page 
"Cannot display webpage" error.

It's not just http. I'm accessing a mysql server too with the same 
problem resulting. 

I know I can use "localhost but I would need to change my code everytime 
I'm using it locally.

I was going to use a linux server...I' may switch back to windows 
though..

Oldes, That worked on my windows box. Thanks alot!

Anyone know how that works on a linux box?

Any recommendations for a domain registration service?

sitelutions.com, configure everything via web interface, cheap. since 
many years never had a problem.

I've used directnic for a long time. No problems that I can recall, 
but my needs have been very simple.

Has anybody wriitten a "flush" function that sends data back to the 
browser before the CGI script has finished running?

that would be a good trick

Graham: I could spawn another process but have had problems with 
both using 'call to launch a second Rebol process on Mac OS X; any 
console output from the spawned Rebol session is sent to the browser 
in addition to the output it should receive from the cgi process.

And if you called a shell script that ran the rebol process?

I tried to find such a "flush" mechanism for REBOL.org (running Apache 
under a generic GNU/Linux OS).

It would have been very useful (still would be).......But I never 
found anything that worked.

Sadly, even if you call a shell script that runs the rebol process 
:-(

I'm now not sure if flushing the html to the borwser is necessry. 
I tried with a simple test. Firefox displayed the page immediately 
but the connection to the server was kept open. Safari didn't display 
the page unitl the connection to the server was closed.


I dug a lttle deeper into Apache Docs and it seems that Apache doesn't 
buffer simple html output.


It seems that the "problem" is getting the browser to display the 
html before the connection to the server is closed.

And, is there a REBOL version for something like PHPMailer?

With QM, I use QuickTags (integrated into RSP or standalone) to build 
the form elements, and then wrap common constructs in functions.for 
data-driven forms.  It's not as pure as say, Henrik's HTML dialect, 
but perhaps has the flexibility of being at markup level.

http://www.ross-gill.com/page/QuickTags


Alternatively I have a make-doc dialect (somewhat rough) that I use 
for forms on my site wiki.

http://2008.rebolconf.info/on/!Edit_Form?format=raw

Is QM integrated into RSP pages? I think I need to take a closer 
look (and hope I will get it).

I'm trying to find out what's the "best practice" process for forms 
is. But after a bit of research I think it's: Do it by hand. Forms 
are not very complicated. All the generators, tools etc. are quite 
limited when it comes how to process a form. I use MooTools as AJAK 
lib and it has some very nice validator things.

I don't know what it is about doing table-free designs, but I personally 
think it's damn hard to do. You have some parameters that you can 
adjust for CSS that are cryptic and difficult to guess how the layout 
will be. With a table, you have cells, adjustment, width and many 
predictable elements. I think it's because CSS is underpowered for 
what it's meant to do, and the ability to separate design from content 
(desktop vs. phones) is a tad overrated, if it just makes site design 
and construction that much harder.

sorry: "But it's ridiculous to assume that CSS/DIVs are the main 
bandwidth hogs for webpages.", should be: "But it's ridiculous to 
assume that tables are more of a bandwidth hog than CSS/DIVs for 
webpages."

Depends to what degree you use html to define visual aspects.  The 
comparison above is talking old school page design where your markup 
contains all the bgcolors, widths, font colours, etc. (FrontPage-esque) 
 Typically this approach does significantly increase page size.  
Using tables mainly as an alternative to <div> as a way to divide 
up page components in an otherwise CSS driven design isn't going 
to be at all costly in comparison.  Actual bandwidth cost I guess 
is case specific.

I'd possibly consider myself a CSS 'purist' - I like that it encourages 
a language oriented approach to page/site design (not a language 
of Rebol's calibre, indeed, but a nod in that direction : )   The 
trade off can be in the complexity in implementing layout, but really 
there are few patterns that have not been mapped out.

I use tables to presend data that belongs into tables and where it 
makes sense. I didn't use tables for general layout in a long time. 
I am not any purist but I find other ways much better than tables 
for this. It can make quite messy code and they don't degrade well 
to smaller screens.. etc..

the web is a good distibution system... its just about all it really 
does pefectly... and that's the only thing it was designed to do.


I don't agree that web programming itself is easier, unless you really 
are doing easy apps.  


IMHO Rich clients are the best of both worlds combined into one seamless 
experience

There's also a page at 37signals.com advocating for web-based software 
: http://37signals.com/webbased

One of the advantage listed is : "You’ll never have to ask “Is it 
compatible?”"...good joke:-)

I don't get it... I've always built websites like that. Using a paint 
program to do it is just impossible. :-)

I've once worked with this process of first having a designer building 
mockups in photoshop, then they were moved to Dreamweaver and I had 
to "graft" javascript on top of it, and whenever the designer made 
a change, I had to start from scratch. The customer demanded to see 
the site in full function. We moved so slowly, the project was dropped 
after a few months. 


Another time, I finished the project, but it took so long to do, 
because the design was nearly impossible to convert to HTML/JS. That 
was 5 years ago.

And people are just realizing this now?

Isn't the WHOLE thing simply insane?  After all these years, there 
is not a tool that allows both programmers and artists to work on 
the SAME data?  All strange...

Xara pretends to be such a tool, but otoh I did not found, how to 
easily adjust using code .....
http://www.xara.com/eu/products/webdesigner/features/

Many of the problems arise, because designers/developers/programmers 
try to make html do, what it wasn't supposed to do in the first place.


When making a movie, one might start out by drawing a storyboard. 
Later in the process, a camera is used to shoot some film, and in 
the end a story is told, that may or may not be close to the original 
storyboard. But it works, because the final output (images within 
a frame) is the same kind of thoughts that goes into creating the 
storyboard (images within a frame).


Designers think in the line of the final output, but html isn't wysiwyg, 
and the html technology might not be well suited for the ideas, the 
designer has. So problems arise. ... Or something. ;-)

I use Balsamico for my mock-ups. I like the tool a lot. And it can 
convert mock-ups to code via emitters.

a better web is coming, just got this from google:

Dear Google Apps admin, 


In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated 
features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements 
in web browser technology. ÊThis includes faster JavaScript processing 
and new standards like HTML5. ÊAs a result, over the course of 2010, 
we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 
as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own 
manufacturers.


We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the 
Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. ÊAfter 
that point, certain functionality within these applications may have 
higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. 
Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers 
for Google Mail and Google Calendar.


Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, 
Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 
and above.


Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message 
in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change 
and asking them to upgrade their browser. ÊWe will also alert you 
again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.


In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements 
to enhance your product experience. ÊWe are aiming to beat that in 
2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration 
products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

I'm creating a forum and using R3 CGI to output a page.  How do we 
send the Doctype to page?

and obviously you can have all the image data in a javascript file 
as well (for which you probably already have a longer cache expire 
set up)

I think the only downside of a data: url is it's not supported in 
IE, iirc.

that was an example, but there are others... reboltutorial, Nick's 
learn programing site, Olde's flash site, rebol.org, rebol weekly 
news links, etc etc... I think that having a unique source for all 
of that rich rebol content is very usefull for everyone.

And if so, we need a permanent host for it

Andreas, you're right... same with using a title search with construct. 
 it returns nothing.

Hmm.. I had not exclusion rules for rebol.com ... you sure that there 
isn't a no robots directive higher in this path?

if this construct page can't be found by any of the search engines 
... is there a no robots directive ?

There's a lot to be said for a custom site specific search engine.

Looks like you can have a great deal of fun setting up the search 
engine parameters

If you can get to them from the root, then they are fair game, unless


.....they have a rel=nofollow......We have that on a few simply because 
they duplicate content (eg viewing a script, viewing a script in 
color, downloading a script


....Mailing list -- best to index either the individual posts (http://www.rebol.org/ml-display-message.r) 
or the complete threads (http://www.rebol.org/ml-display-thread.r) 
but not both.


....you may get a __lot__ of duplication when spidering the AltME 
archive as every post has a URL, but we display in batches of 50.....So 
perhaps only spider URLs like
http://www.rebol.org/aga-display-posts.r?post=r3wp291xNNNN
when NNNN is 1, 51, 101, 151, etc....


....I think You already have indexed the ML as on REBOL.,net and 
Carl's latest 300 AltME messages, eg
   http://mail.rebol.net/cgi-bin/mail-list.r?msg=45305
   http://host4.altme.com/altweb/rebol3/chat771.html

It would be better _not_ to have index those; it just creates duplicates 
once you have indexed the equivalents on REBOL.org (especially as 
the AltMe last 300 goes out of date so quickly).

Tell me what is unclear there!

I think the REBOL.org archive is a better place to send people than 
then REBOL.net one for the ML (it has threads not just messages in 
id sequence).
So perhaps index REBOL.org's then drop the REBOL.net one?

Interestingly this search engine has a REST interface so you can 
wrap your own custom search around it.  95k pages and still going 
...

If you add a public annotation, then any diigo enabled browser will 
see them.

I think this fear of having to redo a bunch of effort is keeping 
quite a few sites from really breaking through - you only feel confident 
about these kind of features from already established sites

that's why my view is that you should always own your stuff - the 
cloud should only be used as a temporary cache, or when you need 
grid computing  - just some infrastructure that can be easily substituted 
with another

actually for grid computing, I meant when you need huge power - otherwise, 
a grid of personal computing devices could constitute a powerful 
enough grid

they've been running for 4 years now .. so I guess that's a little 
reassurance

In my approach, the mapping between the data and the "view" is defined 
by a dialect. I guess, one might want to make at least part of that 
mapping part of the view; this does not change the fact that the 
template file can then be simple HTML.

Formatting

 to me does not seem a templating issue though. It's about localization 
 and customization (different users will want different formats for 
 dates, and almost everything else). So, this is a completely separate 
 axis. As Carl often says... the problem is multidimensional, reducing 
 it just to "model" and "view" is not really going to work.

(for example, when he says that "the calculation of a subtotal belogs 
to the view", i disagree that the actual code to compute the sum 
belongs to the view. the view should allow for declaratively defining 
such kind of things. page subtotals, for example, was a feature i 
intended to have in PDF Maker 2 tables - since you don't know where 
the table is going to be split at, the engine has to be able to do 
the work for you.)

has anyone here worked on a firefox plugin before?

any tips for wget tool allowing to go via form authentication? We 
need to make off-line copy of one site. The site works only from 
one PC at a time from our organisation, it seems it uses cookies 
or so ....

Petr, I think you need to take a look into curl stuff for this.

Many of the concepts are a lot like how I started the first phase 
of my CMS three years ago, but the implementation is a bit different

Is anyone here familiar with the current state of WYSIWYG web designers? 
Are there any decent current free ones? I'm only familiar with Kompozer 
(the new Nvu) and have heard good things about WebMatrix. This is 
for a person familiar with Frontpage, but I'm trying to disuade them 
from using it (for all our sakes), and don't want to encourage piracy 
of Dreamweaver or Expression Web.

There's been a lull in KompoZer development, but it's reasonable 
now

It still has a lot of quirks, though

Would using any modern word processor then saving as HTML be any 
worse than Frontpage? ;) I wouldn't do a complex site this way, but 
for a couple of static pages it may suffice.

If Frontpage is the alternative, WebMatrix looks a lot better. However, 
it's focused on developers and complex backends. If the goal is simple 
web pages for a common user, KompoZer is probably better, and more 
in the ballpark of Frontpage

I just remembered that there's a successor to KompoZer:

If you are on OSX take a look at Rapidweaver. Really good.

Steve Jobs made a good point in an interview not long ago: "PC's 
are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this 
is going to make some people uneasy."

Exactly, and there's the opportunity as most people (and tools) are 
still stuck with a "mywebsite.com for desktops and mywebsite.com/m 
for mobiles" model.

designing for a small browser still requires re-designing the layout. 
 no way round that.

I'm not sure that there will be a distinction between mobile browsing 
and desktop browsing for too much longer (no longer than a decade, 
IMO). Just a few more tech advances in battery life will allow for 
practical pico projectors to be included into any mobile device. 
An alternative that increases viewable area is foldable displays 
- they exist already in prototype form - just need to be commercialized. 
HUDs and retinal displays are others. These are not sci-fi anymore. 
But if you're just talking about the next couple of years or so, 
I agree.

yeah the first not crappy plasma screens where 60000$  and they didn't 
come down for a long time.

It is a long time I last looked into ajax libraries.  I know I tend 
not to use mainstream stuff, but often based upon coolness of the 
technology :-) Many ppl talk jquery, even MS is adopting it for SharePoint, 
but what about e.g.:

Mootools
YUI - http://yuilibrary.com/
Dojo Toolkit - http://dojotoolkit.org/
Sencha Touch - http://www.sencha.com/
DHTMLx - http://dhtmlx.com/
Prototype - http://www.prototypejs.org/

SmartGWT (successor to GWT) - http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#main
http://dojotoolkit.org/

Any experience, preference? What are YOU using?

I'm still using JQuery .. but it's a hard slog.  But I might switch 
to using Enyo if it's as good as it looks

I can imagine REBOL dialect to build code for many such a toolkits, 
but as I say.. I don't want to spend time on it at this moment.

I used dojo a litle a whwile ago, I found the event handling very 
clean. I've read that dojo is stronger for single page apps that 
many of the other frameworks.

I recently used Kompozer to build a quick site to fix a friend's 
site that was so bad I figured I could at least spend a few hours 
and take it from a 1 to a 6 (scale one to ten).

There are a few variations of Kompozer.  But Kompozer is the best 
of them.


It still sucks though.  When you do view source it does not put your 
cursor where you expect it to.  It is nightmarish to figure out how 
to edit tables. 
But, over all, if you keep things simple, it works well enough.

mobile browsing expected to outpace desktop access in 3-5 years.

Most of the world lives on their cell phones.


As to JavaScript Frameworks to fix the biggest human fail in computer 
history (that being that we use HTML+JavaScript to build UserInterface), 
having headed the creation of a complete UI system that is delivered 
through the web, I will say the following:


- Find something that handles Tables (grids, lists) well.  Make sure 
it does verything you need.

- Make a list for yourself of widgets you care about, and confirm 
(assume nothing) about the level of detail with which they operate. 
 For example, Imagine 3 radio buttons, on the web they have no default 
state, and some interfaces allow them to operate like checkboxes, 
not radio buttons.  Again, assume nothing!

- Confirm, for yourself, they work on the platforms you care about. 
 Nothing works on everything, even when they claim it.


I did not want to build Quilt, but we still don't know anything that 
comes close other than Tibco's crap, and I'm not sure they even sell 
it anymore. (I recall it was like $100K).

a good resource I found to start using HTML 5 and help make those 
pages work somewhat backwards compatible on non html5 browsers.

http://diveintohtml5.org/

it has a nice retrospect of HTML and tackles a single question... 
"why do we have an <IMG> tag in html?"... the answer is surprisingly 
simple and evocative:
The ones that win are the ones that ship.

funny... the leading OS is called WINdows   ;-)

about JS libs:

I don't use jQuery .. it's oweblown for what I want (I don't need 
it to reinvent javascript). If I need any complex components like 
datepicker (which I don't want to reinvent) I use mootools usually 
(because you can use just needed parts of it). jQuery UI modules 
(which has this) are very very slow and CSS is so complex I don't 
even start to get it how to customize it.


Dojo always seemed this mega lib that I don't want either. If I go 
to their demos (at least last time I looked) everything is slow and 
unresponsive. I want my things to be slim on code and snappy.


Prototype (mootools does this also, but I think a little less) is 
first generation JS lib (that started it all). I think it heavily 
monkey patches the core JS/DOM objects.. thats why I don't like it.


I also neve use css3 selectors in my JS code (that is a major part 
why people use jquery and likes). I always move relative to an element 
with seekFwd, seekIn, seekOut, seekBack fuctions I have or just use 
ID of element (and then seek if needed).

onetom, do you have a site using this angularisjs ?

http://misko.hevery.com/2010/07/29/a-radically-different-way-of-building-ajax-apps/

here is a video about angular. it's one hour but it worth very much 
to watch.

and yes, i have a site using angular, but it's a work in progress, 
so i can't show it publicly. privmsg me if u r interested

So, angular is a DSL that is compiled into JS client side to handle 
all the dom manipulation and other stuff that you would normally 
have to write JS to do ...or use Jquery functions.

Sounds like a neat idea .. less is better !

angular is a js library which interprets special tags, attributes 
and element values in the dom and sets up an event handler system 
behind the scenes which keeps model objects in sync w the dom content 
(back and forth)

ah, I just put back some toolbars which are off by default... making 
a bit more sense.

u seem to be a prisoner of your habits. toolbars? in a browser? what 
is the good for? :)

finally i dont have to start with turning off the bookmarks bar on 
a fresh install. most ppl dont use it anyway... and probably FF maker 
have *measuered* this. and giving more space for the content worth 
more than bookmarking