There's a new blojsom release out there and we're responsible for the new default theme. Currently it matches the look of our site, but we're thinking about some cool improvements and blojsom style colors scheme. The theme uses tableless layout with valid XHTML & CSS code.

Thanks to David Czarnecki for the collaboration and support.

Most of you know who Jeffrey Zeldman is, but do you know who's the Bulgarian Zeldman? The funny photo of my friend Boby, recreating the "Designing with web standards" book cover has inspired the today's Blue Beanie Day announcement. If you care about web standards and accessibility then you can show your support by wearing a Blue Beanie on Monday, November 26, 2007. Switch your Facebook profile photo and post it to the Flickr pool. Enjoy!

A few months ago I was exited to see the new Canvas based JavaScript Chart engine created by Emil of WebFX. Canvas emulation in Internet Explorer using VML is really challenging, so we can't be more than happy that Google has an open source project that does this job for us.

Yesterday I started evaluating various charting components for a large e-health application and my first choice was the WebFX Chart. Of course Flash is always an option, but we still don't need it that badly and we're trying to avoid it when possible. Everything went smooth, I was able to customize the background and legend suffixes, but then I got stucked: it doesn't print in Internet Explorer. Such issues can be problematic if you want to promote such evolving new technologies.

I had the time to dive into the issue and the VML docs available on the net. It's a powerful technology that in fact has no problem with printing. After some digging I found the problem and here are the two possible solutions:

Using the original excanvas.js you need to add the following CSS to your documents:
g_vml_\:*{ behavior: url(#default#VML); }

You can also hack the library by changing line 56 with the one below:
"g_vml_\\:*{behavior:url(#default#VML)}";

This is also the bug fix I've proposed to the excanvas team.

Plotkit is also a good charting framework that suffers from the same printing issue.

Opera 9 has good support for the Canvas tag, but looks like it doesn't print it at all. I still haven't the possibility to check the situation with Safari 2.

Update: The fix was accepted and this functionality will be available in the next excanvas release.

Since we've started this website I'm looking for a syntax highlighting tool that can be used for code samples. Geshi seems to be great, but since I'm using Tomcat I cannot run PHP scripts that easily. The same applies to the well-known Beautifier highlighter and it hasn't been updated for long time. Flash Text Formatter is a good one, but to me it seems more appropriate for full Flash websites. So one day while I was browsing at the YUI examples I saw another engine that uses pure JavaScript to highlight most of the languages that I need. This is how I've chosen the dp.SyntaxHighlighter and below you can see some samples of it:

CSS:
/* hide from ie on mac \*/ html { height: 100%; overflow: hidden; } #flashcontent { height: 100%; } /* end hide */ body { height: 100%; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #FFFFFF; }

JavaScript:
if(typeof asual.util == "undefined") asual.util = new Object(); asual.util.Functions = new function() { this.extend = function(superclass, subclass) { function inheritance() {} inheritance.prototype = superclass.prototype; subclass.prototype = new inheritance(); subclass.prototype.constructor = subclass; subclass.superConstructor = superclass; subclass.superClass = superclass.prototype; return subclass; } this.bindAsListener = function(method, object, win) { return function(evt) { return method.call(object, evt || ((win) ? win.event : window.event)); } } }

ActionScript:
// SWFAddress code and initialization import flash.external.*; function execSWFAddress(addr:String):Void { // Begin custom navigation // ... // End custom navigation syncSWFAddress(addr, title); } function syncSWFAddress(addr:String):Void { ExternalInterface.call('syncSWFAddress', addr); } function loadSWFAddress(addr:String):Void { execSWFAddress((addr == 'null') ? '' : addr); } loadSWFAddress((swfaddress) ? swfaddress : ''); ExternalInterface.addCallback('loadSWFAddress', this, loadSWFAddress);

This showcase uses a custom copy of dp.SyntaxHighlighter that matches the look and feel of our website. It also includes improved CSS highlighting, ActionScript support and a minor Ruby related fix. I'm providing my version for download and I hope that one day I'll find some time to convert it to a blojsom plugin.

Our blog is up for 2 weeks and I'm happy to see that the lead blojsom developer David Czarnecki writes about it on his blog. We're also listed on sites running blojsom page next to sites like Apple OS X Tiger Server, JBoss and Hewlett-Packard Labs Semantic Blogging.

May be you're wondering what blojsom is? Its one of the best open source java blog systems out there, very lightweight, file based, with extensible plugin architecture. It was inspired by another weblog application called blosxom. Apple is going to include blojsom in their next OS X Server.

I'm still polishing the look of this blog but once its ready I will contribute our theme to the blojsom community. It conforms with the latest XHTML and CSS recommendations so hopefully people will like it.