Jeff Epler's blog

Online Anagrammer with AJAX

At the office, we frequently do a scrambled word puzzle from the newspaper. Occasionally I overlook the answer for minutes at a time. In the past I've used various websites or programs to find solutions to these problems, but now I've written my own very fast one from scratch. It includes commandline and web interfaces (including ajax for lightning-fast updates).

You can try it or get the source.

Whine!!!!!!!&exclam;

Terrible HTML documentation

Having recently tried to write some documentation, I'm a bit struck by how much all the alternatives I'm aware of suck. All I want is to get a nice HTML and PDF output of a document with a few tables. Some signs pointed towards this thing called "openjade", which is a "document style semantics and specification language" (I guess).

Imagine how unimpressed was when I got a look at the documentation they had produced—If anybody is going to have good-looking documentation it should be the people making the "document style" software! At first I thought of blaming myself because I had a wide screen, but it's even bad on a maximized window on a 1024x768 monitor, with its black text over a terrible dithered dark blue background.

I guess I'll go back to writing HTML by hand and using "File > Print" to produce PDF. Or maybe I'll write LaTeX again and berate people who don't seem to know how to use xpdf.

glif: generate client-side gif files from javascript

It probably won't be the biggest thing since AJAX, but I hit upon the idea of generating images client-side. The current ways to do this seem to involve using tables or absolute-positioning of very small DIVs. (See, for example, http://www.walterzorn.com/jsgraphics/jsgraphics_e.htm) My technique, which I call glif (for GIF and glyph), generates a gif-format image on the client side.

One application for this that comes immediately to mind is client-side generation of sparklines-type images, possibly from an AJAX source.

glif.html is a small demo which draws a sine wave in an image (Known not to work in IE) Update: SparGlif demo

Timestamp-based caching for filesystem-based dynamic websites

aether is nice, but it's a bit slow, especially when many local files must be parsed to produce a single page. cache.cgi is a simple program that, in cooperation with any filesytem-based dynamic website, can serve from a cached copy of the page when it is appropriate to do so.

Aethertool 0.6 Released

A new version of aethertool, 0.6, has been released. Compared to 0.5, it features mostly cleanups.

New version of aethertool (formerly called commandline tools for Æther)

This version features image rotation and optimization, "put" and "blog entry suffix" commandline switches, and more

Wikipedia-like floating thumbnails for Æther

Adds a family of markup functions for floating images with thumbnails. It also replaces [image] to include the image's size. This module requires PIL, which is used to find the size of images.

Comments for Æther

This module adds comments to Æther blogs and other pages.