Geoff Holden

I don’t think anyone will argue against the point that a lot of applications that were traditionally desktop-based are now moving on to the web. Google has proved that you can make very rich, very responsive, and very good web applications; GMail, Google Maps, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, Reader, etc. are all applications I use regularly. While some of them may not have all the features of their fat counterparts, the fact they they work anywhere with a ‘net […]

Now, several weeks after it was supposed to be done and posted, I finally finished version 1.0 of my posting frequency plugin for WordPress.

The options screen is still terribly ugly, and the default colours come from the colour scheme for this site (but are configurable).

So, if you’re running WordPress, try it out.

On October 5th, Google Code Search was unleashed upon the world. People have found many uses for it so far, like finding things that people don’t want found, or finding other security bugs. Now, some people have been known to find some entertainment or humour in off searches (I wouldn’t know anything about that). So, in that vein, what would make good code searches?

I thought to search for common comments that developers […]

Almost 14 months since the previous release, a new version fo XFN Graph has been released to the world.

A lot of ‘under the hood’ changes with this one, as I refactored almost everything to make it much easier to work with. The spider porition is now multi-threaded, so it spiders sites much faster now. I’ve also replaced the default JGraph visualization library with Prefuse; part of doing that was refactoring things so that new […]

Unless you’re reading this with a feed reader, or are a first time visitor, you’ve probably noticed that I changed the site design (again). This is the third major design since I launched GeoffHolden.com back in October 2004; three designs in two and a half years isn’t too bad.

I’m pretty happy with this one (for now anyways). It has several new features that the old design didn’t have:

It actually expands to use the whole browser width.
It adds the categories/tags features […]

There’s been a lot of talk about Java lately, mostly because JavaOne is currently underway in San Francisco, but it’s got me thinking about Java’s future, should it have one.

When Java was released in the early 90’s, it got itself a bad name, applets where overused, slow, and usually useless. The niche that was once filled by these applets has long been taken over by Flash now.

Java has made huge inroads on the server-side. Java Server Pages and similar frameworks […]

If you’re into fancy web tricks/layouts/etc. and you haven’t already, check out Lightbox JS v2.0. It’s a neat little script that lets you link to images and have them display on top of your current page, without having to navigate away.

I’ve been meaning to try to integrate it into my photo gallery for some time now, and finally sat down and did it this evening. So, if you try to browse through my gallery now, and click on […]

I just read yet another article about how extra white space in HTML code is wasting bandwidth. I have several issues with these articles, the first of which is that people actually believe them.

Here are what I think are the main issues:

Most large sites use HTTP Compression. This means that for all text files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) the server is compressing the file before sending it “down the wire”, where your browser will decompress it. GZip is […]

As you or may not notice as you’re reading this, I’ve made a few minor updates to the style of this site. I wanted to give the site a little more style, pizzazz, panache, and might I even dare to suggest cachet? (Oh, it’s got cachet, baby! It’s got cachet up the yin-yang!)

Now, as a warning, if you happen to be using IE the page might look slightly worse than before–the round corners will be far less smooth than they […]

I just finished the relase of XFN Graph v1.2. This version removes the text labels on all the links, opting for a colour-coded approach. Maybe the choice between the text and the colours will be an option in a future version.
Here’s the list of what’s changed:

Added a more visual representation of what the links are.
Added Help.
Made the spider follow frames as belonging to the same site.
Fixed a bug whereby some sites didn’t get spidered because they were marked […]