Here's a particularly tangled and difficult problem. It arises because I have another blog. Specifically this: Team Red Cruising. And it's an unholy mess.

There are two important features of the Team Red Cruising blog.

1. It's managed with off-line editor(s) so I can write posts from the boat and …

A random list of cool things.

1. HTML5. Start now. It's supported (more or less) by all browsers if you add appropriate shims. Start with sites like http://www.html5rocks.com/en/ and continue reading. It's largely arrived and there's no compelling reason to delay.
2. JavaScript. I'm not a fan of …

I worked with this a few years ago to tweak up some web pages. http://colorschemedesigner.com/ I just rediscovered it. It's a cool toy. You get some colors that all "go" together. If you're careful with your .CSS definitions, you give people this page and let them fuss around …

Got this question recently.

I’m looking for an HTML editor that fits into my price range (free of course). I don’t need to do anything fancy, just vanilla HTML to run on an Apache server ..., and maybe some PHP down the line. Can you recommend any open source …

My old Citizen Pro-Master watch died. It needs batteries. It's a dive watch, so it also needs to be opened by professionals, have the gaskets replaced, and get pressure tested to be sure it works.

I tried sending it to the Citizen Watch Service facility in Dallas. Their web site …

Browsers are required to skip over bad HTML and render something.

Consequently, many web sites have significant HTML errors that don't show up until you try to scrape their content.

Beautiful Soup has a handy hook for doing markup massage prior to parsing. This is a way of fixing site-specific …

Ugh. When you try to parse MS-generated HTML, you find some extension syntax that is completely befuddling.

I've tried a few things in the past, none were particularly good.

In reading a file recently, I found that even Beautiful Soup was unable to prettify or parse it.

The document was …

I can't say enough good things about ReStructuredText (RST). I've used all of the available markup languages (SGML, HTML and XML). They have their place, but they all fall short of being truly usable.

In This sounds complicated, because it is I reviewed some of my history of cheap content …

I haven't done Applet stuff in years.

I do -- intensely -- like embedding functionality in web pages. RIA/Ajax and what-not are something I have trouble with because I'm not a graphic designer. Javascript and Applets fall into three clear categories:

1. Basic usability. Javascript offers lots of little enhancements to HTML …

For a while, I generated documentation with Cheetah. I wrote bodies as a fragment of HTML and used Cheetah to wrap those bodies in standard templates with navigation and branding. To write my books, I learned DocBook markup and used DocBook XSL tools to create HTML and PDF versions of …