Dudspuds Blog

This has been a maintenance week, it seems. One of those weeks where it feels like you’re not getting too much done, but you really are.

Here are the highlights.

It’s the Tables, Stupid!

There was major problem posting articles with large and numerous html tables. In fact, would take a vacation while working on these tables! I discovered this working with content from FootballGuys.com - they include good number of data tables in some of their articles.

The issue was resolved, and we’re back at it. It was a problem with the HTML sanitizer — and how it was processing the articles. For anyone interested – the HTML sanitizer removes HTML tags from the article, so the system can accurately count the number of words. It’s important, otherwise you wouldn’t know how long the article is that you’re buying.

Another problem came up with these articles involving the WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE). After you “Save” article, the editor likes to massage the HTML to make sure it’s not malformed. This occurs right before the article is sent to the server. With lots of tables in the article – the “massaging” may take a while and the browser may pop up warnings that say things like “Script is taking a long time”, or “Do you want to continue running this script?”. Since we’re stuck with this issue (for security reasons) – just let the browser finish running the script… Thats the easiest. Firefox seems to go much faster than Internet Explorer. This only applies to large articles with lots of tables - most folks won’t even notice it.

Rotobowl League Update

There’s a reason I started Dudspuds… It’s because I’m terrible at fantasy football. So bad, in fact, that I’m last place in my Rotobowl league this year (out of 12 teams). Even worse, I’m #289 of #348 overall. Ouch. Now – in my defense, I’ve had the misfortune of injuries, bad luck, under performing players, poor drafting and a lack of preparation to deal with…. My goal is to finish somewhere in the middle – which will require that I win the rest of my games. If I win in coming weeks, I’ll be sure to mention it. Otherwise, there will be no more talk about the Rotobowl until next year. Now, off to read the Week 9 Cheatsheets, and Week 9 Player Matchups.

New York Tech Meetup - Tuesday

Seeing that New York City is a stones throw away, I’ll be attending the New York Tech Meetup on November 6th. Not sure what to expect… other than to see some cool technologies, and chat with like-minded folks. It’s a big group (~400) – so it’s probably done in lecture style, with power points and static demo’s. I may try to present Dudspuds to the group in coming months. We’ll see.

Weekly Updates to become Individual Posts

I’ve been debating on whether I keep this weekly update format, or I do individual blog posts. I’ve decided to do individual posts for a handful of reasons…

• Each post can be more in depth
• Posts are easier to find when searching (or when being searched or indexed by Google, Yahoo, etc)
• Posts can be linked to directly, since they cover one topic

I’ll reserve the periodic updates for special occasions, or when I haven’t updated the Blog for a long while. (this should never happen, of course)