Lately I have been doing some javascript development and I have written a couple of functions which I find really useful. I almost find the code snippets to be used on all sites I work on so I thought I would share them with you. Both the snippets are written using the jQuery library.

Opening urls in a separate window/tab in a xhtml strict environment

The target attribute is not a valid attribute in xhtml strict and your site will fail to validate if you use it, so to get around this you can use replace your target attribute with the rel attribute. Adding the rel=”external” attribute on your anchors that points to an external source and adding some javascript solves the problem.

I am currently switching both domain host and web host, and in that case this site might be down for a little while. I am about to replicate the site to my new web host so hopefully it will be a minimum of down time.

I have chosen to leave servetheworld.net which has been my web host since 2003, they have done a great job, but the time has now come to move to a web host which can provide me with some more advanced features.

I have chosen webfaction.com as my new web host. I chose them because they offer a multitude of different applications, for instance svn, python, ruby on rails and of course PHP. They also offer ssh access.

I chose 123-reg.com to host my domain names, that was done out of convenience, they are well known, large and hopefully know what they are doing

Today I started to work on a little project that required a crawler, and Nutch seemed to do most of what I needed. The nutch team conveniently released Nutch 1.0 late in March 2009, so I had a brand new release to test out. Installing nutch 1.0 on a mac is not as straight forward as I thought, I ran into a lot of unexpected issues and here is my cook book description of how to successfully install nutch 1.0 on your mac.