Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

XML is a wondeful thing, but I think sometimes it can be all to easy to make life difficult for myself, by attempting to do things in XML which would be much more straightforward if I did them with a database and then output XML as needed.

For example a couple of things I will be adding to this site are a “last updated” menu, showing which pages have been recently updated on this “multi-blog” site and a bookmarks section - a central place to keep my bookmarks rather than importing them from one web browser to another. Both of these could be done purely using ASP and XML, and i’m sure if I look around I will find some examples, but I know I can knock something up with an access database, even writing everything out as XML in half the time.

The other thing is that the ASP I would use if it was purely XML wouldn’t be portable in the slightest if I wanted to move it all to, say , PHP, whereas any SQL queries I use for a database version probably would be.

I read this article by bill thompson on the BBC site about the Amazon IPAQ price error, and while i’m not sure that I agree about that particular issue (I was always under the impression that pricing mistakes have to be honoured), the general theory behind the article is that the internet suffers from a perception problem, where the general public believe that it is an imaginary place where different rules apply.

Whilst there is some truth in the “alternative reality” of something like an online role playing game, the mundane reality of 90% of internet transactions is that it is as real as filling out a form in a post office or phoning up a travel agent. The scale and automation of the internet may make it easier to slip things through unnoticed, but there are people behind the scenes, and alarm bells will ring when people start to get silly about it…

Sorry to burst the bubble

and not the first. An old uni/ skate buddy of mine from Dublin found this photo of himself snapping his deck at cork skatepark. He puts me to shame because I rarely even skate to spar these days.

I took this on an early morning bike ride from the old railway bridge near the create centre in Bristol.

with a backdrop of blue sky and gorgeous sun. in march. in the uk. incredible.

thekeyboardonmy laptop has a sticky space key itis doingmy headin

This is one amazing little creature I caught trying to sneak past me the other day. Actually I didn’t catch it, just zoomed in from a safe distance and took this picture then let it carry on it’s daily business of building huge webs. I know there is a bit of an insect theme going on at the moment and I know these pictures would probably be better in the digital photography blog but I keep posting to the wrong one…..

…it has to come freely and so it was about time that we knocked my band braxtonhicks on the head.

The band had been going for about 4 years with a varying line-up, and it was fun while it lasted, but the format was getting tired and most of us felt that it was never going to go beyond what it was, which was essentially a covers band. With the guitarist leaving to focus on something more original and creative and a couple of other key members leaving this summer anyway to go onto better things we decided that it was pointless flogging a dead horse and to call it a day.

Fear not, because the creative energy behind the band will flow into other places and whenever it emerges you will hear about it here at hypothecate.

I spotted this little green beastie pretending to be a leaf in the garden at the weekend.

for those of you who don’t know, amphetadesk is a program which allows you to subscribe to the Rich Site Summary (RSS) “feed” or “channel” of a website (if they have one, which they all should!), like the one on this site. It runs on your local machine as a server, periodically downloads local copies of the feeds you specify and generates an HTML web page for you to view the feed locally, or if it’s running on a network or internet node, remotely.

I noticed that my RSS feed isn’t 100% compatible with amphetadesk (and probably other readers) as my links show up as tags because they are encoded, so apologies to anyone seeing them like this via an RSS reader - I didn’t know until just now!