vCard is a specification for representing contact information. It’s used to move information between address books in a non-proprietary format, and to download or even upload contact information from web sites.

Apple’s Macintosh Address Book supports vCard as an export and import format as does Microsoft Outlook.

A vCard can contain things like addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, even photographs.

I’m working on a web site which stores contact information for businesses and I want to be able to make that information available to my users in vCard format. So… I’m coding in Perl. There are two Perl packages that look helpful - Net::vCard and Text::vCard. It turns out that Text::vCard is a more recent version of the same codebase as Net::vCard.

Text::vCard provides methods for creating a vCard and setting the data it contains. You can then create an address book using Text::vCard::Addressbook and use its export function to get the actual vCard text.
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I’ve finally updated the Wordpress themes on all three of my blogs. I rolled out the new theme to this blog and Shiny Things a while back; I’ve just moved the Apocalypse Blog over to it, too.

I had several motivations in doing these new themes. I did them from scratch. One motivation was to improve my CSS skills and learn more about cross-browser issues (man do they suck!).

I also wanted to improve the way that the blogs are monetized (that phrase really rolls of the tongue…). The new theme has three elements that help monetize the blogs. The first is the memory finder in the header. The second is the Google ads. The third is the Amazon box in the right hand column (this is only present on the Apocalypse blog at the moment as I haven’t picked out Amazon items for the other blogs yet).

The memory finder feels to me like it fits in well with Shiny Things and isn’t too far off base here (after all, what developer couldn’t use more RAM?), but it doesn’t really fit in at all on the Apocalypse Blog. Then again nobody’s bought memory through it yet so perhaps it’s just pointless.
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Internet Explorer is often the bain of the web developer’s existence. Read the standards, see how it’s supposed to be done, and then try to figure out how to coerce Internet Explorer into doing it while still getting other browsers to work correctly.

Microsoft fumbled the ball after Internet Explorer 6 - they rested on their market share as it slowly eroded. They’re now planning to release Internet Explorer 8 only a couple of years after 7 was released, according to an article at The Register. Apparently they still haven’t decided that standards are really important.

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I use two computers for development - a portable (MacBook Pro) and a desktop (Mac Pro). It’s helpful having the two different environments, and it’s helpful having a backup in case one of them has a problem. It does open up all sorts of issues about keeping things in sync.

I primarily use Firefox as my development web browser, for reasons I’ll get into in another article. I keep a set of bookmarks in Firefox for all the blogs and web sites I’m working with, as well as other online tools that I use (Google AdSense, Google Analytics, LinkShare…), and Firefox remembers login information for all my accounts.

It’s a pain in the ass duplicating things across instances of Firefox.

That’s where Google comes in. Google has provided a free Firefox extension which will synchronize Firefox’s bookmarks, cookies, passwords, history and even open tabs and windows, across instances of Firefox.
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