Just finished up redesigning my 4th site in the past 5 weeks (along with 4 relocations and 2 migrations). I love starting with a brand new template and coding something very clean and neat, however sometimes it is just better to update existing templates. Anyone who has reworked templates for a major set of changes knows that sometimes it feels like things are messy and out of control.  Especially with stylesheets.

I still have not found a decent way to order classes in a stylesheet that makes any sense (and is maintainable) but search functions make that passable. However, I still cannot help but feel like the stylesheet is messy since I really have no idea which classes I’ve obsoleted vs. which classes are still used by some obscure template I never touched.  I’ve always been meaning to find a better solution to this then my usual method: <i>leave them all there – just in case</i>.  A clean and tidy stylesheet reduces server load and is easier to maintain.

So instead of doing the work I was supposed to be doing today, I goofed off and coded a little stylesheet analysis program.  The idea is pretty simple: Read the rest of this entry »

What is XML-RPC? Stripping all the technological detail away, it is merely a specific way of requesting data and getting a response back. It uses xml to make the request and sends and receives the data over http. (A more technical discussion can be found here.)

I’m currently working on a project that needs to get data from a WordPress installation. Fortunately, WordPress provides an XML-RPC interface which includes several stock APIs as well as a WordPress specific API. This is far more efficient than using custom templates or parsing actual html pages for both sides of the transaction.

With all that said, how do you use it? Depending on what you are trying to do and the platform you are using, there should (hopefully) be a nice library already coded so you can worry about requesting and receiving data without fretting about the details of xml-rpc. However, sometimes a q&d (quick and dirty) script is useful to test a request and look at what is actually coming back. I do that using a simple php script:
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