Philipp Lenssen of google blogoscope has published a while ago truth I had known for a long time now Good programmers are lazy and dumb. I keep telling my developers that you don’t impress me by staying in the office late, you impress me by doing the 8 hour job in 6 hours with proper documentation. Then you can go home for all I care.

Most of my development happens because I don’t want to repeat things. EasyCMS was built to allow me quick changes to a prototype, EasyNav to allow clients using contribute to edit the navigation.

Working with Mint I was missing an option to collapse the different panes when I don’t want to read them.

Some hacking later, I wrote a script that automatically allows you to collapse and expand a table by activating its footer. As a visual indicator, the script adds an image to the footer (this also allows keyboard access).

It is a work in progress and I need your help to fix it for Opera and get rid of a weird Firefox issue.

See the collapsible tables demo

Shaun Inman is not only a well known blogger and developer who recently put my pathetic efforts in generating CSS constants to shame with his server side CSS constants , no he also developed a very much blogosphere-hyped stats tool called Mint, which is available at http://www.haveamint.com/.

Enthusiastic, as I was, I signed up for the preview and demo just to realise that is database seems to have gone boom. This was a bit of a shame, as I dislike buying cats inside the bag. However, this pussy purrs very much and one painless install later I have Mint running on icant.co.uk. The recent success of the CSS Table Gallery made my former free counter from http://www.statscounter.com not free any longer (more than 9000 hits/day), and I considered to go for Mint instead of dashing out a monthly upgrade (I bought one now, though).

Now, as you can see in the Mint screenshot it is a beauty and gives very much the information you want. However, statscounter does a lot more, including user paths, browser, OS, resolution information and which country your visitors are from.

With Mint being a no-nonsense approach and an extendable architecture I am looking forward to more bits to come. Job well done for now!

Following a request on the list, where a subscriber had unsuccessfully searched for an online gallery of styled data tables, I came up with the following idea:

http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/

It is pretty much like csszengarden, only for a single marked up data table.

What I need now is people participating with an own style for the data table. You can submit it directly on the site and I will check through them when I come back from a training in 3 days, so please don’t expect to see things appearing immediately.

I admit I had fallen behind my webzine browsing, mainly because BT promises to make the move of your telephone number to a new location easy, but fouls up badly when you really try to do it. Therefore my only online experience at home is my neighbour’s unencrypted wireless…

Good news is that A List Apart is back with a new, slicker layout and another Joe Clark article, this time dealing with PDF accessibility.

I am also proud to see that evolt.org is finally live with the new Drupal based layout and will hopefully get some good articles to review there soon. Right now the backlog is rather overwhelming though.

Sitepoint.com has lately taken to have an illustration for every article and its Really, Really, Really Good Introduction to XML is as much what it says on the tin as Cats in Sinks is.

Digital Web focuses on the business end of the web design stick with an article about RFPs . They will publish my article about “10 reasons why our clients don’t care about accessibility” in the next issue I am told.

Devarticles gets very techie in the last few issues, reporting on C++, Java and how to build an encrypted Login system in JavaScript.