XML Tribune

There is a new page about XML ValidatorBuddy on Facebook:

XML ValidatorBuddy

Wirb ebenfalls für deine Seite

Of course you are welcome to become a fan…

I have 5 Google Wave invitations to give away. So how do you get one?

Just download XML ValidatorBuddy and test the tool. Give valuable feedback and I will send an invitation for you if you want a Google Wave account. There are no formal requirements for the feedback. It is enough that you suggest or find anything which is not obvious and a real improvement.

Please note that of course I can’t guarantee that you get an account and I even can’t promise that I will write back to everybody. But if you are one of the first 5 testers I will send the invitation.

[Update 12/16/2009] There are still some Google Wave invitations left…

Some weeks ago Altova released the new versions of their products. XMLSpy 2010 comes now with a brand new scripting tool to provide custom forms, macros and support for any kind of automation possible with the built-in API of XMLSpy:

New scripting tool in XMLSpy 2010

XMLSpy already comes with some sample scripts to show how to implement macros and forms. If you try it yourself and you start to write some code in the Script tool you will notice that there are also entry helpers available for the XMLSpy API. Very useful.

There are two macros available which I recommend to add them as commands to your XMLSpy menu. SearchPath and CloseAllButActiveDoc. SearchPath opens a dialog where you get a list of all files currently in the project together with all other files open in XMLSpy. You can then type a search string and the list is reduced to the ones which match (case in-sensitive, substring search). CloseAllButActiveDoc does what it says. With one click all documents but not the active one are closed.

Just use the Customize dialog from the Tools menu to add the macros as commands:

Customize dialog in XMLSpy

Use the “Display text” field to give the command a friendly name. Do the same for the SearchPath macro and then go to the Keyboard tab to assign a keyboard accelerator for easy access. After I did that my Tools menu in XMLSpy looks like this:

Modified Tools menu

Don’t be confused about the “Umschalt+Alt+S”. Umschalt just means Shift on a German system.

I can just recommend to check-out the new scripting tool in XMLSpy. With the help of a few macros this excellent XML editor can be even better…

Recently I decided to add the TrialPay offer to the payment options for XML ValidatorBuddy. I already learned about TrialPay months ago but never took the time to set up a product or just even to create an account. Of course it doesn’t take just “5 minutes” as TrialPays says but after one hour I successfully added ValidatorBuddy as a new product. Now I have to wait until it gets approved and then I can add a link to the TrialPay page as an additional payment option to my web pages.

We will see if the typical ValidatorBuddy user, and close-but-not-really customer, also likes one of the TrialPay offers…

Sometimes I get feedback from people who are installing XML ValidatorBuddy that there was “no application visible” after running the installer or like “didn’t install at all”.

I know that most of the people expect some program to run or a desktop icon to appear after the installation of any new software. I was thinking about this for XML ValidatorBuddy also but nothing useful came to my mind until yet. The reason for this is that currently ValidatorBuddy doesn’t have any real executable beside the command-line tool. So let me summarize what is offered now:

1. A Windows File Explorer shell extension to provide quick and easy access to XML validation and batch processing.
2. A command-line tool to allow scheduled batch processing like XML validation of thousand of files.
3. A plugin for the popular XML editor Altova XMLSpy.

As you can see no obvious way to start anything after installation to present it to the user. Of yourse, any ideas are much appreciated!

A few weeks ago I removed all PAD files from my server because I was tired of updating the content and I never noticed any real traffic coming from all of the download sites anyways. The whole PAD file misery was already discussed in detail and if you want to know more you can read a lot about it here. Just search the blog for PAD

Every now and then I get a PAD polling error sent by one of the many download sites I added my PAD file in the past. Of course this is also a little bit strange because those sites are actually of a higher quality and to appear there could also be a benefit. But the vast majority of sites where my PAD is known don’t care if it is still accessible or not. They just took the details from the PAD to fill there own pages with content to get hits for advertising. With a lot of “stolen” content and a lot of links they get a high page rank pushing your own sites from the first pages of the search results. Nothing new here…

To come to an end. If you consider to submit to hundreds or thousands of download pages please don’t do it. Add you software to some selected places like download.com (even the free of charge plan) or tucows.com if you are a patient guy and provide content instead. Don’t waste time to get registered anywhere just to bring clicks to other people.

This is a little bit off-topic for an XML related blog but I never promised here that I will always be on-topic :-).

So we learned last week that Windows 7 will have the version number 6.1 from Mike Nash here on the Windows Vista Blog. Beside the somehow creative counting of previous Windows versions to get to number 7 for the successor of Windows Vista the main argument for taking 6.1 as version information is compatibility. Hm, … Mike tells us that at Microsoft they are afraid to break a lot of end-user software if the version number is changed to 7.0 and of course they don’t want to.

Honestly I can’t tell for others but usually when it comes to version checking in software I have in mind that:

1. I add code to check for the minimum version the tool/application supports. So the code shouldn’t have problems if the new version is 7.0 or 6.1. How can I predict the future and say that a change to the minor version is ok but a change to the major is not? What is if the minor version breaks something which is fixed then in the next major release? Never happened before?
2. I hope that driver compatibility is not decided on the version number of the operating system and there is a more complex way to tell if a driver should be installed in the system then two (or actually in this case only one) digit. But I have to admit that I never wrote a driver for Windows.
3. For serious problems with compatibility Windows can already run in a mode faking a previous version of the OS to the application. So where is the point to have “better compatibility” in setting a version number?

Here is the new XML Tribune blog. Installing Wordpress on my “own” server was really straight-forward as the 5 minute installation guide promised. However, to be honest I wasn’t able to manage it in just 5 minutes but it was really simply and no pain.

There are two plugins I can recommend for your Wordpress blog:

• Cross-linker http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cross-linker 
  This plugin converts each occurance of a keyword into a link. Of course you can create a list of keywords and let them point to any URL you like. Useful if you want to refer to any other page from you automatically.
• StatPress http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/statpress
  The usual plugin for statistics. Who doesn’t want to know about the number of visitors?