Premus 1.1.1
With no normal job to take care of and with a few encouraging words from friends and users, I’ve managed to find some time to update Premus a bit. It’s nice to finally be back in the code to give it a bit of the cleanup it’s needed. There’s still lots of cleaning up left to do, but I at least got rid of the table layout and the onload attribute… These changes include CSS and javascript changes, so if things look and behave a bit funny, make sure to shift-refresh.
Apart from the cleanup, I’ve also had time to add a few things. I’ve always hated the popup UA string selection, so now I took the opportunity to add an autocomplete when you type the string instead. I hope you prefer it to the old way, I certainly do. I also got a newer PML spec (version 1.13.5, if you have a newer one please let me know) sent to me and started implementing some of the features in it. I didn’t get all of it done, but thought it was best to get a release out with at least parts of it, before the wedding next week starts interfering with my ability to sit for hours in front of the computer. =)
A more detailed list of what’s been changed can be seen in the change log.
Update: Now it’s 1.1.1, because I completely forgot about testing in good old Internet Explorer before.
The UTF-8 BOM
I was looking into a bug with Premus and discovered that it was caused by the page requested starting out with a BOM (Byte Order Marker). I’d seen BOMs many times before in UTF-16 documents, but I’ve never actually seen a UTF-8 BOM before, which I now find quite amazing since they’re completely valid and have been around for a long time.
Now, the problem with the UTF-8 BOM in particular is that Python doesn’t automatically strip it out if it’s there. And it looks like other languages have the same problem. Python 2.5 does add a specific encoding for UTF-8 with a BOM, but that seems to imply that you should know if you’ll be getting a BOM from the start. Another problem is of course that only one of my machines is running 2.5 so far.
I solved my problem by better keeping track of what input encoding I get and with the help of Evan Jones’ very helpful notes on UTF-8 and Python, but this really seems to me like a problem that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Premus out in the open
I find it really exciting to see Premus out in the open and actually used by people. It had been sitting publicly on my server for about a month, but it was only when Andrea Trasatti wrote about Premus that it was properly launched to the public. Since then, it has now had approximately 1500 page views, which doesn’t sound like a lot for almost a month, but which I actually find quite pleasing considering that it’s quite a niche product that was only ever announced on a niche blog. And before that, my traffic averaged 0 views per day. 
One thing that has surprised me is that a lot of the referrers seem to be from searches for Vodafone’s PML. But then I don’t really know anything at all about my users at the moment except for what I can find in my access logs. When I was originally developing Premus four years ago, all its users were in the same room as me and I got feedback very quickly. Now, I don’t seem to have any way to communicate with my users. I find that incredibly frustrating. So if you’re using Premus and you see this, please let me know in comments or email how you use it and what, if anything, you would like to see changed.
