A Smattering of Selenium #105 was a short link roundup by Adam Goucher, published on July 30, 2012. Its nine items touched on Selenium and WebDriver discussions, automation practices, developer tools, and Mac OS X setup. The “105” is the roundup’s issue number—not a Selenium version.
What the 2012 roundup covered
Goucher’s post collected links with brief comments rather than announcing a Selenium release or presenting a single technical guide. Its topics reflect the software and platform discussions of the time; comments about standardization and project support should be read as observations made in 2012, not as statements of current Selenium status.
- OAuth and API providers: A link about OAuth and API providers prompted Goucher to connect the subject with Selenium’s move toward W3C standardization.
- WordPress error handling: A critique of error handling in WordPress described the difficulty of improving behavior across a legacy installation base.
- Heroku Dev Center: Heroku listed articles it wanted written for its Dev Center.
- WebDriver and HTTP status codes: Jim Evans addressed why WebDriver does not expose HTTP status codes. Goucher recommended using a proxy in this context.
- Finding an unused port: A shell script searched for a valid, unused listening port, which Goucher noted could be useful for Grid nodes.
- Downloading files with Selenium: An article discussed downloading files and why browser automation may be the wrong tool for that job. Goucher called out its treatment of status-code checks and proxies.
- Selenium RC support: The post reported that BIDPOM had dropped Selenium RC support. Goucher speculated that other projects might do the same over the following year; the roundup does not establish what happened afterward.
- Objective-C: An Apple Developer article covered Objective-C.
- Mountain Lion and the command line: The final item covered PATH and environment settings in Mac OS X 10.7 and new UNIX commands in Mountain Lion, including
caffeinate.
Why the post is historical, not current Selenium news
The references to W3C standardization and Selenium RC support capture Goucher’s perspective at publication time. The post is useful as a snapshot of subjects circulating in the Selenium community in 2012, but it does not establish current WebDriver capabilities, the present status of Selenium RC, or the later outcome of the predictions in the roundup. For the original entry and its links, see the official Selenium post.
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