Joel Nagy .com
web technology is a way of life
Twitter is obviously a huge part of people’s lives, not many of these people, but many. I for one see it as a great medium for learning news and interacting with my “real world” friends and even finding new ones. It’s even a great resource for marketing oneself and helping to locate new jobs as well.
Twitter is akin to email where the basis for it is ver simple, it’s a transportaion layer for information. This information is only limited by 140 characaters. This still leaves the layer quite open. The idea of distributing news via Twitter is among the many ways that illustrate the powerful nature of their simple transportation layer. Riding on top of that layer is RiotFeed which has a few dozen or so Twitter accounts where they aggregate and categorize news on various topics such as Technology, Green Living, and Trends and Culture. They collect news from other Twitter accounts and the web and put it into a single use news feed. I do wish they would attribute Twitter resources with the @ sign, but that’s a small gripe. The concept and the follow through are well done.
Even with Twitter being a single access point, the plethora of clients provide for a personalized way to retrieve the news. I’m not going to go to Facebook for news, and with a limited number of alternative facebook clients and because of Facebook’s complex user interface you really need to go to the site to get the most of it. This shows where Twitter really shines.
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Twitter Trending Topics are a very cool thing and it is interesting to see how information spreads through Twitter. An example that’s relevant today is the #IranElection. But if you look at the current results (and since Twitter search is real time you may or may not see it) there are quite a number of ReTweets very often.
So It makes me think about how much is something really a “trend”. So that means you need to define trend or at least define it for yourself or the twitterverse. For me I’m more interested in seeing real content that is relevant to me. So that means true conversations and discussion of a topic. And a retweet as helpful and nice as they are, are not nessecarily real content when they reach a mass large enough to be a trend. So I would like to see an option to the Trending Topic search that removes retweeting from the results.
Since retweets are not standard I’m sure it wouldn’t be perfect but I figure that by removing tweet results that start with “RT ” or “retweet ” or ones that have ” via @” near the tail of the tweet could constitute a retweet. I’m sure there are a few others as odd apps like to come up with their stnadards (like “RT:”) So another means either in conjunction or by itself is to remove tweets that are 95% similar to other tweets. If you said the same thing as someone else then that data is not nessecarily as important in most cases.
Now I don’t propose that this option be a default unless it’s perfected but that like I’ve said that it is at least an option to help weed out the results to get decent content. Since in the end the real reason to search is to find.
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Why do tracking/analytics companies want their code placed at the top of the page (meaning below the opening tag) to be properly tracked? If a user exits quickly they should not be tracked. It seems quite duplicitous to track a user that has exited a page before it has even finished loading. Granted if you have a site that takes a bit to load you shouldn’t wait till everything on the page loads, otherwise you’d never realize that your page load time results in lost visitors. But if a user exits a page or clicks away very quickly that visit doesn’t really count. It would be like Nielsen tracking every channel I skip when I surf TV using the channel up button.
I also simply can not believe it when a tracking company claims that their code will not be guaranteed to work if placed in the <head> of the document or if the code is wrapped inside a generic tracking function. If your code can’t be wrapped or placed in the <head> what did you do wrong in the first place, or what kind of tricks are you trying to pull? I don’t like to always use the exact code provided by these companies when working on a client website. Your client’s needs for analytics may result in them changing tracking companies and then the developer would be forced to make widespread changes across a site to deal with such change. Granted this type of change is not all that frequent, but it does happen and being prepared is far easier than redoing work.
I’m also not convinced that the analytics provided by many companies is accurate enough. I’ve seen on many occasions that raw stats provide disparaging numbers when put against 3rd party companies and even between multiple 3rd party tracking companies when used together on the same page. When the numbers of hits you receive on your site is the means for convincing ad placement or other financing I think that accuracy is quite important.
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There’s a basic issue with placing floating <div>s or any floating element for that matter in a parent <div>, the parent looses all sense of height and becomes essentially invisible. The parent can now no longer have a background, border or any defining style that would show up behind and around the children elements. But with a bit of CSS you can remedy that situation. Look at how the Example After heading is pushed around because the <div> isn’t cooperating nicely.
HTML:
<div id="Footer">
<a href="/blog/">Home</a>
<a href="/blog/contact/">Contact</a>
</div>CSS:
#Footer {
background: yellow;
border: 1px solid blue;
}
#Footer A {
float: left;
width: 100px;
}
#Footer:after {
content: "";
display: block;
height: 100%;
clear: both;
}Example Before:
Example After:
Just found my self needing to implement an <iframe> into a MODx site, and since I wanted to have the <iframe> be part of the template I felt it would be best to have the src, width and height be template variables making the <iframe>’s appearance based on the content and not fixed. For my particular needs I was wrapping everything in a <table> that then needed to have a width slightly larger than the <iframe>. For this I came up with a simple snippet that evals a little equation forcing it to an integer to be safe:
<?php
// eg: [[math?math=[*iframeWidth*]+34]]
if (isset($math)) {
eval("\$math = (int) ". $math .";");
echo $math;
} else
echo "0";
?>So if [*iframeWidth*] is set to 550 and I have <table width=”[[math?math=[*iframeWidth*]+34]]“> in the template then the rendered HTML will be <table width=”584“>
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Whenever you need your web design to be pixel perfect a nice simple way to check things out is to to use CTRL+ (Mac: APPLE+) in Firefox to zoom in (use “-” for out) and then use the MeasureIt add-on to count the pixels.
Quick, simple and easier than screen capturing and bringing the cap into PhotoShop to examine.
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Gaming like it’s 1969 but with a 2009 twist. OnLive is the new “console” in gaming; everything is done on the server and sent down to your PC or your TV with their own micro console. It’s quite possible it could work on a netbook one day.
It’s coming full circle again. Back the 60s we had mainframes that supplied all of the processing to the dumb terminal. Then the PC age came and all the processing went completely to the PC. Then the Internet came and with JavaScript and AJAX the processing was split between the browser and the server. And now OnLive is presenting the possibility of Gaming with processing of the heavy graphics and AI done on the server, and in their case a massive server farm.
They will be offering a micro-console for playing directly on your TV. I imagine that this micro console code could easily be built into devices that are Internet ready with USB/WiFi support such as TiVo or even the Wii.
They have a beta program which you can sign up for.
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I’ve been using TwitterBerry for my BlackBerry Storm, but I don’t quite love it so much as I use more and more desktop and web based apps. I feel like there are some features that I need, that would make things easier. So until I have the time to learn the BlackBerry SDK and write my app, I’m going to list out what I think is important and useful.
- Multiple Accounts - (for Corporate and Personal) all tweets from people you follow will be integrated into main list and have capability to have color coding
- Groups - The app will have grouping capabilites (along with automated groupings (such as per account groupings and recent friends etc…) and groups can be accessed by swiping sideways on the list view (also the abiity to hide groups from swiping and only view from group list availble from main menu)
- Tweet Caching - The ability to cache a tweet while you are not able to access a mobile signal
- In-app Flagging - for followup gets added to the “Flagged” automatic Group
- Search tweets of my friends - You know you recall a friend that tweeted about something particular, so search only within those tweets
So this is the start of my “favourite” twitter mobile app. I’ll add more as I come up with more ideas and wishes. Let me know what ideas you think are important or ones you think don’t work for you.
UPDATE: Here’s another feature I’d like it to have as well:
- Email tweets or add to social bookmarking service like del.icio.us
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I write this post in the hopes that one day IT departments across the planet will wake up and realize the cost effectiveness of upgrading IE 6 to IE 8. As a web developer I spend about one third to one half of my time when a bug arises (ussually for IE 6 alone) solving the problems of Interent Explorer. This week alone I needed to code a few simple JavaScript scripts for a new project and each piece of functionality took only a few hours to get the basics in place, but then required about twice as much time getting it to work in IE 6. Cross Browser functionality is a known task in my line of work, but it can be a nightmare when it comes to IE 6 and it’s outdated functionality.
Internet Explorer 6 came out in 2001 (eight years ago) and IE 7 came out in 2006. According to Upsdell IE 6 accounts for ~26% of browser usage, this is still unfortunately a large enough user base to warrant developing web sites that are compatible. MicroSoft still manages to push out security fixes every now and then, and that might be the real culprit of the situation. If MS simply stated that they would no longer support IE 6 and that the only way to get new security features is to upgrade to IE 7 at least then I think companies would make the switch. I think that the costs associated with a rollout upgrade are probably cost effective if you think about the time spent dealing with security risks to individual PCs that are vulnerable with IE 6, and you think about the time wasted on simple productivity of users that do not have a browser that was even built when Web 2.0 became a standard.
IE 8 is desgined to be a relatively decent competitor to the existing landscape that now includes Chrome and Safari 4 for the PC. The new version has many features such as their Accelorators and InPrivate browsing that can be very useful, along with tabbed browsing (a novelty of an idea that IE 6 will never support) that enhance the use of the browser as a tool.
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So I thought I’d take a stab at using ping.fm to update my Twitter, LinkedIn, del.icio.us, GTalk and Facebook acounts when I post a new blog entry. I imagine I’ll need to hack my wp-mail.php like I did with TwitterUpdater so that I can still blog from my BlackBerry and have the updates ripple out.
I tested their service from within their own interface and it didn’t update del.icio.us and LinkedIn took about 10 minutes or so to update. We’ll have to see if it’s working fine from this basic blog post entry.
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