SuperWonderBang

Once again, I find myself looking for work. I guess that’s the problem when you love new challenges. Sometimes, they don’t work out. If anyone knows of web development work in Nashville, TN, let me know.

My resume is here.

InnerTee is a site that lets you create your own “remixed” t-shirts using art provided by other users. Those artists get a few coins everytime someone uses an element on a t-shirt that is then purchased. It’s an interesting idea, though the t-shirt mixing tool is pretty basic right now and the choice of available art is small. The site just launched, so both issues should disappear relatively quickly.

This has the potential to be very cool as you could mix your own art with that of others and create truly one-of-a-kind designs. The tshirt market online certainly has room for something like this. One concern is that the “remix” idea could be rather easily adopted by someone like Threadless or Zazzle. Another concern is price of a shirt with more than one suer-created image. The shirt below is almost $25 plus shipping. That’s starting to get out of the realm that most folks will pay for a tshirt.

Click this badge to see my first mix:

This little embedder should really show the shirt I made, not just link to it. I hope they fix that as well. It also gets jacked up by Wordpress’s code filters. Simplifying it some might help.

Digg has yet to release an official API for working with their data. They have hinted at one for a long time and some folks have worked out a few details. Even better are the web services that Digg seems to be exposing. A few rudimentary and completely unsupported and unofficial documentary efforts have occurred.

There is one piece missing from all of these efforts thus far. It is frustrating me to no end. As far as I can tell, it is difficult, at best, to determine whether a given link has been submitted to Digg already. So, if you are programming some system and want to provide links to submit items or Digg items, you are incapable of determining which tool to provide the user.

Digg’s official policy at this point is to push all the users to the same place and let the submit form on their site sort things out. That’s what their Tools site has to say about it. For most developers, I imagine this is less than desirable. It is much better to be able to show the Digg button for those items already in the Digg system and let your users update that Digg without leaving your site.

The Holy Grail of the Digg API at this early stage then is letting developers dynamically determine the state of any given URL in the Digg system and present their users with a way to easily add a Digg to that URL or to submit that URL to the Digg system with a minimum of fuss.

One Wordpress plugin developer seems to have done just that. I do not run a Wordpress install and cannot test his work. I have spent the better part of the day trying to adapt it to work outside of Wordpress with little luck. His curl and scrape method seems fragile and is certainly prone to slowness.

Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas about how this can be implemented in PHP? I have some code, but it’s based on the plugin above and I am not comfortable with the HTML scrape.

Technorati Tags: digg, wordpress, api, php

powered by performancing firefox

I have been trying to adapt Andrej Okonetschnikow’s ModalBox for use on our site at Fylmz.com. We were having some issues with the many Flash objects on our site displaying above the modalbox or flickering through the overlay. This is pretty typical and is something that many of the modal solutions faced with HTML select boxes in IE.

The common solution for this was to set the “wmode” for the Flash objects to “transparent.” This would make the Flash objects obey the z-order for all the objects on the page and consequently ModalBox would work correctly. There’s a problem here though. On Mac, when one uses “wmode = transparent” for Flash objects, some serious bugginess appears in the Flash player.

We experienced weird mouse behaviors and odd movie flickering and resolution issues with symbols within the movies. All of these problems only appeared on the Mac in Safari, Camino, and Firefox with versions 8 and 9 of the Flash player and disappeared when we got rid of the “wmode = transparent” parameter for the movies.

So, here’s the solution I came up with that provided us an acceptable result. It does not “solve” the problem, but was an acceptable compromise for us.

First, we detected whether the user was on Mac or Windows.

If they are on Windows, I dynamically write “wmode=transparent” for the Flash
objects in the page and ModalBox displays above them as expected.

If they are on Mac, the wmode is NOT set to transparent. I wrote a small function in modalbox.js to hide or show the Flash object which looks like this (adapted from Lightbox Gone Wild):

// For Mac browsers -- hiding all FLASH elements
        _hideFlash: function(visibility) {
             if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac") > 0)
                {
                flashes = document.getElementsByTagName("object");
                    for(i = 0; i < flashes.length; i++) {
                            flashes[i].style.visibility = visibility;
                    }
                flashes2 = document.getElementsByTagName(”embed”);
                    for(i = 0; i < flashes2.length; i++) {
                            flashes2[i].style.visibility = visibility;
                    }
             }
        }

It’s a hack and can be done better, but it works and I just wanted to prove that it was possible. This function would be called in the “show” and “_deinit” function of modalbox.js:

this._hideFlash('hidden');
or
this._hideFlash('visible');

All of this results in the ModalBox working fine in Firefox and IE on Windows and Firefox and Safari on Mac. The Flash movie will disappear on Mac and will start playing from the beginning each time the box is displayed in Firefox, but these are things we can live with. Your concerns will be different.

I know this is not the clearest write-up, but it seemed that a lot of folks are struggling with this so I wanted to post it quickly. Comment or email with questions and I will try to help.

I had a hard enough time trying to cancel their service. Today, I get an email saying that I can still get some free months if I refer friends to them. This is incredible. I used to recommend them all the time, but never again.

Not only are they trying to win me back in a most grating way, but they want me to sucker my buddies in on the trap as well. It’s just ridiculous how far they have gone to turn a happy customer who just needs to cancel for a while into a person who is now actively blogging negatively against their company.

Technorati Tags: vonage, cancel, voip

Just setup my resume using a new service called Emurse. I already had it written so it was very easy to transfer it over. They also offer the option to just upload the one you’ve already created. Here’s the widget they give you to link to your resume:

Resume Links:

WEB

DOC

PDF

RTF

ODT

TXT

Host Your Resume Online at Emurse.com!

I have yet to face this in my development experience, but it’s certain to be on the horizon. Bob Aman had this to say about Asian-language websites

Most Chinese/Japanese/Korean websites I’ve seen lately tend to have unusually “busy” designs…I usually react with something more along the lines of, “Yuck, how do you guys read the text on a site like that?!” There’s obviously a lot of sites out there that people typically point to as examples of good web design, but the vast majority of such examples seem to use the latin alphabet.

Sporkmonger >> CJK Web Design

His repulsion at the design of many asian-language sites might be the sheer fact that the language itself is seen by his brain as a visual element.

That is, you don’t see it as text, because you can’t interpret it. Even though you might not speak Spanish or French (if you do, just play along) you still know the letters, while the characters of many Asian languages are completely outside your linguistic perception.

Therefore, you perceive them as visual elements, then you deconstruct the page into having a ton of visual elements. This leads to your conclusion of it being “busy” or “cluttered.” I would suggest that you might find the same issue on Arabic language sites as well.

For examples, you might try any of the large consumer sites in their Japanese or Korean incarnations like Sony Korea or Sony Japan or Nike Japan or Nike Korea. Not that these are great designs, but it drives home the point.

What’s even more bewildering is how we might build these ideas into the web software which can change its interface language and presentation language “on the fly.” The challenges there are truly mind-boggling and by examining what the large companies have done, you’ll see that they purpose-build for every region and language. There’s wisdom in that, if not technical ease.

Technorati Tags: language, design, internationalization, asian

A great idea spawns a million permutations. It’s not quite a million yet, but the 3spots blog has a nice list of “all” the digg clones in existence.

They also link to some open-source software to make your own digg-style site, add tagging to any project, and do other digg-style things. A nice compilation of resources here.

Technorati Tags: digg, pligg, open source

I just don’t get why Flock exists. Admittedly, I’ve only been trying the new beta for all of 20 minutes, but it is simply the same as Firefox. In fact, I had to install the Performancing plugin to post this entry as the Flock blogging client is too skimpy (no categories?!).

Can someone please tell me how Flock sets itself apart from Firefox? What is its mission? How could it not have accomplished that mission with a suite of plugins and skins for Firefox? Why “develop” a whole new browser?

I understand this is just a beta, but the only hint of the value this may have is in the integration of the photo tools and the bookmark sharing tools. These are not that compelling to me or to a huge swath of the market. The tools are very nicely done. My hope and the only logical thing is that they become a platform for building API-based tools into Flock. Hopefully, these few tools with which they’ve started are only to prove their concept and the company or third-parties can use the copious numbers of APIs popping up to develop their own tools based on these UI and communication foundations.

I don’t want to be a naysayer. I just want to see the light.

Technorati Tags: flock, firefox

I thoroughly enjoyed the first 5 or 6 days of the World Cup. I watched a good bit of it on my computer while I worked using ESPN 360. This is the video solution that ESPN offers through a select group of broadband ISPs. So, your ISP is basically picking up the tab for the increased features and bandwidth concerns for the live streaming and hosted, taped content.

ESPN 360 was delivered by its own custom Windows app, which certainly had its negative points, but for the most part worked very well. The video streamed quickly, was clear and the app had little to no issues with crashing or memory/resource hogging.

That all changed with ESPN’s release of their new 360. It is now a browser-based app taking advantage of Flash 8.0’s new video capabilities and things have gone downhill. One of the most noticeable things is that the quality of the video is much lower. This is true of both live and recorded content. There are often stutters and hangups with both kinds of content as well.

There are further issues with the interface. There is no way to “pin” the application window to “always be on top” of your desktop. So, if you watch it while working and want it to float above other windows while you work away, it’s impossible without 3rd-party solutions. This was a feature of the previous player application with a little “pushpin” icon.

The interface also features some sort of auto-scroll thing that moves the content from left-to-right based on where your cursor is within the window. This occurs to display extra content such as headlines and other “interactive” content. I appreciate ESPN’s desire to push more of their programming and, thereby, advertising, but this auto-scroll only gets in the way.

The most egregious addition to ESPN 360 has been the addition of advertising at the beginning of every clip. As a service for which my ISP pays ESPN, I don’t think it reasonable that ESPN subject me to advertising while I am using a paid service. They’ve added banner ads to the screen, as well. This is less objectionable than having to sit through the same commercial 5 times during a 20 minute show because the video has to be restarted 5 times forcing you to watch the commercial again each time.

I used the “Feedback” feature in the player to voice these concerns to ESPN, but since the form didn’t ask for an email address, I can’t expect that they will get back to me in any way. I hope that this post will serve as a message to the developers and executives at ESPN that in striving to do the cool, new thing, they have ruined the user experience. Making these changes at a time when so many users are using ESPN 360 to watch the World Cup seems like an ill-advised move.

Technorati Tags: espn, espn360, world cup, soccer