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Future of Web Apps – Miami
For the past three days I was at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami Beach, FL. Overall I thought it was a great conference.
The conference started on Monday, with registration, demos, eating, drinking, and networking. This was supposed to be on the beach, but it was ‘cold’, windy, and raining so it was inside. I arrived a little late and made it just in time to register and hang out for a while.
The real deal started Tuesday, which was a day full of speakers. Overall it was a great speaker line-up with a good mix or marketing, motivation, and technical topics.
On Wednesday I participated in two workshops. The first workshop focused on Facebook Connect, how to use it in an application, and how not to use it. It was led by a former Facebook employee so there was a lot of useful information given out.
The second workshop I went to covered the basics and not so basics of jQuery. I have been using jQuery for a little while now, so the actual content wasn’t that useful for me. The session was led by John Resig, who created jQuery and still leads the group that develops it. It was amazing to see how well he used it and learn some of the techniques he used. I walked out feeling like I needed to rewrite everything I have ever written in in jQuery. John also used a really cool slide deck, which was actually just a big web page that he manipulated using jQuery. This setup allowed him to demonstrate the features without having to flip between the browser and powerpoint.
When I wasn’t at the conference I had a great time in Miami Beach, meeting a lot of interesting people. It is always inspiring and humbling to hear about some of the cool things that people are doing on the web.
TwitPrompter.com
Last night I launched a new service – TwitPrompter.com . After looking around I was surprised at the lack of twitter prompt services there were, so I threw one together. It is not too fancy at this point as I wanted to get the whole thing put together in about an hour, which I did.
Let me know if you have any suggestions for prompts. I will be slowly building my database over the next few months and new ideas are always welcome.
jQuery UI Accordion Issues in Internet Explorer 6
I really like jQuery UI, but I was having some issues with the accordion in IE6. It was hiding some of the content after I expanded a section. The content it was hiding was in a table, but in fiddling with the code it turns out that it was hiding random things in the div, not just the table.
I fixed the issue by setting ‘animated:false’ when I called the accordion. I actually used cgi.http_user_agent to sniff out the browser and if it is IE 6 I call the file with the animation disabled. Otherwise I call the original file.
Internet Explorer Caches Ajax Requests
Last night I was putting some final touches on an app I am developing and I ran into some issues in IE8. When I used jQuery’s $.get() to pull some content off the server it triggered the success function without ever requesting the page from the server. I was a little confused at first, but after I used the right keywords I was able to figure out that IE8, and probably IE7, cache ‘get’ requests. It seems like there are two workarounds that are pretty common: switch to post, this is what I did, or add a random number as a URL variable. I didn’t care if my request was get or post, so I just made the switch.
After that all was good, again.
Importing from Blogger ftp to WordPress
When I first heard that blogger was disabling its ftp service I figured I would just import by blogs into Wordpress. It turns out that the WordPress importer for blogger doesn’t support ftp. Here is a simple solution:
- Log into blogger and select the blog you want to import into WordPress.
- Go to Settings->basic and export your blog.
- Create a new blog, in blogger, and import the export you just created.
- Import this new blog into WordPress using the WordPress importer (tools->import).
- Delete the blog you created for import/export purposes.
- Drink a Coke.
Goodbye, Blogger
For the past 6 years I have maintained my family’s blog using blogger, but they apparently decided to cut the ftp service. I have been thinking of moving the blog to WordPress for some time now, so I guess I have a good excuse to do so. I have enjoyed my time with blogger, and will definitely miss it. One thing I liked about blogger is that I could maintain separate blogs and ftp them all to my one web site. Now I need to find another solution.
Tech Support
I have a Kodak ESP 9 printer that I use for work. It should be a great AiO, but it has issues. I spent an hour on the phone with Kodak tech support this morning trying to get things straightened out. I spent about an hour talking with Davis, from New Delhi. Aside from my printer issues we also spoke about life in New Delhi, weather, his schooling, Iowa snow, and other off-topic topics. Most of this was while we were waiting for one thing or another.
A lot of people complain about foreign call centers, but I really enjoyed my experience. I had to talk slowly and there was a lot of ‘N as in Nancy’, but I think Davis and I both had a nice time chatting while we waited.
On another note, at the beginning of the call I had the option to receive support in Spanish. I wonder where I would have been redirected to had I chosen that option?
jQuery 1.4
jQuery1.4 has now been released. I just recently started using jQuery and have used it for a few projects. Now I am not sure how much testing I need to do before I upgrade my code or if I should even bother. I think for the time being I will keep my old projects at their current level and upgrade as I build new apps.
DrPic.com
I was helping my kids’ principal with the school newsletter and she was having an issue with a Word document that was too big (8MB). She was on her school computer with no way to resize the 3 huge images she was trying to insert. I was thinking about our options when she said, “What about picture doctor dot com?” I had never heard of such a thing, but after a little searching, I found it.
DrPic.com is certainly not going to replace PhotoShop anytime soon, but it worked great for her. I don’t know that I will ever use it, but it is nice to know it exists.
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