Three things have happened in the last week with my FlipClock Firefox add-on:
I stumbled on a fantastic, very simple CMS concept recently. Just £35
Imagine building a CMS driven site using the following steps:
It is commercial, but very very cheap. Perfect, in my opinion, for very small sites requiring a content management system.
My new FlipClock add on for Firefox has now been translated into Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Russian and is in queue at Mozilla to graduate out of the developer sandbox, which means the install warnings should go away soon. w00t.
More chore list this weekend included taking care of a bicycle in my garage that was locked up with a Kryptonite lock with no key (lost over several moves).
First thing I did was to text message a hard-core cycling friend, who suggested I YouTube search Bic Pen and Kryptonite. Turns out, opening an older cylinder-lock Kryptonite product is, with a bit of luck, actually pretty easy.
This lock picking technique revelation was made public a few years back, and Kryptonite quickly offered to fix the locks (a good percent of them could be opened) but only a small percent of owners took advantage of the offer.
My attempt to open my lock took about ten minutes, but I could probably do it again in just a few minutes by fast forwarding to the hammer step.
PS: If any bike thieves are reading this, I hate you. You and your kind have taken two of my favorite possessions from me at a time in my life when I couldn’t afford to replace them.
I’ve been playing with Yahoo! Pipes with some success. The concept of Pipes is a great, and it is an ideal tool for the current online aggregation/mashup revolution.
My Yahoo pipe is an aggregation of several forums on two different sites, all regarding the building of spearguns (for spearing fish).
It can be subscribed to via RSS and JSON and I’m looking for project ideas that’ll let me go a little further with this. The final step was to add the RSS feed to my iGoogle homepage where it happily updates throughout the day:
For those of us who are too lazy to parse XML, JSON is a great Web data format. And the fact that it can get around all sorts of cross-domain restrictions*.
I just posted a simple JSON-enabled HTML web page that accepts a zip code, and retrieves longitude and latitude from a Geonames JSON feed, and then uses that to look up the weather from the nearest weather station. I love the fact that this is possible without a single line of server-side code. The code rewrites the page’s DOM, dynamically appending a <script> tag to the page, and doesn’t use any of the standard AJAX functions.
Cross-Domain AJAX JSON Example
Fancy Cross-Domain AJAX JSON Example
Next up: a clickable map that will figure out your country and timezone. This functionality will solve about a dozen headaches I’ve been having with adding a selectable timezone feature to my FlipClock Firefox extension.
*Yes, there are many, many caveats that go along with to this statement
Just posted this on my company blog, but thought I’d repost it here:
Our head of QA, Bethany Garcia, circulated a link today to a (London) Times Online article about the Internet and other new technology as seen through the eyes of a 15 1/2 year old boy. Matthew Robson’s report for Morgan Stanley, How Teenagers Consume Media, is a very interesting insight into a generation that doesn’t listen to the radio, read the newspaper, or pay for music. I remember coming up with metaphors to explain the Internet to older folks, and this article makes me feel as though I’m on the receiving end. The report is a very quick read, and just as a tease:
“Teenagers never use real directories (hard copy catalogues such as yellow pages). This is because real directories contain listings for builders and florists, which as services that teenagers do not require.”
Surfing around online, I just discovered that a book I wrote has been translated into Chinese and is being sold in China. This would be more exciting if I had heard about it from the publisher and/or received any money for it. Looks like an inquiry into Osborne/McGraw Hill is in order.
This reminds me of a story… About five years ago a friend was in Brazil bragging to a girl he had just met that he was credited in a book’s acknowledgments section. To prove it, he took her into a bookstore and showed her. Several minutes into relating the story to me (apparently the woman was quite stunning), I learned that my book had been translated into Portuguese.
When Google books is fully online, will it be able to inform me what languages this book has been translated into?
FlipClock, my new Firefox extension is now available for download. The extension is still awaiting approval by the folks over at Firefox and has been in-queue for about 10 days, but who’s counting. When it is approved it will be available for download from the official Firefox add-on site.
FlipClock sits in your browser’s status bar and simply tells the time in a variety of styles.
I was playing with non-rectangular HTML text blocks today and thought I’d share my results. The goal was to come up with a way to present HTML text in a parallelogram shape.
I tested the code in IE6, IE7, Firefox 3.5, Safari, Opera, and Chrome (all on XP) and the page rendered correctly in all of them.
The dotted lines are visible to show where div tags were used.
The HTML for the page is available here.
The Skinny Scoop