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Posted Wed, 10/08/2008 - 05:03 by metarobert
I'm far from an expert on the topic of "unobtrusive Javascript," but I've seen some real benefits over the past couple of days. I've spent several hours re-writing BeTwittered, with some design ideas already in my head. One is the need to separate the front end (the web page) from the back end (the server and the data) Another idea was to move heavily to Javascript on the client-side, and to make it unobtrusive. The basic idea is to remove javascript code from the HTML.
Posted Tue, 09/16/2008 - 11:01 by metarobert
I had added the the ability to turn @user references to links in BeTwittered (Twitter client) quite a while back. Today, I reused that code to turn #tags to links in BeTwitted and Identify (Laconica clients). Basically the PHP code below takes plain text, looks for #tag references and replaces them with the required HTML to create a link. This code is not complete as I've not found a specification that defines the characters allowed in a #tag. It does convert the link to lowercase, while leaving the text as was originally typed.
Posted Fri, 09/12/2008 - 09:35 by metarobert
Today I added cookie checking to BeTwittered, BeTWiTted and Identify. It was pretty simple once I jumped in and just started. It was made a bit easier, too, due to the fact that they all start with a logon screen.
Basically what I did was to write a cookie called "today" setting the value to todays date. I specifically set it using this PHP code:
setcookie('today', date('mdy'), time()+7257600);
// 7257600 seconds=12 weeks - dont ask why, just 12 weeks.
Posted Tue, 09/09/2008 - 09:07 by metarobert
I'll be spending some time rewriting BeTwittered. I'm liking the term "overhaul" better than rewrite, because I'll be reusing large chunks of code. I've made this decision because the presentation layer and the server side stuff were really muddied up. That's due to the fact that I was learning web programming, Apache, CSS, Javascript and PHP as I went.
Posted Thu, 07/24/2008 - 15:34 by metarobert
With all of the pain of the Twitter service outages and "brown outs," people are searching for alternatives. A VERY promising alternative is
identi.ca. Identi.ca is working toward API compatibility with Twitter. This doesn't mean much to most people directly. It means a lot to Twitter client application developers, though. I decided to make a copy of BeTwittered that connects directly to identi.ca instead of Twitter. It took all of 5 minutes to make the basic changes required. This is NOT a trivial statement. There is so
Posted Wed, 01/16/2008 - 00:06 by metarobert
I've made some more improvements to my Twitter Gadget for Google /
iGoogle. Check it out, follow the link to 32hours.com ->
The Latest Changes - TwitteGadget for iGoogle
Posted Sat, 01/05/2008 - 15:45 by metarobert
I've spent the better part of my rainy, Southern California Saturday updating, or more accurately, rewriting my Twitter gadget / widget for iGoogle.
I'm really happy with it, now. The progress I've made is making me excited. I've learned a bit of AJAX today in order to make some nice changes. Want to have a look? Do you already have a Google account (like GMail) ?
Posted Mon, 12/31/2007 - 15:02 by metarobert
I have a tendency to switch back and forth (and back, again) I usually run
Firefox, but have used
Flock several times. I'm currently running Flock again. Flock is now at version 1.0.3, the first non-beta version I think I've used. It's based on Firefox, and now runs Firefox extensions. This was a key point, in my mind. I couldn't switch and stay unless I could run my favorite extensions. I'm happy with Flock, now. Another nice feature F
Posted Mon, 12/24/2007 - 19:17 by metarobert
Firefox 3 vs Firefox 2? I checked out Firefox 3 Beta 2 today. It was not stunning, but, wow, did it use a LOT less RAM by default. It reminded me that I hadn't changed the settings to force Firefox to use less RAM.
Posted Sun, 12/16/2007 - 14:44 by metarobert
So, I've written a small bit of PHP to pull RSS feeds. Not at all monumental, but I've written a bit, and taken some notes required for site setup (pear installs of XML stuff) My goal is still to create a widget that will work on iGoogle, and be configurable. If nothing else, at least I'll get some more programming familiarity out of this. After all, I don't know who you are and couldn't possibly care what you get out of this. Well, unless I'm reading this.
