Slower Developments

After a bit of an uncertain situation at work, I've changed groups at Microsoft. I'm now working as a Front End Developer at Farecast. They do statistical modeling to determine when it'll be the best time to buy tickets for a specific flight. Pretty freaking cool stuff.

Part of why I'm so excited is that being on the Front End team means I'll actually be writing code that goes into the user interface. We're talking JavaScript, XHTML, and CSS, baby. No more C# and XAML for me. I'll essentially be doing at work what I used to be doing for fun on my own with this site.

Unfortunately, this means that I'll potentially be less motivated to improve this site. Not out of lack of wanting, but out of a sheer desire to do stuff outside of work that doesn't closely resemble work. We'll see, it's possible the differences between the projects and my general passion for this technology will keep me avidly working on both, but we shall see if my passion runs that deep.

Feature Directions

I'm not sure what I want to do with the site next. Or rather, I know of a ton of things I'd like to do with the site, but the sheer number of choices is preventing me from tackling each of them. Here's a list of ideas of things I can do.

• Javascript-disabled accessibility
• Server-side caching and page generation (to improve performance)
• Cell phone accessibility (generic mobile and iPhone-specific)
• Error message box (so I don't use the alert() anymore)
• Host outbound links in floating iframes
• Fill out Mafia resource
• Fill out Ultimate resource

Leave me a comment if there's something you really want to see. Otherwise I'll just sort of get to these in some arbitrary order whenever I have time and feel like it. Hooray!

--Chris

IE8 Released!

Internet Explorer 8 was released today, for XP and Vista. If you're testing Windows 7, you don't need to worry about upgrading. But if you're using any other prior version of IE, I implore you to upgrade. Details can be found here: http://microsoft.com/ie

Developing websites to match different standards is time and labor intensive. Keeping whatever browser you use as up-to-date as possible will encourage web developers to target the W3C web standards to have as broad a reach as possible, rather than just targeting compatibility with a single browser. It also should mean a mostly feature-complete experience across any modern web browser you choose to use for your browsing leisure.

That said, apparently rendering my site in IE8 mode causes weird things to happen. Like the top left image not showing and all of my pretty generated windows just showing up as plain text. I'll get to these issues eventually and plan to support native IE8 rendering, but for now I've just added the <meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE-7"> tag.

So, to summarize, if you use IE, please upgrade. Otherwise, just keep on using your favorite standards-compliant browser.

bookmarkable urls!

Last week I made it so you could add #tab={number} to a url and go to that tab. Tonight, I added 2 more bits onto that:

1. There are now support for more user-friendly words instead of zero-indexed numbers
2. The url now automagically updates when you navigate on the site. So you can stop doing it yourself!

The only time it'll be inaccurate is if you edit it yourself and hit enter. Editing a hash doesn't cause a page refresh, which is useful for showing state in an Ajax-page, but doesn't do so well if the user changes it and expects something to happen. I could write a timer to check and solve this problem, but I'll probably just leave it. You shouldn't be navigating the site by keywords anyway.

--Chris

Direct links to navs!

I added a quick feature so I could post links to other tabs than just the main one. Adding #tab={a number} to the url will make that tab load instead of the default "Quick Feed" tab.

The plan is to round out this feature at some point, which includes watching to see if it changes and updating it whenever you navigate. But I was lazy and just wanted to get it to work so I could make a blog post, put a URL on twitter, and have folks view my blog through my site. And that's done. So there.

Now with Comments!

There's now a comments link for each blog entry. This wasn't the original design, but it was the only one that came out to be technically feasible.

The original idea was to have a textbox below each blog post with a "comment" button, so you could simply type in your comment and it would automatically go to Blogger. The Blogger API has the facility to do this, but only in a very limited way:

The Javascript library (and I believe all of the REST API for creating blog comments) requires a user to be logged in. Which means that to comment, you would have to have a Google account and give my site permission to do things on your behalf (namely, create comments). But it could only create comments on blogs of the signed-in user, so I'd have to setup the service to sign me in every time. And then, even when trying that for a "this is a horrible way to do things, but let me just see it work" approach, the mere fact that I had granted my site access caused something in the google script to go into an infinite loop.

I tried giving Google's interactive Javascript API tutorial a try with this whole creating comments thing, and had the same infinite-loop experience. So I abandoned the smooth Web 2.0 style commenting. And now you have links directly to Blogger for all your commenting needs.

At some point, I'll make these links load in an iframe or something so you don't have to wait for my page to re-load when you go back to it.

And, as a bonus: Permalinks!

Javascript is easy.

The website now has more content! The navigation links for twitter & both blogs now loads recent activity. It was surprisingly easy to do, considering I already had the data cached and some nice reusable functions to make windows. Anyway.

Next on the horizon: either differentiating the "help" windows in each section, or adding commenting ability to the blogs. It depends if i want to work on graphics-fu and css or on blogger api and css. Fun all around.