I have updated LinkMindr.com with a few improvements. The big change is limiting the tag cloud to just 35 of the most recently modified tags. At the bottom I have a drop down list for all of the tags so users can still access all of their tagged items. This conserves real estate on the page and makes the most used tags more accessible.
As a part of this change I also converted the page to use PostBack events as triggers for the UpdatePanel which is a features of the new ASP.NET AJAX control suite. Previously I had a clever jQuery call handle all of my AJAX functionality but with the latest changes it became easier to handle this functionality with event triggering.
Six months ago I wrote Web Development Tools for the Power Developer which covered the progress that has been made with tools for web development. It got picked up by a few popular websites and through the various comments I learned about a few additional tools I did not know about previously. The two most useful bits that I found were Firebug and jQuery.
You can see the power of Firebug and jQuery in a demo by John Resig which I have leveraged heavily since I have seen the video. I used his example to pick apart some effects used by the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit as shown in my own video. And now my newest website, LinkMindr.com, is using jQuery as the main engine for the key functionality. Look at the source and you will be surprised that the Javascript running the website is under 40 lines of my own hand written Javascript especially for what it does.
The new WPF/E, which runs on multiple browsers including Firefox and Safari on a Mac, is bringing up some memories of the early days of Flash. Concerns about usability with Flash has been an important issue from the start. One website goes as far as claiming Flash is Evil. This same fate could carry over to WPF/E, but with our experiences with Flash we can try to do better this time around.
Over at Telerik Watch there is a good read on WPF/E and usability which ultimately links back to an article by Jakob Nielsen published back in 2000 called Flash: 99% Bad. The points made in these articles are well worth the read.
One of those hallway debates that keeps coming up lately is over the size of the popular Javascript libraries. The single most popular library is Prototype which comes in at a whopping 70KB. That large size has some developers screaming bloody murder because they think that it actually requires you to download 70KB of data, and it does, unless you take advantage of HTTP compression which is supported by IIS 6 and the Apache web server.
There are some angry people out there who are upset about the decision by Yahoo to start restricting accounts on Flickr.com. Someone asked if there is a way to download their photos from Flickr. I happened to write a little software the other day to pull a Flickr feed and parse the output. This software just saves some of the photo information locally to display a gallery, but it could be modified to instead download and save the files. What I do not know how to get around is the limitation on the size of the feed. It seems it shows less than 20 photos at a time. If there is a way to get to all of the files for a given user id I would be able to find a way around this limitation.
Perhaps one way to help you make this work is to tag your photos with tags like set1, set2, set3 and so on and limit them to 15 per set. If you know a better way to do this, I would appreciate the tip.
I have been reading Pro Javascript Techniques by John Resig. It is an excellent book. I have also started reading his blog. He recently posted Hacking Digg with Firebug and jQuery. I did not know about a couple of things that he covers. First, I did not realize a bookmarklet in Firefox could load a remote script library. Second, I did not realize that Firebug could do all of that. You have to watch his video.
Now that I am equipped with those techniques, I decided to try it out on CNN.com. The following bookmarklet prompts you for a new headline and then changes it for you with a nice fade in effect. This is all due to the features in jQuery which comes in at 20k. It is really a very impressive Javascript library.
I have been building a simple website with some of the web 2.0 signature features like AJAX, RSS, OPML and tagging. It even has an moniker at the bottom indicating it is currently an alpha release. Soon I hope to have it ready for the Beta moniker.
The website works as a social bookmarking system to allow the user to save links from any computer to their LinkMindr account. The focus is on the timeliness of the links with features to give the user access to recently added links. As a part of that focus, RSS feeds are available to access the 20 latest links and links added in the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days. These feeds work well as Live Bookmarks in Firefox. They also work with IE7 but accessing the feeds is a bit clumsy. Below the videos show how LinkMindr works with Firefox.
I would like to get more feedback. To get you started I have created a video demo on YouTube which is shown below. You can also use the other video alternatives: SWF, WMV for higher quality.
There has been some IE7 bashing on Digg.com lately. Sure it can be fun, but the recent rants were just inaccurate. They were uninformed of the history or IE5, IE5.5, IE6 and the corrections which went into IE7. Some context is necessary here. Just consider that Netscape 4 was dominant when IE6 was released. The Javascript and CSS support in Netscape 4 was horrendous when you compare it to IE6, which stood still for 5 years. Given what we have managed to do with IE6 you have to give the IE6 developers some credit. Understanding the history and the recent changes will help you cope with the changes over the coming years.
I had several tasks I wanted to complete on several of my personal projects which I had on hold while I was busy with other work the past few months. Over the break I was able to squeeze in time between driving around the state for family visits to knock of few of these tasks off my list.
