Today I released jQuery Autosave a new plugin for jQuery that tracks the state of a form and fires of events to save the form data when the form has been dirtied. I use this plugin for my content management system to save changes to the user's content while they are working. I'm very interested in feedback, so please take a look and let me know what you think. The release package includes an example that demonstrates usage and how this plugin works. You can find the plugin as well as more information over at my project page.

jGrowl 1.2.4 has been release and is now available for download here. This release is primarily to fix some compatibility issues with Internet Explorer. As always, if you find any bugs or have any suggestions please contact me

I've recently release two updates to jGrowl, the most recent of which is version 1.2.3. If you are a regular jGrowl user I suggest updating to this version as it contains some important fixes when using multiple containers. Callback support has been enhanced and improved to be more robust and jQuery UI theming by way of ThemeRoller is also supported. I owe a special thanks to the community which greatly contributed to this most recent patch release - thanks!

You can find the latest version of jGrowl here.

jGrowl 1.2.1 has been released. You can find the changes here and download the release here.

When I started programming almost seven years ago it was with two technologies in hand, PHP and MySQL. I didn't understand either of these technologies out of the gate, but both could be easily installed on my Windows based laptop; and that summer I had some long train rides across the country to experiment during. MySQL was taking off like a wild fire at the time, with a growing community and various languages developing native bindings to connect to its server. This provided a huge incentive for using MySQL over other database servers. Other servers either relied on ODBC connections or they had immature API's with severely restricted bindings.

MySQL solved a simple problem: where to store "my stuff" that my PHP application would use. I was a Windows guy at the time and I didn't know much about working from the terminal; in fact, you might even say I was intimidated by the command line. This provided me with a dilemma. I needed to formulate a data structure to work with my first PHP application and had no way to do it visually. This was long before the days of MySQL Query Browser and some of the other tools which have cropped up in recent times for working with MySQL. By the recommendation of a friend, I turned to phpMyAdmin to get started developing my first MySQL database.

phpMyAdmin is one of those tools that most people take for granted. It's a truly excellent interface for MySQL and provides some very powerful features for interacting with a database. Most everyone is familiar with the core functionality of phpMyAdmin: its ability to create tables, explore tables, populate rows and even do certain maintenance operates on tables as well. But few are familiar with the real guts and glory of this fantastic open source tool.

This brings me to a recent book from PACKT publishing, Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management. If you're not familiar with PACKT publishing you should definitely explore their catalog. PACKT publishing is where you go after you've finished your first "Dummies" book and are looking for real meat and potatoes on a particular language, tool or technology. Each title published by PACKT very specifically addresses a topic with depth and thoroughness from a pro who actually knows what they're doing.

I think I've reached my breaking point with superfluous web security implementations. I'm not talking about OAuth or OpenID or CAS or any of that stuff. Those things are good and serve their own purpose. What I'm talking about are the various safety mechanisms some websites are starting to use to ensure customer authentication. If you don't know what I'm talking about then check your local bank for starters, because banks and other financial institutions seem to love this sort of thing.

I released jGrowl 1.2.0 the other day over on the jQuery plugin page. It's basically the same as the last beta, with just some minor tweaks and improvements. The big change in 1.2.0 is a queue for notifications to prevent the screen from filling up with notifications and posting them outside of the user's scope of view. More info is available here.

Social networking and social media are exploding.  Facebook is on the verge of surpassing MySpace in its user base, and Twitter seems to be the next best thing to sliced bread.  In the midst of these newer social medium there's still blogging and let's not forget the world of social bookmarking or social photo sharing.  The problem now is that there are just too many networks, too many options to socialize on.

Just a brief update on twitterpate development...  An assortment of bugs related to how dates were handled have been fixed. Time stamps and relative times may have previously appeared inacurate due to timezone issues.  Additionally, relative time stamps will now update in real time and thus always properly reflect the accurate time.  Links in tweets now have a target attribute on them, meaning they will properly open up in a new tab or window depending on your browser's settings.

There is a known issue that I have not had time to deal with which involves the auto-delivery for dates which were not present on the page when you load the page.  This is especially noticeable if you leave your browser open and midnight arrives.  Things will appear to simply stop delivering, when it fact the page just doesn't have any place to put the new tweets.  As soon as I get some free time I will fix this issue and update twitterpate.

I've added some experimental thumbnail displaying for twitpic images, but admittedly I'm not satisfied with how these are rendering.  If you have some advice on what to do here I'd really appreciate the feedback.

If you double click on the "reply" icon next to a tweet, it will now fill in your status box for retweeting the post.  I think at some point it'd be best to have a separate icon for this action, but on the other hand I'm trying to avoid cluttering the interface as well.  If users find either the double click action annoying or elusive I'll look into changing this.

If you click on a tweet's avatar that will now trigger the reply-action, this parallels what a number of desktop twitter clients do.  This was suggested to me by my friend Jon Kohlmeier, and seems like a good idea all around.

I'm looking to possibly include url shortening in the tweet box.  If I do it will be entirely optional and I hope to offer more then just tinurl.  My gut right now tells me to utilize the same services that TweetDeck supports, but I'm curious if anyone has any other feedback on the matter?

I'm also looking for some type of graphic/header/banner for twitterpate.  I'm not a graphic designer by trade, so I've been searching through other's work and have sent out some requests.  If you're interested in helping me at all, drop me a line on my contact page.

Lastly, if you hadn't noticed... Twitterpate has now moved to http://twitterpate.info

Some people have noticed that twitterpate has a little more to it then just threading, so I thought I'd post to detail what I've tried to do with this initial release of twitterpate...

• Moving on up the conversation: When a new reply comes up in a conversation you'll notice that the entire conversation is shifted to the top of your timeline.  This is because in the world of twitterpate the whole conversation is new - something has changed.
• Auto-updating tweets: Leave the window open with twitterpate for a little while and you may see some new tweets appear at the top.  Every 75 seconds twitterpate runs off and checks to see if any new tweets have arrived and if they have it automatically inserts into your timeline, moving conversations up and doing what twitterpate does best... thread!
• New unread tweets: When the auto-updater fires off and finds new tweets you'll know what they are because they're marked differently.  Right now this just works for tweets in real time, but I hope to add support to older tweets via cookies and some other cool stuff.
• Expanding links: Link rot is a huge concern for the twitter ecosystem, and personally I find looking at those itty-bitty shortened urls annoying.  Plus, they're a security concern and a phisher's best friend!  So twitterpate automatically tries to expand url's in tweets out of their shortened form.
• Link hash tags: Everybody uses them, so why not turn them into links automatically?
• Group by day: Tweets are grouped by day to give you more of a "timeline" feels to your timeline.  This also offers a way of collapsing and hiding yesterday's tweets so you can keep current with your twitter ecosystem.

Since I'm on a roll talking about twitterpate let me tell you about some of the things I'd like to do too...

• Offer psuedo-group support/filtering: You know, like you've seen in TweetDeck and other desktop clients, but in a clean web interface.
• Marking read/unread memory: Right now new tweets from the auto-updater are distinguished from the tweets present when you load, but as I mentioned above...  I want to keep your read-tweets marked in a cookie to transcend visits.
• And...  You fill in the blanks!  I want to stick with twitter's simplicity, but I'm also curious what power-user type features can b added to twitterpate to make it even handier to use.  If you have ideas, let me know!