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jQuery Autosave Released

stan — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 08:43:15 -0500

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

stan — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:02:11 -0500

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

jGrowl 1.2.2 and 1.2.3

stan — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:02:38 -0500

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

stan — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:02:56 -0500

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

Review: Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1

stan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:45:29 -0400

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.

Rant on Web Security

stan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:22:42 -0400

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.

jGrowl 1.2.0

stan — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:36:18 -0400

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.

Why Tumblr is Cool

stan — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:36:40 -0400

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.

Twitterpate Update #1

stan — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:33:32 -0400

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

Twitterpate Nuances

stan — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:34:17 -0400

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!

Meet Twitterpate

stan — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:27:25 -0400

I let the cat out of the bag on twitter today and sent someone a link to Twitterpate. Twitterpate is my threaded-twitter experiment. I started it a couple of weeks ago in my spare time. If you follow the twitter eco-system at all then you're more then aware of the ever-increasing number of twitter-clients that have hit the scene. Each of these clients offers a unique set of features catered to a specific tweet-need, whether it be for a mobile device, trends, hash tags or what have you. A couple of clients have recently tried tackling the threading issue, but none of them, in my opinion, have done the task justice.

Here's the issue I wanted to solve... If you "tweet" you may be replying to someone else's tweet. When this happens you sometimes lose track of what's happening in a chain of replies. This is because twitter is pretty linear. New tweets appear at the top of a timeline with little connection to previous tweets that they may be replying to. If multiple conversations are occurring simultaneously then things can get messy and you run the risk of losing track of where the conversation is going or what you're replying to. I've run into this issue many times.

Twitter tried to reconcile these problems with the introduction of a reply-to field on a tweet, and then with the addition of a link to a tweet's originating message if available. This is fine, but it winds up being a lot of extra work to follow a conversation and it prevent you from getting a full view of a conversation. This is where Twitterpate comes in. Twitterpate is a web based twitter client designed to parallel your twitter home page, but with the power of threading. It also features some other handy tools, including auto-updating, grouping by day and some preliminary filtering capabilities.

Right now this is a spare-time project, but I hope to expand what I've started and continue to add features to it. I'm also fairly confident there will be bugs to work out a long the way as well. Twitterpate uses OAuth, so if you're curious and want to take a look, but don't want to share your twitter credentials don't sweat it. All authentication happens on twitter, so you don't have to worry about any of your "stuff" ever falling into the wrong hands.

I'm really curious to get feedback and if you find any bugs, please let me know.

As a disclaimer... the name "Twitterpate" is intended to be a play on the the phrase "twitterpated" from the Disney movie, "Bambi". If you don't get it, rent the movie!

Twitter Threads

stan — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:15:27 -0400

I've been getting into Twitter as of late, and I admit that I'm enjoying the micro-blogging world intermixed with a little bit of social networking. I've been entirely disenchanted lately with Facebook, especially since their recent interface overhaul. It seems overloaded, and they've pushed the micro-blogging feed too far. The Facebook feed has reached a point where it's no longer useful because there is too much there.

So I've migrated to a smaller community over at Twitter, and I've been enjoying it - for the most part. One of the things I started to miss from Facebook were the mini-feeds that would spin off of a posting, creating a conversation. Now Twitter lets you converse with @tweets, but more then once I've thought someone was replying to tweet X when they were really replying to tweet Y. If you use the web interface you can now reference back the old tweet, but there's an extra step involved there and it's only one tweet at a time.

What I've wanted for a little while now is threading for tweeted-conversations. I want to take it a step further though, I want threading and then I want my client to be intelligent enough to move a thread up to the top of my tweet list when there's a new tweet in the conversation. Then just for extra measure I want to be able to clearly see where tweeting on Day 1 is from tweeting on Day 2.

To my surprise there is very little activity on the world wide web for threading twitter. I imagine that there are a number of reasons for this, the API rate limits being a huge one. All this aside though, I began to think about how I would deal with threading twitter. This snow-balled into an experimental project I am working on.

The idea for the project is simple, it's not to reinvent twitter nor is it to develop yet another air application for your computer. It's simply to augment the existing web interface for twitter's user home page with a threaded version. Along the way I may toss in some other nifty tricks, but the principal problem I'm trying to solve is threading.

So stay tuned and keep your eyes open, it's on the horizon... and if you happen to be following me on Twitter pay attention to the source of my tweets, you may even see this mysterious project appear occassionally.

jGrowl and jQuery 1.3

stan — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:04:03 -0400

I've gotten a couple of e-mails asking if jGrowl was compatible with the newly released jQuery 1.3. To the best of my knowledge jGrowl is fully compatible and there are no know regressions. I would recommend using the latest 1.3.2 release of jQuery though, albeit there are no known issues the items fixed since the initial 1.3 release are worth having and could possibly effect overall behavior.

More Updates to Sanctus.org

stan — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:37:25 -0400

The updates keep rolling out... I've done some more UI enhancements, including a toolbar at the bottom which will show you pericopes as you hover over days. I've also added the Gradual, Verse and Tract to Sundays - I have not yet had time to put these together for festivals where they are available. Each proper can also be collapsed by clicking on it's respective title and they can be universally collapsed and expanded with a +/- sign in the upper right corner of the day's header. I've straightened out some display issues with commemorations and other labels as well. I also have exciting news... Today I received from a friend who has been helping me with data entry about 85% of the daily lectionary from LSB (basically the non-festal portion), and will begin working to integrate this into sanctus.org soon. Keep an eye out, that and the new iCal export are just around the corner.

Updates to Sanctus.org

stan — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:37:52 -0400

I've upload some updates to sanctus.org tonight, they include fixes to the existing iPhone optimized version (for those curious, just go to the normal site in your iPhone/iPod Touch), fixes to the Sundays after Christmas and New Years, fixes to some backend logic that no one cares about, the addition of text-links to Libronix (little icons at the end of Scripture readings) and the ability to go directly to a date by doing... http://sanctus.org/lectionary.html#YYYY-mm-dd where YYYY-mm-dd is the year - two digit month - two digit date, ie. 2009-01-05.

For those that have been asking, an iCal file is on the way. The file generated from the old sanctus.org site ended on 12/31/08 so if nothing else I need it. I'm verifying dates and things of that sort and then need to figure out a place to post it. There's also the possibility of a Libronix Lectionary file coming as well. If you're in need of these resources and would like to see it and others please consider a donation to help support the Lutheran Lectionary Project. All donations go to defer the cost of hosting and bandwidth.

Pax Christi