I always hate after I shutdown my Macbook, when it fires up it does the Apple “Dong!” noise on startup. This is a script that you can use when restarting or shutting down it will automatically mute your sound. Then on startup it will move the sound level back. Enjoy!
I think I may have found it! A use for twitter the small business owner can use and a developer can push.
I recently had a task of making a small news section where the user can easily ad a small blurb about their business. The other requirement was for it to be simple to update as the user had no knowledge of HTML and was not very tech savvy. This is where twitter came in. They did not need long updates or uploads of images. And I didn’t want to create a table in a database, as frankly, the site was small and didn’t even have a database.
After creating a small tool awhile back to update my facebook status, and create a tweet at once, I was somewhat familiar with the twitter web service. So I created about 4 lines of PHP that contained the username and password of the twitter user to publish from, then retrieved a certain number of tweets. It then simply formatted it between divs to look like the rest of the page. Simple and easy!
This is a simple too I will most likely suggest to future clients. I will also look for ways to extend it.
I just read about Googles plan for online storage here. But the question is, how useful would this be?
Don’t get me wrong, Google has some great services such as Gmail and Google Docs. But the problem with the GDrive is nothing Google can control: Download/Upload Speeds.
With time bandwidth speeds have been getting a lot better. But I don’t think we are close to being able to have a majority of our storage online. Imagine going back to the days of slow read/write speeds on a CD drive. That is what would happen if we moved to a model like this. Imagine trying to upload all your images, movies, docs, and backup info. Now most in the US are lucky to have an upstream of 1mbps. At that rate for every 24hrs of uploading you would be able to upload almost 9GB of data. Now if you want to upload your 250GB drive of data to start syncing to, it would take 28 days of non stop uploading just to get setup.
Now maybe I am being a little bit pessimistic, but I feel unless our speeds can increase by at least ten times this will not be viable.
Tell me what you think.
I just published a new version of software for the Medical Passport. This version (v1.3.0) has a number of new features.
There are other small bugs that were fixed plus small other enhancements that have been taken care of, but this software is turning out to be a great asset to doctors and patients alike.
I have been working on the new PlasmaCAM site for awhile. It employs a number of technologies.
The home page was made using Flash. We made sure and added links at the top and bottom for SEO value. The home navigation of the slides were done using Actionscript 3. All the slides are called from a loading php page in Actionscript, and all the slides are separate SWF files. This allows the ability to create a new SWF file and ‘plug it in’ easily without making any changes to the loading SWF file or the php code.
The rest of the site is database content driven. This is going to allow the ability to change text without going into the html and changing it. It is the step PlasmaCAM needed in separating the content from the style.
Other parts of the site, such as the owners community, uses jQuery and ajax functions to save user data and perform client validation.
So far the result are favorable, the conversion rate has almost doubled and the length of visit has gone up by almost a minute. This has been pretty consistent as it was launched at the end of November.
Ive written ajax request the long handed way using the long hand way of a XMLHttpRequest. It can be tedious and frustrating. Don’t get me wrong, it works great but building this functionality can take a long time, just to avoid a page refresh.
This is where jQuery comes in handy. In a few lines of javascript you can create quick ajax requests. This is how its done:
1. Download the jQuery library and include this file in your head tag like so.
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”path-to-file/jquery.js”></script>
2. Create a php file that will be called and return value to the DOM. This can be a simple file that echos ‘Hello World’.
3. Create a page element that receives the markup. Here would be an example:
<div id=”loadedContent”></div>
4. Now that you have a php file that returns content, and a page element that can recieve the content you can now create the javascript/jQuery to make the ajax request and input the results into the DOM.
<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function () {
$.post(”hello-world.php”, function(data){
$(”#loadedContent”).html(data);
});
});
</script>
That’s it! On the page load it should request the page. You can go further by using simple click events and send simple name/value pairs using the same request. jQuery is simple and easy to use. If you have any questions please leave a comment.
After downloading and installing chrome, here are my first thoughts.
1. Its fast, but when many tabs are open with flash it slows down a lot.
2. Its simple design turns me off. Don’t get me wrong I love simple design, but when I feel like more functionality is lost it crosses the line. I’m used to Firefox with custom add-ons such as firebug and such. I have the feeling that more browsing tools are being taken away.
3. I have the feeling in the back of my mind that Google is using the browser to monitor browsing habits just like many think is happening with Analytics. This may not be true, but one has to wonder if rankings may depend on how often a site is visited using Chrome. I’m not saying this is how they will rank sites in the future, but could be a factor.
Those were my first thoughts on the beta of Chrome. It has potential using the webkit engine if it was more customizable and I didn’t feel like half of my browsing experience was taken away.
Just released! I just finished developing a new version of the Medical Passport. This new version adds charting to the Passport formally called Electronic Medical Record. So in short, if you are away from home, and something happens, a new doctor can create a chart that is stored on your medical drive. Then when you get back to your doctor, he/she can see exactly what another doctor has done or given you. I am continuing to develop for Essential Medical and there are some new and exciting things coming up that should be a great asset for the medical community. See the features of the EMR HERE
I have had an interest in affiliate sites for the last few years and its looking more appealing all the time. I have seen great success from others in this area and have about a half dozen idea floating in my mind for doing this. I will most likely try both sides as an affiliate and a host of a program for a few different sites. One site i will be offering a program for is Essential Medical. This will work similar to the distributor section just online. For every refering site that sales either a download or drive Essential Medical will pay $5.
Also on the other end of things, I am looking to be an affiliate for a few differnt sites and will be setting up specific blogs and sites just for this purpose. I will document my findings as I progress.
Here is the rest of the list.
1. Watch your load speeds. As a lot of people are on dial up, load speeds are an issue. No one wants to wait along time to have a page load. More and more are moving to faster connection speeds, but still a large percentage of people are still on slower speeds. While adding images or even thinking about video, remember load speeds.
2. Do not play music on your home page automatically. This has been mentioned by many books and design sites, yet still designers do it. For one most find it annoying when it starts, and two it can alienate people from your site because in various likes in music. I you must have music for example, a band site, give the user an option to turn it off, or have volume controls.
3. Easy to use navigation. This one is pretty important. Users want to know where they are and how to easily get to where they want to get. Make the site map of your site easy to read, and make the structure easy to follow. Also the navigation bar should be easy to read and consistent throughout your site or application.
4. Colors of text vs. background should be pleasing. There are always those sites that use red text over bright blue or something similar. Then you try to read the first line of text and go cross-eyed. Black texts on a white background is preferred, but if you need to use different colors, make sure the text is easily read, and does not strain the eyes.
5. Content. Write content for your site that is appropriate. Do not try to combine 3 businesses into one site as users will get confused as to what they are looking at. For example, if your site is about skiing in Aspen, do not try to run an online poker page from the same site. Domains and hosting is cheap enough to separate your business ventures.
6. Spelling goes a long way. Make sure you run your content through a spell-checker. I find even large corporate sites have very easy to fix spelling errors. Simple spelling errors put off users. If you can not spell right, it shows that a user cannot trust you with a product or service either.
