A huge thank you to Derek Perez, who has taken over development of the jQuery PageSlide plug-in. He’s done a major overhaul and brought it up to version 1.1 with the following new features:
Very cool. GitHub now offering private installs of their software within a company’s own network. If I had a business that was large enough to warrant this type of setup, I’d be all over it. But, alas, my new projects are weenie small, so I’ll stick to the regular ol’ GitHub product in the foreseeable future.
This weekend, I started to play around with Jetpack from Mozilla Labs. If you haven’t already heard of Jetpack, it’s a Labs experiment that looks at making the creation of web browser extensions easier. As someone who’s previously tried to make a Firefox extension, I can say wholeheartedly that this was a much, much, much more pleasant experience.
The widget that I created–TinyFinder–looks for rev=canonical links in a webpage, and displays them in the statusbar of the browser window. Rev=canonical links are meta tags that are used when a website wants to suggest a preferred tiny url to use. For example, the Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/srobbin/3533142101/) can also be accessed by Flickr’s own tiny url (http://flic.kr/p/6odh48). Of course, you could always use one of many url shortening services, but Flickr’s custom URL suggests what you’ll see on the other side of the redirect: a photo/movie. Several services are starting to employ their own custom tiny urls: Dopplr, Threadless, Songza, and many more.
If the web page you are looking at does not provide its own tiny, custom URL, you can always click on the statusbar widget; one will be created for you and automagically copied to your clipboard.
Steve Souders is one of the brightest people I know. And, on top of that, he has an uncanny ability to convey complex topics in an easy-to-understand manner. If you haven’t already ready his book, High Performance Web Sites, I suggest you do so. Here’s his latest article about the performance impact of using @import or <link> when including stylesheets.
Lately, I’ve been learning Python and applying it to the redesign of some older projects. A few weeks ago, I stumbled across NodeBox: “a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie” It’s been a fun app to play with, work on my Py-skills and create some interesting patterns.
Earlier in the week, Jacob turned me on to an interesting article about readable URLs. It’s been sitting in the back of my mind ever since.
Today, I was poking around Muxtape, to see how they do what they do. I ran across something interesting in their Amazon S3 URLs, where they house the MP3s:
http://muxtape.s3…?PLEASE=DO_NOT_STEAL_MUSIC&AWS…
Funny. What a great way to communicate a message.
On a related note, I have to say that I love Muxtape. Justin Ouellette has done a great job of giving users what they want while keeping the concept, process and interface very simple. It follows many of the same principles that we try to follow at Songza. I’m really interested to see where it goes from here — hopefully, it stays true to its minimalistic ways.
P.S. My Muxtape is at http://srobbin.muxtape.com
Last week, I had written a post, introducing a way for mobile users to watch Google Video on their phones. Well, for those readers who are visual learners, and who’d rather not traverse the article’s geek speak, I’ve created a video demonstrating how the application works and have posted it online (to YouTube….go figure). Enjoy.
UPDATE (Oct. 23, 2006): The application has been modified to allow for the downloading of both AVI and MP4 files, so that phones capable of MP4 playback can take advantage of the smaller file size.
How many times have you been sitting on the train, with nothing to do, and you thought to yourself, "Boy, I’d really like to be watching a video about pickles," only to realize that you have none on your person? If you’re like me, then the answer is plenty.
Well, worry no more. You can now search and watch Google Video right from your mobile communicator. Read the rest of this entry »
Alright, the first thing that we need to admit is that we’re standing on the shoulders of electronic giants — downloading Google Video is nothing new. In fact, the means to do it are plentiful. Good people, all over the world, have been hard at work, creating various ways of accessing and downloading video content. Here are but a few: Read the rest of this entry »
