Matthew Botos

To some, blogging is already passe, giving way to microblogging sites like Twitter or even Facebook’s status line (now with optional “is”!) . For sure, this makes sense given our increasing ADD tendencies, but there’s another way to expose your continuous attention profile: social bookmarking histories.

My bookmarks on del.icio.us are a good indicator of what I’ve been reading and found worthwhile enough to save. It’s also fascinating to watch your friends and co-workers bookmarks via RSS as they wander from one topic to the next, occasionally over to one of yours, and so on. When you know people are watching, your comments section becomes a microblog, highlighting what you thought was important or making a more explicit original comment.

And the beauty of it is that it takes no effort on your part beyond the self-serving act of storing your own bookmarks and thoughts. To me, this is where the real power of social networking resides: leveraging actions that serve the individual to serve the community.

I’ve been using RoundCube Webmail for the last month or so, and it’s pretty slick for an early release. One feature really bugs me though: it defaults to blocking all images in messages until you click to load them, and doesn’t provide an option to toggle this behavior.

If you have good spam protection on your account already, you can automatically load images by finding the following block of code in program/steps/mail/show.inc and changing it to read:

// check if safe flag is set $MESSAGE['issafe'] = 1; // override to always display images // if ($MESSAGE['issafe'] = intval($GET['safe'])) // $SESSION['safemessages'][$MESSAGE['UID']] = true; // else if ($SESSION['safemessages'][$MESSAGE['UID']]) // $MESSAGE['is_safe'] = 1;

A growing trend in submitting support tickets is to redirect you to an existing answer using text analysis, search, and recommendations. Most of these systems miss the mark, but I have to again say how happy I am with my hosting company, A2 Hosting, for providing a suggestion that was spot on, and revealed they already had a solution for my problem. Instead of another question to answer, their helpdesk actually got a compliment in their inbox instead!

I sold three items on eBay this week: a camera lens, a cell phone, and a suitcase, all starting at 99 cents. Guess which one had the highest final bid?

The lens got some initial bids, but the last-day bid up finished short of what I had hoped. The cell phone got nothing until the end - I didn’t think it would even sell, based on some other unsold listings - and ultimately fetched a tidy price. The suitcase really surprised me, though, selling for 80% of what I paid for it, despite its use, bulk, and more expensive shipping.

I’ve sold occasional outdated or unneeded things on eBay over the years, and it’s always surprising what price the market sets for them. It’s a good reason to clean out your closets and basements and “find” some money in the process. Another good reason: eBay has simplified their listing form and PayPal makes it quick to get paid and print USPS and UPS shipping labels.

As promised in Roll Your Own WordPress iPhone Theme, I’ve applied the same custom iPhone theming process to my photo gallery. It follows the look and feel of the iPhone’s own photo application: albums appear in a list, photos in a grid, and individual photos largely by themselves. I also reproduced its coolest feature: you can scroll through photos by clicking the left and right sides to go back and forward!

While this leveraged CSS to tweak the same set of full screen pages, I found there was a good bit of cleanup needed in the original Gallery2 theme, which still had tables instead of divs. There’s also some Javascript XPath and DOM manipulation to strip out the tables that create the drop shadows around photos and thumbnails. Finally, the “scrolling” photos are accomplished using a custom image map based on the dimensions of each photo.

I’m quite pleased with the end result; it makes viewing photos on the iPhone quite nice!

Update: By request, the code for my theme is now available; the iPhone specific parts are marked in theme.tpl, theme.js, and iphone.css. It’s still a bit rough, so you may need to make some adjustments for use on your own site.

Download the iPhone Gallery2 Theme 

This blog now has a new, custom iPhone theme, replacing the previous plugin-based theme. It’s based on the principles laid out in A List Apart’s Put Your Content in My Pocket, using CSS and a layout optimized for iPhone and other small screen devices. It also restores the benefits of caching and the search feature. None of the iPhone emulators respond to the layout cues, but you can see a preview to the right.

The project was a great challenge: optimizing a single, cached copy of each page for both large and small screen devices. In addition to using CSS to hide secondary features and resize the important parts to be readable and functional, I employed some Javascript manipulation to hide the remainder of posts and provide the “…” more links. Safari doesn’t have a native XPath implementation for Javascript manipulation of the DOM, but there’s a very compact XPath and XSLT library for Safari available. The CSS and Javascript is all open, so feel free to have a look.

Next up: an iPhone theme for my photo gallery.

This week concluded a six-month project to develop a more dynamic website for my ski club, which culminated in the design being scrapped. It’s a bit disappointing, since I had put a decent bit of effort into the beta, and had been advocating a change for at least a year and a half. Ultimately, though, it was a good learning experience, both in terms of technology and project management.

The original goal was to offload some updating responsibilities from our webmaster to a larger group of editors, and to provide more timely updates. This meant moving away from a static, Dreamweaver-generated site to a dynamic content management system, Drupal. Drupal seemed like a good choice from systems I reviewed, being free to use and modify without costly tools, and with a large community of contributors.

A second goal soon overtook the project, though: redesigning the look of the site. It made sense to do both together, but graphic design by committee is a difficult process and took us away from a functional evaluation. After implementing and debating several designs, attention did partially return to functionality, which still came up lacking to many. Admittedly, Drupal - even with TinyMCE and WYSIWYG editing - isn’t the easiest system, but it was still usable.

The classic dilemma of customizing an broader, existing tool versus developing your own tailored but more limited one presented itself. In the end, the latter won out, largely due to the fact that in six months, other ways were found to spread the load of updating the existing site, and other options were presented for the more dynamic pieces.

For myself, I got some first hand experience with Drupal and the politics of project management. The lessons I learned: commit to a visual design before implementation, make early and objective functional evaluations, and engineer the social aspects as much as the technical ones.

Syndicated feeds (RSS and Atom) make it much easier to follow your favorite sites and your friends’ activities; I’m also finding they provide some other amusing moments:

• I’ve been using FeedHub to suggest select entries from the many feeds I subscribe to; it uses a trainable recommendation engine to give you a feed of recommendations. The list of feeds it works off included a few of my own I added for testing purposes, so it’s alway fun to see one of my own posts get recommended back to me!
• On the more social side, I’m a heavy del.icio.us user and enjoy seeing what people in my network have been bookmarking & occasionally tagging bookmarks for them. It’s always rewarding to see them pick up things I’ve bookmarked, whether it was one for them or just one for myself.

I have a confession to make: I’ve actually been using Internet Explorer 7 for the last month at work. Though I’m a die-hard Firefox fan, I decided to undertake a little experiment when I switched jobs.

With tabbed browsing and search plugins, IE7 offers some familiar features, and even goes a step further by making it easy to create your own search plugins. Bookmark organization is a bit basic, as is del.icio.us integration, but usable. It’s also missing Greasemonkey, though I use fewer scripts at work than at home. Being that I do develop websites at work, though, the developer tools are a step down from Firebug, particularly when it comes to debugging Javascript.

The verdict: IE 7 is surprisingly tolerable, but still leaves power users hungry for Firefox and it’s rich collection of plugins.

After trying homebrew spreadsheets and Quicken to manage my finances, I decided to give mint.com a try. Pure viral marketing finally got me - I saw a friend declare himself a “fan” of the site on Facebook.

Setup was quite easy; it grabs account information with much less fuss than Quicken. It uses an established provider to this, which eases some of the worries that a web startup has all your banking information. From there, you get an immediate overview of your finances, and offers from their presumed partners on how you can save money. Not a bad business model, especially when you consider the email alerts and updates it sends to keep you coming back.

It does have a few shortcomings: it only pulls in your last month’s worth of information and doesn’t always set new categories successfully, making it more difficult to use the budgeting and analysis capabilities. It did turn up some good tempting deals, though it missed some of my current credit card rewards.

The interface is smooth, though, and with everything moving to the web, personal finance can’t be far behind - even Quicken is getting in on the game.