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August 30, 2007
HiloEats.com
Hilo Eats now has it's own domain, hiloeats.com!
This is the first of several changes I plan for Hilo Eats. Other possible changes include, in random order:
* Instant reporting of "bad reviews" (reviews that are themselves bad, not reviews that say a place is bad).
* Easy reporting of closed establishments.
* Hide old reviews by default.
* iPhone/mobile version.
* Comment on a review, not just a place.
* Tagging for instant filtering.
* Expanding the scope to other areas including Keaau (after tagging is done).
I'm also open to suggestions. Please send them via the Hilo Eats Contact page.
Posted at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2007
How to Use Line Processor to Save Time on Repetitive Tasks
I often find myself needing to build a series of commands or statements from a list of elements. Whether I am linking a list of emails, building an SQL insert statement or writing a block of field validation code, this Line Processor makes the job very easy. Here's how to use this simple yet powerful tool.
I will walk through some of the steps for building a short web form, however the List Processor can be applied to any number of things not programming related. The form in this example will take a name, email and 5 URLs.
The Line Processor Interface
First, let's look at the tool itself. There are three sections:
- the List of core items,
- the Mask that will be applied to each item,
- and the Results of the processing.
The mask section has an additional save to button feature which I will cover later.
The List
The list of items contains each element I want to do something with. For my example, I have a list of field names that I'll be creating as HTML entities for the web page form.
name email url1 url2 url3 url4 url5
(Line Processor could even help create the list sequence url1..url5 but with such a short list I just typed them.)
The Mask
I now specify what I want to do with the list. For the example, I am creating HTML code, so the mask is:
<input type="text" name="{{LINE}}" id="{{LINE}}" value="" />
Clicking the Go! button will then make a copy of the mask for each line in the list and put the list element in wherever "{{LINE}}" appears.
This produces the following:
<input type="text" name="name" id="name" value="" /> <input type="text" name="email" id="email" value="" /> <input type="text" name="url1" id="url1" value="" /> <input type="text" name="url2" id="url2" value="" /> <input type="text" name="url3" id="url3" value="" /> <input type="text" name="url4" id="url4" value="" /> <input type="text" name="url5" id="url5" value="" />
Save a Mask to a Button
I'm now going to temporarily save this mask to a button via Save mask to button. I stress temporary because the new button created will disappear when I leave the Line Processor page or close the browser window.
The mask is now saved to a button so that I can recall the mask as saved after making changes to the mask. This is perfect for creating several masks before I have my list the way I want it. For example, I create this next mask to use in the processing of the form:
validateNotEmpty($_POST['{{LINE}}'], '{{LINE}} cannot be blank.');
I save this mask to a button and can break name into first_name and last_name and just recall and apply each of the masks I had saved.
In Conclusion
Manually editing repetitively is tedious, boring and prone to erorrs and search and replace can only go so far. This is especially true when working with a changing list of items. The Line Processor really makes batch modifications to a long set of items easy--especially when combined with another great tool, the Online Clipboard.
Posted at 01:29 PM | Comments (1)
April 11, 2007
MiracleSalad Gets Some Attention
I've made some much needed changes to this site, including adding an iframe to the home page so that page loading isn't hijacked by other servers (like Twitter). I've also made quite a few behind-the-scenes changes to my web tools, including making the timesheet calculator much more usable. I also wrote a jQuery script which enables full label tag support in Safari.
Speaking of Twitter, I really like the free Twitterrific app but have been having lots of problems with connectivity and lost tweets. I will post a tweet with Twitterrific, it will show up on the Twitter site and usually in Twitterrific, but when I make a new tweet, the old one simply disappears! Ponderous. I'm not entirely convinced it's a problem with Twitterrific as Twitter has been making quite a few changes with their explosive growth.
Wedding plans are continuing... though there is still a lot more to work on.
For work, I've been playing around with some object-oriented PHP but am not convinced all my projects should be OOP--especially since we don't currently have a production server with PHP5.
Posted at 01:44 PM | Comments (1)
May 09, 2005
Hilo Eats
So what's new? More World of Warcraft. :P
Ok, ok, so that's not so new. My latest work borne of boredom/inspiration is Hilo Eats. Quite simply, it's a list of places to eat around Hilo, Hawaii, with a section for reviews. Eat in Hilo? Review where you ate! :)
Posted at 05:53 PM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2005
Welcome to the InterAdNet
Many of you are probably too young to remember this, but the Internet used to be a collection of services that allowed clear and rapid communication between multiple parties via electronic mail, document sharing and discussion forums. Then something happened: commercialization.
Businesses found an entirely new demographic to rape and plunder. And by businesses, I don't mean the plague that is Wal-Mart and its ilk. I mean "small" businesses, businesses unregulated by laws, businesses run by people who knew only one thing: "I can make money on the internet by peddling anything!" These morans prey on the stupidity of the exact same people doing the same thing as they. When the average education level of the Internet community dropped below college level, it should have been obvious that the future of the Internet was destined for something more childish, more degraded, and more pointless than any given post in rec.humor without an OBJ.
I guess the 'net has become an exercise in anarchy in its rawest intellectual form. Morals play no role in governance of the 'net. Government regulation only succeeds in providing legal loopholes for unscrupulous behaviour. And complaining about it, like I'm doing now, only adds to the millions of terabytes of worthless drivel available at a few clicks of the mouse.
There is no cure for the ravenous destruction of the benefits the Internet has given us, short of shooting the already dead horse it has become. And yet, were the 'net to be shut down, economies would collapse. The skin rag industry would go grass-roots. And I could finally be free of TrackBack Pings that are nothing but advertisements for nothing relating to the contents of what you see here.
Horray humanity. :P
Posted at 07:26 AM | Comments (2)
August 10, 2004
Urban Legends
I've spent a good portion of the last few days perusing snopes.com reading up on urban legends. Using some of the information contained therein, I was able to correct a few quotes that are commonly misattributed to Mark Twain on Quotes Salad. Ahhh, progress!
This was all spurred by a very popular thread on Fark. Only read it if you have a whole day to kill and you skip the various flame wars about reading in dreams and various other topics.
Posted at 02:25 AM | Comments (0)
August 05, 2004
Conformity
In a rare attempt at conformity, I'm moving to a new blog system -- Movable Type. While writing my own was educational (especially in comment filtering), the lure of extra features and the lack of desire to learn how to recreate them on my own led me to seek alternatives. I read many blogs and a good portion utilize MT. We'll see how it goes!
Posted at 07:17 PM | Comments (1)
March 11, 2004
Domain Chosen!
Dare I go with the engrish flavored domain of MiracleSalad.com? Yes! Does it go with white wine or red? Whichever you have in your glass! Which fork do I use? None, let your mouse do the feeding! You can now contact me at soupspoon (at) miraclesalad (dot) com.
(Why I'm not linking the email address.)
I will be moving the stuff off of the old site (UHH) and over to the new one (miraclesalad.com) on a "as I can" basis, so the old site will eventually go away. :)
Posted at 08:10 AM | Comments (0)
March 01, 2004
The Domain Search
Why the hell is it so hard to get a domain name these days? I've been checking register.com for the past week and everything I can think of (that's communicable to others) has been taken. Procrastination on my part? Sure. That doesn't revoke my right to bitch about it though.
The sad thing is, I've been on the net longer than 90% of these people too. Fall 1990--back when "the net" was barely more than gopher, veronica, email and usenet news.
I've come up with a few fun/good/cute/etc. domains but most would involve me spelling out the domain to people who: 1) don't understand l33t sp34k and/or 2) don't get the inside joke.
Some of the domains I've tried (and are already taken), include: swalker.com, sunny.com, sunnywalker.com, oxymoron.com, oxymora.com (the plural of oxymoron), procrastination.com, perspicacity.com, perspicacious.com, verisimilitude.com, spoonerism.com, and solecism.com.
/sigh.
Wondering what the hell some of that stuff is?
Why not go with .net, .org, .info, .ws, or some other domain suffix--especially when I'm not a commercial institution? First, most of the domains I've tried are also registered with those other suffixes. And second, whenever one communicates a domain name, there is a knee-jerk reaction to prepending with "www" and appending with ".com". People have to stop to think when it's not "www.domainname.com", and we all know no one likes to think.
The domain registration can just bite my ass (oh wait, bitemyass.com is taken too). :(
Posted at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2003
The Art of Design
For the first time, I am really excited about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I mean, sure, I've been using them for years now, but now that I've seen what they can really do and now that modern browsers are really supporting the CSS standards, I am starting to appreciate them.
Unfortunately, good CSS still isn't trivial, and I'm not sure it will ever be. But with good enough tools, it can be. Dreamweaver MX 2004 really make a concerted effort to improve their development environment towards supporting CSS, and it appears they've done a decent job. Apart from the program being about as stable as Sam Kinnison on a coke binge, it has helped me develop more CSS dependent (and therefore less browser/OS dependent) sites.
The real issue, however, is at what point do I, as a university webmaster, decide when to stop supporting non-CSS compliant browsers. Or, more accurately, when I do stop adding tons of extra code to specifically support non-CSS browsers like Netscape 4. It was a great browser for its time, but its time is LONG gone. Unfortunately, there is still a significant portion of the site's traffic that still uses NS4 (8ish %). There has to be a time to move people off ancient architecture, OSes, applications and browsers.
Posted at 07:54 AM | Comments (0)
October 08, 2003
Ye Olde Internet
I'm seriously thinking about changing to a moderated comments system. The, shall we say, "quality" of the comments has been less than great (which is why you don't see many of them here). I guess I should have expected this. And by seriously thinking about, I mean, I just have modify my comments system code.
There are times when I miss the Internet of 1991. There, the primary social interaction was via Usenet News (newsgroups). And it wasn't the haven for pornography and spam that the newsgroups have become today. You could actually have a conversation with people and only occasionally get flamed (unless you were posting to rec.humor).
A few years later, the web brought far too many people to the Net and with it, we got the full flavor of online culture. It's as poluted as our IRL (in real life) lives.
But hey. Where does nostalgia get us? More flames. ;P
Posted at 08:54 AM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2003
Sunny's Funnies
Now that I've gotten most of the Quotes Database rebuilt, It's on to the Sunny's Funnies humor archive. It should be an easy one to build except for the picture management system.
I haven't quite decided how to handle funnies with pictures yet. The database side of the funnies is quite flexible with regards to adding pictures to a funny. The beast is in writing the web-based UI (user interface). Because there are so many possible functions (add funny with no pictures, 1 picture, many pictures; update funny with 0, 1, >1; delete funny with 0, 1, >1), I want to build a UI that is both functional and usable.
There's no sense in writing 9 different UIs for each of the possible functions because that's just stupid to use. Likewise, one page with all options isn't the best for server load. I just have to decide what is both usable and easy to write (because I'm so lazy :D).
Also, to help get some feedback and interaction in my site, I've added a Submit Quote and Submit Funny so visitors can send me stuff they enjoy and want to share.
Posted at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)
July 16, 2003
Quotes Database
Adding the Blog feature to my web site also gave me an opportunity to work on my quotes database.
When I first put it together, I was still a n00b in database design, so I put it together wrong. I've since gone in, restructured the database so it's better (not best because I wanted to preserve my data) and working much more smoothly. The new design also allows me much more freedom and functionality. Wheee! :)
Anyway, the updates continue, and I've added a few hundred more quotations to the database. I think one good weekend should flesh it out quite a bit.
After I'm satisfied with my quotes database, I want to revive my Sunny's Funnies to some degree. That will definately be time consuming though. /sigh.
Posted at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2003
Working for Myself
I've been watching quite a lot of Changing Rooms (neighbors swap houses and redecorate a room with the help of two designers) and Ground Force on BBC America. On the 100th episode of Changing Rooms, two of the designers swap and redecorate each other's houses. In the preamble, designer Lawrence mentions that it's really difficult for designers to decorate their own houses because they're always working for other people and never really thinking of the decor for their own personal consumption. I find the same is true for web design.
When building and updating my own sites, I feel that I'm far more critical and/or fussy about what I'm doing than when I'm building a site for someone else. I don't mean that quality suffers in either case (well, you can be the judge of some of that anyway), but I go through far more possible designs when building my own site. Part of that indecision is what draws out creativity and stretches the boundaries of my repertoire. That's the fun part.
Another (large) portion of the process, however, is spent saying "does that layout/design/color scheme/functionality really speak to me and match both my tastes and my personality? Or is it just something that seemed like a cool idea or design and would work well if I was only building a site for X, Y or Q?
It's rather difficult trying to invest oneself and place one's personal stamp on something that is meant as both for public consumption and private display. Seperate, the two are relatively easy to identify and cater to, but making something personal and for sharing is no easy task--whether it's a web site, a room, or a garden.
As I consider this further, I begin to wonder if there's much difference to an extrovert's opinion. E's are used to dealing with the human element more frequently (by choice) and may be attuned to it more. Or, perhaps, just as the uncomfortable introvert's presentation of "self" is worked and reworked, so too does the extrovert go over the many possibilites that could be both personally appropriate as well as socially.
Either way, it seems to boil down to one simple generalization. One presents oneself in a way that they feel will garner the most acceptance. The details are just in the balance of social acceptance and personal pride.
Posted at 10:58 PM | Comments (0)
July 09, 2003
Convenience
I identified one of the reasons I never update my site. It's one of convenience. Because I didn't have an automated blogging system, I only rarely updated my blog. Makes sense, eh? So, being the lazy person that I am, I'm looking into systems already written. We'll see how this one works out. It will take a bit to customize it into my template.
Posted at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)