Tag Archives: web development

Hacking Around With Twitter

Last night I was hacking around with Twitter and a few Javascripts and cobbled together a window into my Twitterstream (sgclark.com/twitterstream). What I basically did is take a javascript and have it suck in the RSS feed of the folks I follow on Twitter. Its a very simple view – just displaying one tweet at a time – which allows you to actually read what is being said rather than being overwhelmed with the “river” of information. I then rigged it so it will refresh every 5-7 seconds or so. I am going to make a few interface tweaks to it over time, while still keeping it simple and minimal. Nothing too exciting, but just a little hack that will let you look at Twitter from a different angle.

Updated Mini Slide Navigation

So I’ve finally gotten around to “officially” updating the Mini Slide Navigation mashup that I did two and a half years ago. When I created the mash up back then, I was just hacking around and was completely un-prepared for the attention and positive accolades that this idea received. What was really cool was that two people – Rob Glazebrook and Brian McAllister – built on the work I did and made the navigation even better by making the page locator “snap back” to the page you are currently on.

So this time, I’ve taken what Rob and Brian did, and built on top of that. With my new version, I’ve incorporated some PHP into the mix, to enable the navigation be an used as a “virtual include” on your site, so you to centrally manage the navigation and have one change/addition cascade throughout the whole site. Through PHP, I’ve also enabled the navigation to indicate the proper area of the site two directories deep, and realistically, it could handle more if needed.

So go on over to the demo page and check it out. One note: I’m still learning PHP, so if the method that I used is way too novice or considered a pseudo-hack, please be gentle with me.

Bookcontracts.com Launch

I’m happy to share the launch of www.bookcontracts.com. My wife’s uncle wrote a book on how to effectively negotiate a book contract. Recently, he updated the book and I helped him build out the website to sell a PDF version of the book. So if you are in the middle of writing a book, and need to figure out how to how to negotiate any contracts with publishers, you should consider picking the book/PDF up.

24 Ways Circa 2006

For the second year in a row, Drew McCellan has brought to us the wonderful 24 Ways to impress your friends with your web development skills. This is a daily web development journal, with its name playing off of the 24 days of Chrstmas, where guest authors draft an easy to consume tip, trick, and pointer that helps take the confusion out of some fairly advanced and cool webdev features. Be sure to check it out every day this month for a new installment.

Animated MiniTabs

The Mini Slide is now officially a cottage industry. Brian McAllister of frequency decoder has developed another version of the Mini Slide which he has titled Animated MiniTabs. He has built on my initial creation along with the outstanding work Rob Glazebrook did.

Smart Mini Slide

Rob Glazebrook made some sweet additions to the Mini Slide Navigation. He essentially addressed many, if not all, of the requests and suggestions noted by the many who commented on the navigation. Builds significantly on the tiny addition I made to put a “you’re here” indicator on the nav.

Mini Slide Update – Page Indicator

I updated the Mini Slide Navigation so that there is now an active page indicator, informing the user as to where they are within the navigation/site. This was a known omission in the original version of the navigation and it was also astutely called out in a comment on my original post.

I used the “decendant selectors” method in creating the active tab, where I gave both the page’s <body> tag and each navigation item their own unique id, so I could style specific elements of the page based on the relationship to the parent element.

As usual, I have only tested this out on Firefox 1.5 and IE 6.0. I only changed the CSS and made no changes to the SlayerOffice JS. For some reason, I am seeing the “tab slider” move slightly on the initial page load. I am not exactly sure why I am seeing this, and will investigate further. I think it may have something to do with the “z-index” element I am using in the CSS, but I am just not sure (and its very late when I am posting this and I am tired). If anyone has any insight into why this may be happening, please feel free to post it in the comments area of this post, or my original post.

Front-End Architects

This is it! I recently read this blog post by Garrett Dimon addressing the fact that the time is now for Front-End Architects. Options and applications being used on the “front end” (i.e. presentation layer) are quite diverse and as the Web becomes more pervasive, the need for an architect to handle the front end in its entirety is needed. I completely agree!!

Del.icio.us-ed

My Mini Slide Navigation mash up was discovered and posted up on del.icio.us this weekend. By Sunday 1/8/06, it had made it to the #2 slot on the del.icio.us/popular ranking (see photo).

As of ~~Monday 1/9/06~~ Thursday, 1/12/06, its been tagged by ~~over 400~~ 750+ people. Not bad for a small “mash up” I whipped up late one evening.

I had to make some last minute edits to the page and directory. It’s been on my site for a while, but I still needed to put the files in a more accurate directory, so I was admittedly a little unprepared for the traffic and attention. Del.icio.us obviously accelerated this! :) I even got a small nod of approval from Dan Cederholm of Simplebits himself.

Update – I updated the directory for the Mini Slide Navigation so the files reside in a directory of the same name as the navigation (/sandbox/minislide/). I have a redirect in place on the old page.

Mini Slide Navigation

So I was recently playing around with a couple of navigation treatments that I’ve seen – Simplebits’ MiniTabs and SlayerOffice’s Focus Slide. And I came up with a navigation “mash-up” of the two. I’m calling it the Mini-Slide Navigation (click to see demo page). I’m not sure this is any great innovation here, and I’m not claiming it to be.

I essentially applied the small Javascript used by Steve Chipman at Slayeroffice for his neat Focus Slide navigation to the equally neat Mini Tab navigation treatment created by Dan Cederholm @ Simplebits, with a few CSS tweaks. So instead of having the bottom indicators “appear” when you hover over the navigation link, the indicator slides between the navigation choices. So if you are a CSS purist, you can go with Dan’s creation. Or you can add Steve’s little Javascript (so Web two point oh-ish) and give the navigation a little bit of life.

This has been tested on IE 5 and Firefox 1.5, however I made no material changes to the Slayeroffice JS so the testing done there should be valid for this. Enjoy!