techno.blog("Dion")

I blogged about Yahoo! Pipes yesterday on Ajaxian

I was very surprised to view source and find such a nice UI was created with Ajax technology. Most people I talk to assume it is Flash, which is a testament to their work and YUI.

Many are talking about how the average Joe may not care about Yahoo! Pipes.

I applaud that this was created. Power users are users too, and they need tools that fit them.

I have several use-cases for pipes, and even registered feedgrep.com over a year ago to do some of these things.

I would like to use pipes for a couple of things, such as:

• Xenophobe: I want to filter feeds such as technorati/google blog search/delicious feeds for a given search term through a xeno pipe that nukes all but english items. This alone is a killer feature for me!
• Planet Maker: I often would like to grab the feeds of Bob, Harry, Jane, and Stacey, but I only want their thoughts on a given topic. Being able to query their feeds and grabbing out only the posts on content that I want and then aggregating it to one output feed is great.

If Yahoo! Pipes doesn’t cross the divide to see my mum using it that is good news for me. I want some of their cycles!

The Google Ajax Search folk just released updates to the search API including a dynamic news bar, and support for Book Search.

I quickly went through the wizard and threw the code at the top of this blog with terms such as Ajax and Ruby.

It is up there in a bit of a broken state as the width of the content can push things around.

I am playing with screencasts and coming up with a simple way to do them and get them out there.

The current model is:

• Capture with iShowU or Snapz Pro X on the Mac…. Camtasia Studio on the PC
• Do simple edits in Quicktime Pro
• Do more complicated edits in Final Cut
• Upload to YouTube to share

The current issue is that the quality once uploaded isn’t too great (e.g. Live DOM Viewer).

I have also tried Google Video, and I am playing with many codecs. Maybe I will find the magic settings.

If anyone has experience making really nice screencasts let me know. Maybe I give up on the ease of uploading to YouTube and use a hosted Flash delivery system.

I am having fun playing with the various Google APIs, and just added the Ajax Search API to this blog.

This allowed me to get rid of the poor search that was in the blog software itself, and just let Google to the work.

The search happens inline, with results showing up on the left hand bar itself. I could have used a different model to put the results in a div on the right hand side, which is many cases is probably better.

I used the tabbed search control that enables results to be shown for the web in general, and across blogs, as well as the default… pinned to this site.

The bulk of the work is this JavaScript function, that shows the API at work:

function OnLoad() {
// Create a search control
var searchControl = new GSearchControl();

// Setup a search for this site
var siteSearch = new GwebSearch();
siteSearch.setUserDefinedLabel("This Site");
siteSearch.setUserDefinedClassSuffix("siteSearch");
siteSearch.setSiteRestriction("almaer.com");
searchControl.addSearcher(siteSearch);

// Setup a search for the entire web
var webSearch = new GwebSearch();
webSearch.setUserDefinedLabel("Entire Web");
searchControl.addSearcher(webSearch);

// Setup a search for blogs
var blogSearch = new GblogSearch();
blogSearch.setUserDefinedLabel("Blogs");
searchControl.addSearcher(blogSearch);

// Setup the tabbed view
var drawOptions = new GdrawOptions();
drawOptions.setDrawMode(GSearchControl.DRAW_MODE_TABBED);

// Tell the searcher to draw itself and tell it where to attach
searchControl.draw(document.getElementById("searchcontrol"), drawOptions);
}
GSearch.setOnLoadCallback(OnLoad);

Ilya Grigorik has written up what a few people are probably doing in Ruby Screen-Scraper in 60 Seconds.

The combination of Firebug and Hpricot is power, simple, and fast.

The power comes in not having to come up with the XPath to get that piece that you see in your browser. No more walking through the DOM working out the XPath from that. No more looking at the source. Find it. Inspect it. Copy it.

I touched a couple of very different social applications that choose good content.

New Age

The new kid on the block is the Supervote which is a YouTube app that let’s people send in their ranking on the superbowl commercials.

Aside: I thought they were almost all poor. If I was a high-up and marketing came to me saying “we need $2MM for a superbowl commercial” I think I would say “if you show me a creative commercial that will be talked about for months after the superbowl, then we can talk”.

Back to supervote. It is a simple page that let’s you go through the various superbowl ads, watch them inline, and knock them up or down as you go. Then you send in your thoughts. Social ranking in short order.

In Former Times

(I love how Germans say ‘in former times’).

I have been in various rental cars, and realised that an interesting social picking phenomenon takes place there.

I get in, and hunt for good radio stations. Where is NPR? Scan. Scan. Scan. You have the 6 presets (plus a second 6 on FM2 and more on AM normally) and lots of stations fighting for those 6 slots. As new people get in, they make their choices. Some will stay the same, some will change (preset one probably changes the most, as many ignore the rest).

This doesn’t just happen in rentals, I imagine the same thing is going on in zip cars and the like.

Radio Presets: the digg of the old school :)

Charlie Brooker professes to the world I hate Macs.

As I read his piece I felt like I was listening to Dennis Miller trying to be funny whilst saying Iraq is going great and that we need to bomb the people over there.

Lots of wit and sarcasm and poetic tripe:

Cue 10 years of nasal bleating from Mac-likers who profess to like Macs not because they are fashionable, but because “they are just better”. Mac owners often sneer that kind of defence back at you when you mock their silly, posturing contraptions, because in doing so, you have inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble, quivering soul – that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn’t really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.

You can tell that Charlie hasn’t looked at a Mac since the Apple IIe. He still thinks that it is impossible to have a second mouse button (the new two finger trackpad click on the macbooks is nice btw).

Good try Charlie. If your new TV show is as uneducated as this, we won’t be grabbing it ;)

I created a Greasemonkey script to enable a pattern that I like to follow.

When inputting data in rows (e.g. todo list app, cells in a spreadsheet, etc) it is nice to be able to quickly hit enter to move to the next row.

This works well in Tada list and Excel. Type in X, return, next.

This breaks down if the field allows larger text and return takes you to a new line for that one field. An example of this is Basecamp.

I use Shift+Return/Enter to force the existing content to be saved, allowing me to follow the normal pattern with the subtle difference of having to know the meta key.

With the simple Quick Save for Basecamp user script I get the ease of use of Tada in Basecamp todo lists.

Submitting the basecamp form via getTheFormElement.submit() wasn’t kicking off the Ajax call nicely (it worked, just caused refresh).

Instead, I simulate a mouseclick on the submit button via the trusty friend:

function simulateClick(node, eventType) {
var event = node.ownerDocument.createEvent("MouseEvents");
event.initMouseEvent(eventType,
true, // can bubble
true, // cancellable
window,
1, // clicks
50, 50, // screen coordinates
50, 50, // client coordinates
false, false, false, false, // control/alt/shift/meta
0, // button,
null);
node.dispatchEvent(event);
}