philcrissman.com - Latest Comments in General

Re: Displaying a Gmail ATOM Feed In Google Reader

philcrissman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:15:51 -0000

If you mean a downloadable file, you'd have to look up the PHP docs on file IO, I don't think it should be too hard. If you just need a feed, you don't need to do anything different; say the above file was your-url.com/bacn.php, you would just use that address, and an atom feed should be returned.

Even better might be SimplePie (http://simplepie.org/), which was not around when I wrote this and looks very easy to use.

Re: Displaying a Gmail ATOM Feed In Google Reader

Gus — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 03:21:19 -0000

Type your comment here.So say I wanted to write the output to teh screen, or a file, for use with Geektool, how would I do that with the above?

Re: Displaying a Gmail ATOM Feed In Google Reader

Gus — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 03:21:06 -0000

Type your comment here.So say I wanted to write the output to teh screen, or a file, for use with Geektool, how would I do that with the above?

Re: Where Does CTRL-W Come From?

TheGuyThatDoesn'tGiveAShit — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:26:31 -0000

wow is that sooooo important???

Re: Where Does CTRL-W Come From?

henryzx — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:12:41 -0000

I think it is derived from an original Universal keyboard Shortcut from Mac to close a window of a particular application. Try it on a mac.

Re: Flex and Rails

Luke Bayes — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:04:11 -0000

Hey Phil,

Thanks for the pointer!

Please let me know if you have any questions once you do try out Sprouts.

Re: Flex and Rails

VeryVito — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:02:00 -0000

Wow. Always good to see the Jabberwocky raise its head again! The scariest part these days is its ancient AS1 text.

Re: Schroedinger’s Glass

shizly — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:44:33 -0000

About the forms: agreed.

Also a beef of mine: difficulty in unsubscribing. If I don't use said service, chances are I will not remember my username or password, yet the bad website people want me to go through a "forgot my username" AND a "forgot my password" rigamorole just to unsubscribe. Hell no.

Re: Long Sign-Up Forms Considered Harmful

philcrissman — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:00:53 -0000

Right; I agree. In cases where a username is automatically public, then using the email address would be a faux pas.

One simple option would be to simply truncate the email before the '@' and use that as the user id. While it might be relatively easy to guess the address using the major domains used these days (it's still relatively few people who use their own personal domain as their main email channel), it would at least be mildly obfuscated.

But even if one includes a username field, that would (hopefully) be only 3 fields: username, email, password. If you send an email to the new user right away (before you encrypt is and save it to the db) advising them of what password they signed up with, then you don't need a second field for the password; if they really did fat-finger it or forget what they entered, they could just check their email.

There are always exceptions... sometimes you need a little more information from a new user. But in most cases, I think you can leave that until _after_ he/she has signed up; just direct them to their profile page to fill in additional information, if they want to. If it so happens that some information is critical to the app (maybe it simply _must_ know my zip/postal code, for some reason), then you can advise the user that feature X won't work until they've added this information. Etc.

I think it's pragmatic for the web application, as well; I'd venture to guess that the simpler the sign up, the less attrition you'll see at that point of the process. To me, that makes sense; make it so insanely simple to sign up that I just can't resist.

Re: Long Sign-Up Forms Considered Harmful

mrben — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:24:39 -0000

Bear in mind that your username is often displayed publically, and you probably don't want your email displayed that way....

Re: Schroedinger’s Glass

Scott Hanselman — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:36:30 -0000

As an engineer, I declare that there is Too Much Glass.

Re: Schroedinger’s Glass

philcrissman — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:23:29 -0000

Pavlov, Pavlov... I can't picture his face, but the name rings a bell....

(ducks)

Re: Schroedinger’s Glass

mrben — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:25:22 -0000

If you put Pavlov's dog in a box with Scroedingers cat and ring a bell, does it increase the chance of the cat being dead?

Re: Shiftspace for Firefox 3.0

Mushon — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:19:10 -0000

Well, if you ask me the metaweb is the most exciting thing online...

I agree with you that they are the future of the web and I can go on and on about why I think they didn't take on yet. With that being said I think ShiftSpace is not ready for prime time yet and has yet to mature as a platform. It is getting there, but it is not an easy task.

We could definitely use another serious coder like yourself or some of your blog's audience. The FF3 thing has set us back a bit but there are really exciting things happening with ShiftSpace and I have great belief in its potential to transform the way we experience the web.

Again, we would love for you to be a part of it.

Re: Shiftspace for Firefox 3.0

mrben — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 08:11:45 -0000

Oooo - Lily sounds interesting. /me investigates

Re: Shiftspace for Firefox 3.0

philcrissman — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:54:12 -0000

Thanks Mushon. Good to know.

As soon as I can commit some time, I'm looking forward to actually digging into the Shiftspace internals.

To be honest, I'm still a little stumped as to why there isn't more buzz about these sorts of things (shiftspace, (the late?) hoodwinkd, et al.). It seems blindingly obvious to me that these tools, or some other implementation of these same ideas, are a huge part of the future of the web. I guess they are just not quite polished enough (yet) for the Scoble's of the web to jump on them and begin evangelizing their merits...

Yet...

Re: Shiftspace for Firefox 3.0

Mushon — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:09:07 -0000

Hi Phil,
thanks for the continuous support. Unfortunately the link you referred to is an alpha of the upcoming (awesome) ShiftSpace release. It is more functional with FF3 than 0.10 but is unfortunately still not fully functional. FF3 requires us to change the way we attach functions to objects, and there are some fixes to be made with the new release. Otherwise we could have already launched the much awaited ShiftSpace 0.11 (to be called 0.5) in which we basically rewrote the whole thing!

For now the version you referred to works well for leaving notes, but is not as functional with other "spaces". We hope to get the last bugs fixed within the next days and finally launch. We will make sure to keep you posted with a full list of the new features (FF3 support and much much much more).

take care,
Mushon

Re: Turn FriendFeed Into A Twitter Client

t3mujin — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:31:18 -0000

"Client" indeed is a bit misleading, but is another nice source to Twitter, just like twitterfeed

Re: Apple’s Labeled Scrollbar

Brian Glass — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:15:29 -0000

Apple comes up with some great stuff sometimes, but I could never use a Mac until they get out of their single-task menu-bar mentality.

The menu bar for an application belongs on the application, not at the top of the screen. If you're like me and use more than application at a time, it's pretty darn inconvenient to have to keep going all the way to the top of the screen for the menu and also inconvenient to have to click on the application before the menu-bar appears.

Of course I think it's a bad idea to have to click on an application for it to gain focus. I'm a focus follows mouse man. It's a pity Gnome has this set wrong by default. I guess its to accommodate all the migrating Windows users...

IMHO, all the niceties in the world can't make up for this major flaw.

Re: Apple’s Labeled Scrollbar

philcrissman — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 02:42:46 -0000

:sigh. Yes, I half expected it had been there for awhile, and I just never noticed. But I thought it was a pretty unique UI tool, and a smart one.

It does surprise me a little that it hasn't been copied more... seems like it would make a cool UI component in someone's toolbox...

Re: Apple’s Labeled Scrollbar

Corvida — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 02:08:00 -0000

I think I expect such precise detail like that from Apple that I'd never wonder if it was never there before.

Re: Apple’s Labeled Scrollbar

Evan Sims — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:51:51 -0000

Yeah, they've had that since the Apple.com redesign quite awhile back. I agree though, Apple manages to come up with these great, innovative user experiences that really seem to stick with you.

Re: Using K2 Hooks

philcrissman — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:42:29 -0000

Wordpress's "helpful" automatic character escaping keeps screwing up my code above. I'm going to have to attempt to fix it later, right now Wordpress is messing with it every time I click "save". I think the gist of using hooks is clear, though.

Re: Gmail: scanning for viruses

Andrew Block — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:51:12 -0000

Hmm, interesting thought. A Google search didn't turn up anything except a sketchy forum where one guy claimed it was Sophos (doubtful). I'd put my money on a customized Linux app, like ClamAV.

Speaking of antivirus, side thought: I just got Ubuntu 8.04 and I have to say, it is nice to be in the Linux world and never give viruses a second thought. Very nice indeed.

Re: Blamescoble, Day One

xhtmlcss — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:26:07 -0000

Heh :) The same thing happened to me too with Scoble liking Feedego
http://twitter.com/Scobleizer/statuses/824247829

Seriously, he's kind to help me promote it! So Thanks Robert, it's your fault :)