I need a quick solution to a pretty common task, there is most likely a freely had pre-made solution, but I don’t know enough of what the keywords are to bother searching. I need a menu system like eBay uses for categories.
eBay’s is a tad overkill for me–I just want users to pick X Y or Z and then A B or C for each, and then maybe D E or F. All I need is a working example, I’ll plug in my own info. If you point me to an existing solution that I end up using, I’ll PayPal you $25. If you want to go ahead and write something, or hack it together (and can prove it), I’ll PayPal you $50. It should be easy money either way.
If you need more info, drop a comment.
Update: I found a workable solution. It’s located here, but I had to hack it to work (it was tied to only have branching for one category). Let me know if you want the code.
I moved CarbWire over to Pair today. What a pleasure. I’ll be moving MobileTracker there in the next few weeks. It’s great to finally have a host that knows more than me. I can now sleep at night.
I got an invite to join Gmail today, which basically made my day. Yes, it’s just a free email service, but I’m the type that lives for this stuff. Here are my opening thoughts (been playing with it for an hour or so):
- It’s a lot more than just 1GB of storage: it’s a great UI
- The reason Google is picky about browsers is that Gmail uses a lot of JavaScript. It does not work with Safari (even with the user agent changed). I hope that Apple will work with Google on this. But for me, a dedicated FireFox user, this is “no thang”.
- It’s not all that good at detecting spam, but it will likely become better with more people in the system
- Auto-refresh for the inbox is nice
- The interface is super-fast
- Having all messages in a “conversation” together is very nice, especially when you can hide and show bits and pieces.
- It has keyboard shortcuts. It’s a frickin’ web page with keyboard shortcuts. Enough said.
- Along the same lines, it has autocomplete. Amazing.
Here you can see how it bundles conversations. If you click on the collapsed portion, it expands in real time. You can close an expanded view in the same manner. My clicking the grey “quoted text” link, the window expands to show what I was replying to. Very slick for those 3-4 bounce back emails on a lazy afternoon.
Here you can see the [very] slick spell check. I have discovered that Gmail uses frames to accomplish this feat. When you enter spell check mode and there is at least one error, it converts the text in the HTML text area to HTML in a frame. It then converts the mis-spellings into red links with a box of choices in the mouseover state. If none is correct, click edit and you get a text entry box in place of the word. Click done for spell check and it converts this HTML frame back into a text area. It’s seamless.
I’ll be posting more on this most likely. In the mean time, if there is anything you want to know/see–fire away in the comments.
Every week in Environmental Science we have a debate. They are usually on topics that are pretty “in the news” and blown way out of proportion. Example: global warming. It really is a non-deal. But if you search Google, good luck finding someone that says global warming doesn’t exist. Or even that there is no global warming.
This week the debate was on the state of our tropical rainforests. Of course if you subscribe to the facts coming out of researchers being paid to come up with numbers that net them more research money, you’ll think that we are destroying swaths of the stuff daily. When an animal comes out of hiding, these merciless killers just swat it to the ground and spit on the now extict wonder. Well that’s not so true. We aren’t deforesting our tropical rainforests. Brazil has actually had a regrowth of rainforest. Asia is having a few problems, but most of the hippies hit on South America. Oh, and we are not killing 50,000 species a year. Enough said.
For daily readers, you can ignore this. It’s purely for poor souls who are in need of a non-biased voice in the world of enviromentalism.
It looks like SixApart took care of comments that are obviously spam (porn/gambling/Viagra). I haven’t gotten one in a while, which is a really nice feeling. But, lately I have been getting one or two quasi spam comments a day. Mostly on old entries, I assume found through Google, random people will post a comment that adds marginal utility to the topic but include a link to their site. And by marginal, I mean none. Nothing to flip the spam switch though, often times a quote like this, “A fool may throw a stone into a well which a hundred wise men cannot pull out.”
This really is a waste of time for those involved because I delete them in a few minutes in the best cases, and a day or two at the worst. Not a whole lot of time to gain the little PageRank a post here might have. So, if you are one of these despots, don’t bother wasting anymore time.
My last post on SpyMac still gets a fair amount of traffic from search engines, so I figured I would bring up the topic again (SpyMac is in the news). Due to Google announcing Gmail, SpyMac figured it would be cool to give out 1GB of email storage to its members.
If you took all Mac sites and rated them on a scale of “shady-ness”, SpyMac would be at the top. Besides calling it’s spattered collection of PHP scripts a “platform” or “operating system”, the site has a faux address at the Empire State Building listed as its home. Not to mention SpyMac is really based in Germany but co-founded from Canada. Just for fun, they are known to steal stories nearly verbatim from Mac news sites and act like it’s their right. Even more fun, their news feed is almost RSS but starts with SpymacNewsChannel version=”1.0″ so it won’t work as RSS. You could call that stealing nearly verbatim too, as they never mention RSS, but we won’t go that far.
And then we have the flutter of stories about the announcement from a few days ago. The site that launched out of a completely faked story back in 2001 called “iWalk” is now being called a Mac web host that has only been around a year. Sadly that’s probably just mistakes by press people who are too lazy to ask questions. I know how that goes, so we’ll give them a pass on that.
For as much code as SpyMac has written, it’s really ugly around the edges. Try logging in and you’ll get a white page with bold verdana redirecting you. Access something when you aren’t logged in, and you’ll see the same. The PHP is all in different files sitting on the main file index. No nice mod_rewrite action to have URL’s that lack cruft. No modular “platform” that can be seen.
When SpyMac realizes that 10,000 kids decided to load up a gig of email for kicks, we should see quite a show. Drives start dying and investors get cranky. Google is cashflow positive and has a track record of knowing how to scale to infinity. SpyMac can’t buy an advertiser and is only famous for lying. Who would you trust with your data?
For me, I’ll load up 1000MB of my favorite uncompressable junk email, 250 MB of my favorite compressed music, and whatever else I can find to take up my piece of the pie. I encourage you to do the same. I’ll even show you how to set up crontab to make sure that you use that data nightly.
Damn that’s going to be a long time before I can say that again. But just think, we have eight more years of this palindromic date fun before the long dry spell that is 2013-2100.
Tom Bridge and company are today launching a new web project called Four Corners. It looks pretty interesting: people all over the world talking about food, technology, music, politics, culture, games and language. When I say all over the world, I don’t mean NYC and LA… I mean North America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and yes–LA. Check it out.
Nick Denton’s “over budget baby” Kinja is out. I’m kind of surprised at how simple it is. Basically just an aggregator with crappy logos. But, the design is great (37 Signals), and I’m sure it will get better. I was just expecting it to do a lot more for being a year and a half in the making.
Wow. This is a big deal. Look for it to consume tomorrow’s tech news. Google is doing email, but without all the crappy parts. Never delete anything. Auto filing. No spam. I can’t wait to test it out.
“Amidst rampant media speculation, Google Inc. today announced it is testing a preview release of Gmail — a free search-based webmail service with a storage capacity of up to eight billion bits of information, the equivalent of 500,000 pages of email. Per user.”
This could be a April’s fools joke. However, it is a Business Wire PR, which would take some balls to fake. I can’t imagine a GB per user being realistic, but we shall see.
Update: The site is now a placeholder for me, just a logo and coming soon. Before it went do the Directory.
Update 2: I am starting to believe this story again. There are just too many Google people in on it for it to be fake. No matter what, it will go down in the PR history books. Smart smart smart.
