Thursday, October 27, 2005

Flickr Does Printing! Finally!

Flickr Does Printing!

This is likely already old news, but i just noticed a message on my Flickr account indicating U.S. customers can now order prints of pictures, with more countries coming soon.

This really should help them further monetize their service.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Protecting Documents from Google Accelerator

In light of the heated controversy surrounding Google Web Accelerator I'm toying around with a way to produce "links" that would be immune to those technologies.

The main issue is that most user-agent implementations tie a user interface paradigm, an "anchor", to an HTTP method, "GET".

Through scripting, there are quite a few ways to make an anchor tag more immune to accelerators, and automated crawlers. javascript: url as href attribute value, "#" as href attribute value, and onclick attribute submitting a form, etc.

In an attempt to explore alternatives to scripting, I've started toying around with the "button" HTML element. So far, I've found that Mac MS IE 5 doesn't appear to support it. Everything else is looking reasonably happy.

Here's what i'm looking at so-far.

It seems to work in: Opera, Gecko, Safari, Treo650/Blazer, Windows IE
It does not seem to work in: Mac MSIE5, SideKick (thanks Kevin).

Issues/Thoughts:
- Can anyone try more handheld devices?
- One might add a wee scripting to set window.status.
- Removing various CSS directives from that example gets you closer to the original "button" construct, as rendered by default by the user agent. Good to play with.
- You no-longer benefit from a browser's "default way of rendering a link".
- I need to test this with images. - done: it works :)
- Notice what the browser does when your mouse is "down": it lowers the text. Not sure how to override the initial "position" with CSS.

See also:

JAH, by Kevin Marks.

Rocket Boom is 1 Year Old

Congrats! - Celebratory Madness :).

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

On TV Tonight - KABC-TV News Channel 7 @5pm

update: 5pm: I just found the story online

Back in August, KABC-TV, channel 7 of Southern California stopped-by the house to do a brief bit on blogging.

They called me this morning, telling me they're finally airing it *TODAY 10/18/2005*. Chances are i might show-up for a whole 5 seconds :)

They're saying it should air on News that come-on at ... around ... or after 5pm. I'm never home during that time, so i really don't have a way to tape it, watch it, or see how much of a fool i made of myself, which i guess, is a good thing. heh, heh.

If you're able to TiVo or VCR it, that'd be cool.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Call an Apple an Apple: By Ian Hickson

I recently stumbled upon this causticly insightful short piece by Ian Hickson.

I share many of his frustrations, while i've come to reluctantly embrace yet another onslaught of acronyms.

These days, the surest way to call attention to your work is to file it under "Ajax" and "Web 2.0".

While a very useful tool in our shed, the almighty XmlHttpRequest object isn't a panacea for building compelling applications. It's just a newer tool, which happens to have polarized certain developers' creativity, who in turn felt compelled to create a new buzzword that would give it a more central position.

Most buzzwords to-date have either focused on the wrong technology, or put too much emphasis on a particular technology.

Just to mess with the minds of the three people who read this blog, and see whether i can either start a trend or get flamed into oblivion, I'm hereby coining one ugly acronym:

SBIIC: Standards-Based Interactive Interface Components

"sbeeek". oh yeah baby. stop the presses on those Ajax books, we've got something hot here.