#web

To-do List in Google Calendar

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It seems that I am find­ing Google Cal­en­dar (cur­rently being referred to as gCal by technopiles) an alter­na­tive to Out­look lately. Even though I wish that Google would fin­ish up imple­ment­ing some kind of sync­ing between gCal and Out­look already. But luck­ily, there’s a “hack” that helps out in that side of things. I guess its enough to hold me down for a bit till some­thing from Google comes about.

Any­ways, one of the other things that I was hop­ing gCal to have was a sim­ple to-do list(s), aka. Tasks for those Outlook-oriented peo­ple. As I was Blingo-ing for an inte­gra­tion of some kind of to-do list with gCal, this arti­cle was on top of the list by Matias Pelenur. It does the job using JS, GM and Fire­Fox. Although at the moment, it only saves your to-do list per GM install; locally that is, per com­puter. But there are a cou­ple of workarounds that can be done to make it store to ser­vices such as Ama­zon S3, gCal itself, etc. as noted by Matias.

Sup­pos­edly, Google men­tioned the avail­abil­ity of an “Account Authen­ti­ca­tion Proxy for Web Appli­ca­tions” fea­ture that will be inter­grated with their gCal API in late April… this past April in fact. I guess we’ll just have to wait for an update on Matias about that, or from Google regard­ing their own home-blended to-do list inte­gra­tion with gCal.

TechCrunch Reinvents Itself by Going Green

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One of the sites I fre­quent, TechCrunch, has emerged with a redesign.

TechCrunch, founded on June 11, 2005, is a weblog ded­i­cated to obses­sively pro­fil­ing and review­ing new web 2.0 prod­ucts and com­pa­nies. In addi­tion to new com­pa­nies, we will pro­file exist­ing com­pa­nies that are mak­ing an impact (com­mer­cial and/or cul­tural) on the web 2.0 space. TechCrunch is edited by Michael Arring­ton, who also writes a com­pan­ion blog, CrunchNotes.

This time around, things seems to be quite green. Other notable fea­tures of the redesign would be that the main-content area got moved from the cen­ter, to the left. Fol­low­ing that, most of the ads were then flanked on the right, which used to be on the left and right sides of the main-content.

I don’t know what it is, but the green skin just reminds me too much of Technorati’s. Besides that, I think the font-size and line-height improves on usabil­ity from the last ver­sion. Although, I kind of am still used to the sub­tle, nat­ural col­ors of the last one. Any­ways, con­grats to Michael and cre8d design/Rachel Cun­liffe on the launch.

Con­tinue reading →

My Findings on coComment and Movable Type 3.2 Integration

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coComment

After 12-hours or so of usage and debug­ging my MT tem­plates to prop­erly inte­grate with coCom­ment, I finally got some­where to say the least. If you need to catchup to what this is all about, you may read my pre­vi­ous arti­cle on what coCom­ment can do.

Any­ways, I finally got around fix­ing my Indi­vid­ual Entry Archive tem­plate. I did the following:

  • I for­mat­ted the TITLE-tag as stated in coComment’s Sup­port sec­tion,
  • fixed my old MT2.661 JS comment-related code to use the mt-site.js pro­vided on MT3.2,
  • and edited my CSS to reflect the change I have done with respect to the mt-site.js

Thing is, now I’ll have to fix the cookie part. It should be sim­ple. I think I just need to change the com­ment form’s vari­able to match that of mt-site.js. Then, match those changes in my CSS.

One other issue I found through this lit­tle exper­i­ment was that coCom­ment looks for the default markup in terms of the sub­mit but­ton. That is,

<input type="submit" accesskey="s" name="post" id="comment-post" value="Post" />

So keep that in mind for those of you who just cut-and-pasted your MT2.661 code dur­ing your upgrade to MT3.2. It’s just too bad that we can’t use our cus­tom image-buttons. So @Steph, if you are read­ing, could you please address this as well with the team =)

Also, place­ment of the coCom­ment JS code in the header is tricky and strict. I was try­ing to fig­ure out why the heck it wasn’t work­ing when I went on to try JS place­ment. I ended with the following:

&hellip;
<script type="text/javascript" src="<$MTBlogURL$>js/general.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<$MTBlogURL$>js/mt-site.js"></script>
<MTIfCommentsAccepted>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!&#8212;
window.onload = function() {
individualArchivesOnLoad(commenter_name);
}

// coComment entry-specific variables
var postURL = "<$MTEntryPermalink$>";
var postTitle = "<$MTEntryTitle smarty_pants="1"$>";
//&#8212;>
</script>
</MTIfCommentsAccepted>
</head>

Last but not least, how do we tag key­words with mul­ti­ple words? I tried sep­a­rat­ing with com­mas, using double-quotes and plus-sign but to no avail. If you know, let me know. Help me, help you.

Other than that, coComment’s cur­rent ver­sion is rock solid of a tool for blog­gers. Enjoy!

coComment Helps Us Remember What We’ve Said

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I was actu­ally think­ing of some­thing like this. I was going to make it my first RoR project but that might just be to ambi­tious. Any­ways, plain and simple,

coCom­ment is the only ser­vice that allows you to enjoy the full poten­tial of blog com­ments on the web. Before coCom­ment, the blo­gos­phere was not a global con­ver­sa­tion, but tons of frag­mented, hard to fol­low, and untrack­able discussions.

Using coCom­ment, you can now keep track of what you have been com­ment­ing on, dis­play your com­ments on your blog, and see what is new in the dis­cus­sions you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in (if other users are also on coComment).

One con (at the moment), is that “users can only track com­ments from blog posts that they have actu­ally com­mented on, and only com­ments left by other cocom­ment users are shown.“1 But this was a day or so ago. I have to check the new ver­sion out myself as I’ve just signed up a few moments ago.

Along with their news yes­ter­day about ver­sion 0.4c being released, the team also men­tioned the fact that there is now a Fire­fox exten­sion for coCom­ments. This addi­tion, for sure, will make things a bit eas­ier than hav­ing to use a book­mar­let on the user’s com­puter.

There might be one small gripe though. As I was tak­ing a look at coComment’s Blog Inte­gra­tion sec­tion which lists which browsers and blog/CMS/site-platforms it sup­ported, I read that Mov­able Type blogs must have the fol­low­ing format,

<title>blog name : article title</title> or
<title>blog name | article title</title>

Oth­er­wise, the com­ment (in coCom­ment) will show up as “(untitled)”.

So, see­ing that, there might be an issue of hav­ing every­one involved have a stan­dard way of tem­plat­ing their TITLE-tags. I, for one, see this as a big thing (so it ain’t “small” after all). If this is true, and hasn’t been addressed in it’s next iter­a­tion, coCom­ment is pretty much forc­ing every­one to do “this and that.” Then again, we’ll see how this plays out with Micro­for­mats. So if you are listening/reading this oh-Lords-of-coComment, please do let us know. (Then again, I just signed up and haven’t got­ten to play around with coCom­ment that com­pletely yet.)

All in all, the ser­vice is prac­ti­cal and very use­ful for those that like to read and inter­act with dif­fer­ent blogs. It’s great for coCom­ment to have got­ten around and imple­mented some­thing use­ful to the mil­lions that are very involved with interblog-interactivity. In it’s cur­rent state of ver­sion 0.4c, I just can’t wait to see the other fea­tures it will have when it rolls out from “beta”. Pretty much, like all the other “Web 2.0″ application-sites. =)

Con­tinue read­ing →

  1. Michael Arring­ton, coCom­ment visit to Sil­i­con Val­ley [↩]

IE Web Developer Toolbar

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Just stum­bled on a link of a link and found that there is too a “web devel­oper tool­bar” for IE. Although (cur­rently) unrated, it seems to pro­vide some use­ful functionality:

  • Explore and mod­ify the doc­u­ment object model (DOM) of a web page.
  • Locate and select spe­cific ele­ments on a web page through a vari­ety of techniques.
  • Selec­tively dis­able Inter­net Explorer settings.
  • View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index val­ues, and access keys.
  • Out­line tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
  • Val­i­date HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
  • Dis­play image dimen­sions, file sizes, path infor­ma­tion, and alter­nate (ALT) text.
  • Imme­di­ately resize the browser win­dow to 800x600 or a cus­tom size.
  • Selec­tively clear the browser cache and saved cook­ies. Choose from all objects or those asso­ci­ated with a given domain.
  • Choose direct links to W3C spec­i­fi­ca­tion ref­er­ences, the Inter­net Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
  • Dis­play a fully fea­tured design ruler to help accu­rately align objects on your pages.

But, don’t go and down­load­ing all at once… after all it is still in beta—“Beta 2″ to be exact.

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