Memos from August 2006

Amazon Launches aStore Beta

· Comment
Amazon aStore Beta

Just received news through the Ama­zon Asso­ciates Team that their aStore has gone to beta. What is it?

aStore vast­ly expands on our cur­rent link type offer­ings by giv­ing you the abil­i­ty to build a ded­i­cat­ed shop­ping area that can be embed­ded with­in, or linked to from, your web­site.

…

Build your own pro­fes­sion­al online store fea­tur­ing Amazon.com prod­ucts in min­utes with no pro­gram­ming skills required. Because aStore is a ded­i­cat­ed shop­ping area for your site, it is a great com­pli­men­ta­ry prod­uct for your exist­ing Ama­zon prod­uct links. Vis­i­tors to your site get a pro­fes­sion­al shop­ping expe­ri­ence through your unique selec­tion of prod­ucts and cat­e­gories and the fea­tures of Amazon.com you have cho­sen includ­ing Cus­tomer Reviews, List­ma­nia, and more. The check­out process is com­plet­ed through Amazon.com.

You may view the demo store to see an exam­ple of a stand-alone store.

Happy Birthday Jevon!

· Comment
IMG 0063

It was fun see­ing Jevon sur­prised this past Fri­day. Dude start­ed laugh­ing as soon as he got in the door. I think at first he taught it was a strip­per cause he was blind-fold­ed. Any­ways, the night was fun.

Speak­ing of fun, have you seen Katie Dip­pold’s cre­ation, Long Awk­ward Pose? For those that haven’t seen the LAP site…

it’s sim­ple, real­ly. Peo­ple look fool­ish when pos­ing for a pic­ture. So tell your loved ones you would like to take their pho­to… then secret­ly video­tape them the whole time.

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

Cat, Kancho and Japan

· Comment

So, Joe­ma­ma had to back out of our Japan Dis­cov­ery Tour in Novem­ber. How­ev­er, we were for­tunte enough to have Cat come along and join in on the fun. Mean­while, I guess she was talk­ing to Ryan about it and I guess they had a con­ver­sa­tion about “kan­cho”. She did­n’t know what it was… till now:

[15:06] cat: ryan said i can’t play kanchu? w/the big boys yet
[15:06] me: haha
[15:06] cat: what’s it called?
[15:06] me: kan­cho
[15:06] cat: oh yeah, i’m gonna look that up right now
… (sec­onds lat­er)
[15:07] cat: ewww! i don’t want to play, i just looked it up on wikipedia!

CSS Naming Convention for Classes and IDs?

· 4 Comments

Well, just re-read­ing some of the cur­rent book­marks in my bag. To note:

I am try­ing to clean up and make things more effi­cient here at work. One goal would be to have a base CSS that will serve as a start­ing point for our Pro­duc­ers and Fron­tend peeps. Anoth­er goal would prob­a­bly be a con­ven­tion on how to use it and/or cre­ate new class­es and IDs.

One of the things that keeps com­ing up late­ly would be the nam­ing con­ven­tion of class­es and IDs. I used to imple­ment this kind of for­mat “class_name”. Then, only to switch to “class-name” in ear­ly ’06. Fast-for­ward to a cou­ple of months into the year dur­ing a project, I came to find out that if you are refer­ring to either a class­name or an ID (i.e. getEle­ment­ById, or some­thing like that) that the val­ue’s hyphen get stripped out. Can some­one con­firm this phe­nom­e­na and/or myth? That is, for exam­ple, doing “id-name” would be imple­ment­ed like so:

document.getElementById("idname")

With that how­ev­er, would it be more read­able using a camel­Cased name? Although against Tan­tek’s step #4 in terms of sav­ing the user(s) poten­tial headaches. But would there be prob­lems if there was a stan­dard with­in one’s orga­ni­za­tion? That is, class­es and IDs writ­ten as a vari­able, i.e. some­thing­LikeThis; no hyphens and no under­score.

I look for­ward to hear­ing your end­less wis­dom on this sub­ject sirs and madams. Thanks in advance.

Pudding, The Cream Cheese Filler

· Comment

So, I got into work this morn­ing only to find out that there was one bagel left in the kitchen. Being glad that there is some­thing to eat oth­er than the numer­ous amount of snacks in the cup­boards, I found out that there was no more cream cheese. This, after the fact that my mighty bagel just toast­ed to per­fec­tion.

What does it feel like? Well, you can com­pare it to a lot of things. Like, going to drop kids off only to find out that there is no more TP.

Mean­while, the McGuyver in me found some pud­ding in my cab­i­net. I was going to use them for snack­ing with Hon­ey-Wheat fla­vored pret­zels. It’s kind of like YanYans but cheap­er and more nutri­ents. Back to the pud­ding. I then slapped on a small tea­spoon of it on the bagel just to try it out—tasted like Nutel­la but soft­er!

So now you know. Word to the wise though, the pud­ding should have a base fla­vor of Choco­late. At least from my first-time expe­ri­ence today. I hope that this info comes in handy for you one day. Oth­er than that, make sure to let your friend­ly-neigh­bor­hood office man­ag­er know that there is a low sup­ply of cream cheese in the fridge.