I realize this is kinda pointless, but I logged into my GoDaddy account today for something and took a look at my domain names whilst I was in there. Of the 9 domains I own, I'm only actively using 4 of them. The others were either snagged up for a bright idea that I had at one point, dead sites or domains that I fully intend to use at some point.
How many do you own that you're doing nothing with, and why?
I had a request via IM for a more complete example of doing validation within a form submission. I threw together a quick example here to better explain my thought process. Please remember I'm new to jQuery so what I'm doing might not be an example of best practices. Feel free to suggest an alternative.
So essentially I need to capture the submit event of my form. In this case I'm assuming a single form so I simply refer to the tag name in my selector, but I'm sure you could just as easily refer to an id. Here is a simple wrapper to capture the form submission:
Many folks have suggested that I add support for Keynote presentations to SlideSix and while I would certainly love to add full support for that format the truth is there just aren't any* existing tools that I've found to do the conversion.
However I've come up with what seems like a workable solution for my Mac friends. SlideSix now supports QuickTime (MOV) files which can easily be created from a Keynote file from what I understand. Basically SlideSix will create a slide for each frame in the QuickTime movie. From my limited tests the conversion works flawlessly and with impressive results.
*As a side note, have you ever 'reached the end of the internet'? I literally searched through roughly 60 pages of Google results one night trying to find a conversion process/tool. When I got to the final page I felt like I had literally hit the 'end' of the internet. Yes, I'm weird... :)
Last night I wanted to implement a simple measure to prevent double form submissions so I of course turned to my newest best friend for a little help. My goal was simple - when the form was submitted just swap out the submit button for a little animated gif and a 'Saving' message. My first thought was to capture the click of the submit button like so:
Over the last few weeks since CFUnited I've been in the labs refactoring, re-tooling and reworking SlideSix.com based on some conversations and feedback from a few of my friends as well as some general research on some existing presentation sharing communities. The result of that work is now live and I'm really excited about how things turned out. Here are the highlights:
I'm not the usability expert, but nothing annoys me more then a toolbar/menu on a site or application that has nothing but icons representing links/actions. I'll give a free pass to folks who use tooltips or some other descriptive text, but I get seriously annoyed when there is nothing but an icon/image. Other then the universal 'save/open/new' buttons (and even then there are exceptions) I usually find myself taking a wild guess as to what the little 'semi truck' icon or some other stupid icon is supposed to represent. Don't do this - it's horrible - please. </rant>
My buddy Josh has planned the first ever RIAdventure Cruise for Feb 9-13, 2009. As I'm quoted on the official site, I think this is an awesome idea. I always leave conferences wishing I had more time to network with my peers and this cruise will give the opportunity to have some fun and relax with all of your developer friends. The price is fantastic. I'm not sure if I will be attending or not but I'm sure it will be a great time. Nice work throwing this together Josh!
Update: Ooops, sorry for the misspelled title (which I'm sure will lead to double posts on the aggregators)!
What do I mean by contact list importer? Well, join any 'social network' nowadays and you'll likely be presented with a utility to allow you to invite your friends to that network by importing your contact list from GMail, Yahoo Mail, etc. These utilities are pretty nice, but if you think about it the code behind them is pretty powerful. Essentially you need a mechanism to speak to each individual web mail clients API to authenticate and retrieve the user's contacts, then grok each individual response based on the API to normalize the contact data.
There are paid software products available that do this (for example this one from Octazen Solutions) but I say there is no reason we can't build a comparable open source product. I emphasize 'we' becuase I simply don't have the time to research the API for every client and bang out the necessary code to make all them work. On top of that, I don't have an account with most of them, so I'd have to take them time to sign up for each service too.
So here is my suggestion. We, as a community, work on this project. I've already started it - I've got a simple GMail importer built that does the trick. I think we'd need to come up with a standard return format and then have a handful of folks willing to contribute code for the individual API's out there. Do folks think this would be useful, and if so are you willing to contribute?
