joedonahue.org

Joe, I don’t ever want to let you go.

Things like this help me get through life.

I already get a lot of flak at work for being geeky, but this is something really great that will promptly be added to the Things That Are Awesome page. Enjoy.
Weird Al – White and Nerdy Music Video.

There’s been a healthy amount of backlash with my most recent posts taking a dive into a more “technological” realm. I apologize, and will try and keep it to a minimum.

On Wednesday, for the first time since college, I watched some of the Today show. It was disappointing having Katie gone, and I thought the new girl was a little weird. But the few minutes that I watched were devoted to a new “scientific discovery” in the war against ear infections: The Wait-and-See method. This new method is different from previous attempts at curing ear infections inasmuch as you are now recommended to do absolutely nothing. The results are that those who followed the Wait-and-See approach had exactly the same results as those who followed more traditional approaches.
In the words of Relient K, “We took prescription drugs / Look how much good that did.”

For a short while now I have been experimenting with the Yahoo! User Interface toolkit (also known as Yahoo! UI or simply YUI). It contains a hefty set of tools and framework pieces for quickly and easily doing some really cool web stuff using Javascript. It is not always the most intuitive tool to wield, but then again, it is something designed to do serious stuff, not just for beginners such as myself. With that in mind, I have worked towards creating an easy and simple way to implement the first YUI mechanism I have undertaken… a calendar!

I am not going to go through all the steps that are usually necessary to implement a YUI calendar, for that would defeat the purpose of this. I will simply say this: The default how-to’s include a considerable amount of code (which my method eliminates) and also contains no good solution for a pop-up calendar that only displays a single month. It shows how to use an in-line calendar, and even how to build a “2up” pop-up calendar (which displays 2 months at a time) but it was more difficult than it should have been to get a single month pop-up working. The solution described below requires 2 additional YUI files that have been customized in order to a) eliminate most of the in-page js YUI would have you create, and b) create a 1up cal.

The two additional files are a single javascript file and an additional css file.

The new js file, calendar-cfg.js, includes the listener the runs the init function at load time. The only reason I can think of for pulling the listener out and into the page itself is if you are passing variables into the init function, which this is not designed to do! I have not reflected this change in these files, but I have modified the init function so that a default date besides today can be passed in, if anyone is ever interested.

With all of the js in those files, the html to create a fully functional YUI calendar implementation contains only three parts: An input box for the date to go into, a link that calls the popup, and a div for the pop-up to live in. I will also add that the capability is present in the calendar-cfg.js file for the pop-up’s div to be created on the fly and dynamically inserted into the DOM tree, but for design purposes I decided to handle it manually. (But I have, in other places, created content on the fly with javascript: It’s sweet).

Now, the cool part: The customized function this calls is specifically designed to handle multiple calendar instances! Whereas the YUI how-to include lengthy code reduplication to make something like this happen, here you only need to re-create the HTML used above and send it a new argument at the highlighted places.

And now, an example.

This phrase, making reference to the next-generation of internet technologies, is best (only!) defined by its distinctive features. These features most prominently include use of Really Simple Syndication to contruct feeds, the capacity to ‘share’ documents or information in a movement known as Social Networking, and the use of AJAX to make a site function more like an application than a static web page.
RSS

RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, utilizes XML (eXtensible Markup Language) name-value pairs to build a page containing text and links to media. This technology is the foundation for Podcasts, which uses a special format of name-value pairs for iTunes to get the latest feed from a feed publisher. Most blogging software automatically builds RSS feeds of posts or comments which can be submitted to “RSS Readers” so that you can be automatically notified of updates to a blog without actually needing to periodically check the blog. This is a critical piece to understanding RSS and Web2.0: I have one page (such as a personalized google home page) where the feeds of all my friends’ blogs can be assembled, and I only need to go to that one page to get the updates on everyone. Feeds from news services can also be put there, and now I have a personalized internet portal with all the information I need without needing to visit everyone’s individual site.
Social Networking

As clearly recognized from the ways that RSS feeds are implemented above, the world is getting smaller. Web2.0 technologies allow for people to communicate and collaborate in ways that were previously not available. Great examples of this include Google Spreadsheets and Google Calendar. Spreadsheets gives you the capacity to share a document you create for others to either view or edit. depending on the permissions you give them. Two people can work on the same document at the same time, and it will list the users concurrently working on a document. Calendar also allows multiple people to own a single calendar, but more importantly, it allows for you to see friends’ calendars layered on top of your own. Now, I need only look at a single calendar and see what everyone has going on this week. Events can also be copied from friends’ calendars to your own, and users can be invited to events to track expected attendance and share information about that event. And, of course, RSS feeds can be generated from your calendar, ready to import into any RSS reader or other Web2.0 application.

Application-esque

As you can see, web sites such as Google Spreadsheets and Calendar are not referred to as web sites, but as applications. This third distinctive of Web2.0 technologies creates the impression that you are working with an application, and not on a web page. This is accomplished through the use of Asynchronous Javascript And XML. AJAX allows for portions of the page to communicate with the server and even redisplay information without needing to refresh the page. This may not sound like a big deal, but it has shown to completely change the way a user interacts with a web page. Google Spreadsheets would hardly have taken off if everytime you wanted to save the page or recalculate fields would have required clicking the submit button. This unexpectedly transcends the look-and-feel aspect of web design and into the realm of functionality.

In honor of Web2.0, I will be creating a new category and posting blurbs on websites that take advantage of this in creative ways. Hopefully this will involve a project I am working on at NPH that has begun to lean towards an AJAX implementation!

“Crikey, he nearly got me!”

Amazing.  I guess we should have seen this coming, though.

One of my favorite things is free stuff.  My wife and I both have accounts at MyPoints.com, where you get “points” for buying stuff through their website, filling out surveys, or even just reading email they send you.  Last year I used mypoints for a $50 gift card to Gap, where I bought Julie’s Christmas present.  It was pretty awesome.

I today realized that through mypoints, one can get gift certificates for another website, Restaurant.com, where you can buy discounted gift certificates to local area gift certificates.  The standard on there is that for $10, you get a $25 gift card to a restaurant, provided that you spend at least $35 dollars there.

That’s a pretty sweet combo.

If you sign up at mypoints.com, make sure and give them my email address as your referral. (joe [at] joedonahue.org)