Web Things Considered

Interesting to see that at one point, the SmartFilter URL filtering software blocked 3 key Yahoo and JavaScript related blogs (with reason in parens):

Simon Willison (malicious content)
YUI blog (spam urls)
Jack Slocum (spam urls)

I asked for Willison’s and Slocum’s to be whitelisted and the YUI blog started working this week without a request, so maybe Secure Computing updated the blacklist. Is this some conspiracy to suppress the adoption of the Yahoo User Interface Library? (only kidding)

If I had to pick only one application to have installed on my pc, it would be Firefox. I live in it for a good chunk of the day, and am extremely hesitant to install anything else (with the exception of development servers and some programming tools). That’s the power of the web, you can do almost anything in a browser now days.

So, it was with great excitement that I updated to the new Firefox release a couple weeks ago. There are definitely some great features, first and foremost is the spell-checker (getting close to saying goodbye to Word forever) and second , improved tabbing. But there was one subtle change that is a rather large blow to pop-up windows. I don’t mean pop-ups in the bad way, when used for ads. I mean when purposely used for an application, such as the one I’m currently developing where the pop-up allows the user to monitor information while still using the main application. IMO, it would be very awkward to use a div-window within the main document. So, the change?

Note the “Raise or lower windows” option in the javascript settings. You can no longer bring focus to a opened window by default. The user has to grant this permission. Fat chance of relying on a user setting. So, my workaround is to close and open the window again when trying to bring it to focus. This is doable, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to save off the coordinates of the opened window before closing it. Still some more research for that one to get a nice cross-browser solution.

Anyway, couple the focus issues with the title bar issue discovered by a co-worker, and it really seems that FF is pushing hard against pop-ups.

So, Wesabe launched today. I’ve been waiting for this since I first saw Marc’s post on the Radar. As you may know I run a personal finance site, NetworthIQ, so I’m always on the lookout for related ideas and competition. I’m also happy to discover other people thinking about how to improve the way we manage our money.

Wesabe is a compelling product that I myself will try out. Features such as tips and goals are nice community features that are also slated for NetworthIQ one of these years (though my vision of these is a bit different). I need to still explore the account uploaders, but this could be the best part of Wesabe These uploading features give Wesabe the potential to be a Quicken/Money killer.

To beat Quicken/Money, I believe an app has to get out of the transaction entry approach and solve the problem of tracking finances differently and bring a lot more to the table feature-wise (like with social features). Yet, most new web-based personal finance apps (PFMs) still rely on transaction entry and have no social features. The data is already out there in the banks’ databases, so why should we have to enter it again? Plus, banks are rolling out better applications all the time, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to compete directly with them. One of my top goals for NetworthIQ was to provide account aggregation but never require a user to enter a purchase/transaction manually. That’s why it’s incredibly simplified down to just entering account balances once a month (which is stretching the bounds of data entry far enough IMO, and still needs to simplified further with automation and import/export tools).

Like we’ve faced with NetworthIQ, there is hurdle to overcome for users to trust their financial data to a web-based application. This is why you probably won’t see the desktop PFMs die anytime soon. But, like with online banking, the time is coming and Wesabe should help.

By far my most popular post here was the Tracking Web 2.0 recap of all of the various blogs and listing sites. I went back and cleaned it up a bit creating two separate lists. Also, because I’m starting to have fun creating different subscription lists, I created an opml file to kickstart anybody wanting to start following the Web 2.0 world.

• Top Web 2.0 Blogs (opml file)

If you don’t want to worry about adding subscriptions, a great resource for keeping up on Web 2.0 is the Original Signal singlegator site.

Stickies (and similar notes-based organizational tools) are all the rage these days with 3 4 recent product launches:

• stikkit
• stickytag
• Helipad
• nottr

As much as I want to like these tools, (especially local entry stikkit), I just can’t get behind them yet. I’ve tried using all kinds of organizational apps like Ta-da lists, wikis, Basecamp/activeCollab, all of the different start pages (google/ig, pageflakes, live.com) and their todo widgets, Google Notebook, and Microsoft OneNote among others.

But, as hard as I’ve tried, I just keep coming back to the same two tools I’ve used for a relatively long-time, Gmail (using drafts and yahoo mail before) and todo.txt files in different places (one at work, different ones at home for different projects). Using Gmail allows easy online access from anywhere when needed and the ability to upload related files, while todo.txt files are great when offline and when needing more room to process thoughts and lists. I find it requires too much effort at times to open a browser or another application. I’m reminded here of Cory Doctorow’s Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks presentation from a couple years back.

I’ll definitely try out stikkit because it looks like such an elegant UI and back-end engineering effort, but we’ll see if I stick with it (sorry, bad humor). How do you organize yourself?

Note, this is for my personal organization, when working with a team, I’d still recommend a tool like activeCollab/Basecamp or a wiki.

Turn off javascript and try to do a search on the newly launched Like.com (Scoble and TechCrunch have more on the release). What do you get? Nothing. This is a move sure to fire up accessibility advocates everywhere. You may say “But who really ever turns off javascript?”, well I say why on earth do you need to write a series of javascript functions, have 15 javascript file includes, and wire up event handlers to submit your search form? Why not keep it simple and let HTML and HTTP do a little work for you?

In looking at the source, I see they’re trying to set two things, a category to search within and the search query text. Let’s find a much simpler way to do this that still keeps the form accessible.

Like.com version (minus some layout/styling markup and all of the javascript necessary to process it):

<form class="searchform" id="form1">
    <input name="mainSearchField" id="mainSearchField" type="text"
        class="textareafont" value="" onkeypress="return searchEnter(event)">
    <a href="javascript:search()"><img src="pictures/searchbutton.gif"
        width="81" height="26" align="middle" border="0"><a>
</form>

What I would do (no javascript necessary to get the default action):

<form action="search" method="GET" class="searchform" id="form1">
    <input name="btnSearch" type="hidden" value="all">
    <input name="searchText" type="text" class="textareafont" value="">
    <input type="image" src="pictures/searchbutton.gif" width="81"
        height="26" align="middle" border="0" >
</form>

Now the form works for everybody out of the gate and a user without javascript gets a search in the “all” category. Add some javascript to set the hidden “btnSearch” field (which identifies the category) when the user clicks on one of the other categories (and optionally submits the form if there is a query already there). The requirements may be more involved, but this is my 10-minute clean up.

How do you discover new blogs/feeds? The question becomes especially interesting when you want to start studying a new subject area. I checked out Share Your OPML, which certainly seems useful, but that only seems to be helpful for finding the most popular blogs overall or new blogs related to things you already have in your subscription list, not really helpful for finding the top blogs in a new subject area. I suppose Top 10 sources could be helpful too, but I didn’t see anything that helped me. I need to look at it a little further though.

I’m trying to track down a good list of top PHP bloggers in order to keep up with the latest in the PHP world, something I haven’t been doing over the last year. It was a lot harder than I anticipated. But, I got lucky and found an article that listed several, then searched through del.icio.us/tag/php+blog (I dig tag combinations).

I’d love something like Share your OPML where you could upload multiple subscription lists and tag the list. Anything in the tagged list then inherits the tag and you could find the top blogs for the tag. Or if the OPML has parent outline elements (folders), the name could be used as the tag (therefore you’d have less work to do to break out your subscriptions). Google Reader has some potential here to, seeing its use of tags and the feed bundles. I wonder if they’ll expose the most popular subscriptions by tag? Anybody do anything like that already?

Any other tips for finding the top blogs on a specific topic?

I’ve gone ahead and published my .NET and PHP subscription lists (you don’t see those technologies combined together too often, now do ya?), but I’d love to see other good lists (on both technologies):

• Top .NET Blogs
• Top PHP Blogs

Digg this
Bookmark in del.icio.us

I’ve got such a backlog of half-written posts, who knows when they’ll ever get completed. Does every blogger have long list of partially completed stuff? Here’s a quick link list though.

This week has seen a relative slew of new locally produced social sites to launch or that I noticed.

Gone Raw
PDX Web Innovators Ray and Kandace from Needmore Designs launched their newest creation at the Wednesday meeting, which unfortunately I skipped this month, so I didn’t get to see it there. Looks like a nice entry into the social food space and seems like a great site to help people get started and maintain when they go raw. Gone Raw follows Cuppin’ which launched earlier this summer.

Art Face Off
Social networking company for artists, curators and art lovers. (via)

12 Step Space
Recovery oriented social networking. (via)