After the feedback I got on my initial AJAX-S release, I’ve compiled it and added new functionality and fixes. In release 2 you will find these beauties:
Incremental rendering.
Printable version.
Support for non-JavaScript users.
Keyboard events fixed so you will stay in the presentation.
Sure, the print design isn’t exactly ground-breaking, but that’s where you come in! Download AJAX-S and test it out with your presentation material and needs, and style it up with your own design. Let me know how it goes!
The last couple of the days, the whole world wide web seem to be talking about Google and their latest release, Google Analytics. Since I thoroughly enjoy Gmail, think Google Maps is pretty cool and, naturally, use the search engine daily, I was intrigued to say that they were releasing a statistic service in the form of Google Analytics. And for free!
Of course I could’ve written a post right away telling about the release, but I wanted to test it first to tell you about my first impressions. Apparently it took 12 hours to get the account activated after signing up, a truth with modifications if you asked people who tried. After maybe 20 hours the account kicked in. Fair enough, I know everything about deadlines and tight releases schedules.
There seems to be lot of different views and ways of analyzing the data collected, all presented in a design that’s easy on your eyes. All you need to use it is to create an account (or use your Gmail one) and to include a JavaScript in the pages of your web site. Two things that bothered me right away were:
It’s not real time
To me, then it definitely loses its main attraction. I want to be able to check what has happened the last hours, hell, even the last minutes. Live, ok? Now it seems I can only see the data from the day before; that is, when the day is over according to US time. Pretty annoying if you’re located in Sweden.
No localization
There seems to be no way, at least not as far as I can find, to localize the time zone and the ways dates are presented. The American date format is pretty disturbing for the rest of the world, if you don’t know that.
On top of that, it gave off some inconsistent behavior in different pages, but I guess every new release has its problems. However, just before I wrote this post, I tried to sign in to check if it was more stable now, and guess what happened? Every time I signed in, I got redirected to the start page of the search engine. WTF? I mean, really…
For the moment, I’m pretty disappointed. If a product/service is as shaky as Google Analytics seems to be right now, cancel it. Pull the plug. Fix the problems and re-release when it works, before it has created such enormous badwill (or perhaps that’s already too late).
But what if they succeed?
Well, then this might become interesting. It’s a free service which supposedly offers a lot of ways to analyze your stats; it’s bound to compete with other services. What will happen with things like Mint, Measure Map and StatCounter? Will they be pushed to become better? Will all aspects of those mentioned, as well as other statistics services, become free? Who knows…?
What does Robert use?
I use StatCounter, and so far I’m very pleased with it. It has always worked but one time, and then I got instant feedback and support, and within an hour or two it was working fine again. Maybe it doesn’t offer as many ways to check the data as Google Analytics, but I prefer a small reliable service over a bulky shaky one any day.
I’m also very interested in what Measure Map will come up with. I signed up for an invitation a while ago (re-did it today), but still haven’t heard from them. If you guys read this, let me try it! 🙂
Why not Mint, you say? It’s created by the multi-talented (I did a search for multi-talented, by the way, and one of the results was Vin Diesel. Ha ha ha!) Shaun Inman, and people say it’s really good. I have two simple replies to that: I want it to be free and I don’t want to host it myself. Simple as that, but I do wish Shaun all the best and I’m sure he’ll do fine without me as a customer. 🙂
I also wonder, if you use one, what statistics software do you use? Let me know!
PS. By the way, why haven’t Google released Gmail to the public yet? Let people use it, it’s great. If you want a Gmail account, but don’t have an invite, just write a comment and tell me. I can send you one right away. DS.
PS 2. Thanks to Dejan who first tipped me about Google Analytics. DS.
Last week I bought the November issue of Treehouse magazine, coming from the people of Particletree, and I have to say it was the best spent three bucks in a long time! I instantly had to read it from cover to cover.
It starts off with two very interesting things: An addEvent article by Ryan Campbell explaining the need for such a function and the difference between the different solutions out there, and then goes straight into an interview with Peter-Paul Koch. Peter-Paul has had a tremendous impact on the web developing community, and especially the JavaScript part. However, I’ve never gotten the chance to meet him in person, and I’ve only gotten one e-mail reply from him (this was a number of years ago). So, Peter-Paul, if you read this, let’s make sure we meet. Who knows, I might even have something good to say too! 🙂
The magazine goes on with some other interesting interviews and articles, where I really liked the Dead Poets Society feeling I got from the interview with, amongst many other things, teacher Lisa McMillan. Alex McClung also had an interesting article about writing accessible HTML code in his piece Understanding Section 508 (although he manages to call the alt attribute for alt tag once… :-)).
Basically, a very recommended read altogether. I think the magazine will appeal to people of all kinds of experience and interest working with the web. Go read now!
This morning it got a lot colder outside; -5 Celsius where I live. Therefore, time to switch to another jacket. The new jacket I wore today has got all these extra pockets and zippers, but only one inside of it. Since I need to stuff my gloves, cap, PDA and iPod in it, I started going through the other pockets, since I was slightly leaning to the left with a lot of things in that inner pocket.
After some searching, while standing on the subway, I found a pocket on the top right hand side. Wise from previous experiences, I know that some of these jackets have zippers like this that you only open up to get some air flow through, i.e. it’s no pocket so things will fall straight through, so I put my hand in to check that it inde ed was a genuine pocket.
However, I felt some kind of lump in it, and with me, curious as hell, I had to pull it out and see what it was. Sometimes I put paper in pockets just in case I ever need some to blow my nose or similar. But what I pulled up, amongst all the people standing around me, was a sock! After some weird glances, I promptly put the sock back into the pocket. I think I’ll go through the pockets within the safety of my home the next time…
The demo and the zip file are updated with a small fix to avoid generating invalid nodes while still offering the possibility to use custom HTML in any page, and the ability to display escaped code for presentations.
Updated the drop down to support pressing the spacebar and enter keys when it has got focus, to navigate directly to that certain page.
Important update!
By popular request, AJAX-S now supports XHTML code in the XML file as well. No escaping, no nothing, just write as you usually do! I think now that it is a real contender to Eric Meyer’s S5!
For some reason unknown to me, the XSLT files failed to work in some Mozilla web browsers on some computers when they had an .xslt extension. I’ve changed the zip file so it now points to XSLT files with an .xml extension. If you’ve downloaded a previous version that didn’t work, please try the new one. Big thanks to Karl and especially Henrik Box for doing some extensive testing for me (Henrik wants to meet the girls behind girlspoke as a thanks… :-))!
Release 2!
After listening to the feedback I got, I’ve now done some major updates to AJAX-S. It now supports incremental rendering, non-JavaScript users and also offers a printable version. Go check the updated demo.
Changed the JavaScript detect for support for the XSLTProcessor object so it asks users that lack that support if they want to go to the printable page instead.
Added check to scroll the current incremental step into view if it wasn’t visible.
Updated with a different look for active increment, past increment and coming increment, and a setting if one wants the first or last increment to be selected when backing from an upcoming page.
Updated with a different look for active increment, past increment and coming increment, and a setting if one wants the first or last increment to be selected when backing from an upcoming page.
Updated with a fix for two glitches in the keyboard navigation.
Add-on available as of September 7th, 2006
An add-on for AJAX-S has been developed, to automatically show/hide the footer of the slides.
I’ve been thinking about creating an AJAX-based slideshow for a while, and today it happened! Today I wrote my first line of code in this project (probably not the last one), but for the moment I feel very content with the results. The code is probably not perfect, but I’m going more for the concept here. The tweaking options are endless.
The idea came to me because I wanted a lightweight slideshow based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but I also wanted to separate the data of each page from the actual code that presents it. Therefore, I decided to move the data into an XML file and then use AJAX to retrieve it. The name AJAX-S is short for AJAX-Slides (or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML Slides, if you want to).
Naturally, one of my inspirations for creating a HTML-based slideshow are from Eric Meyer and his S5. However, I wanted to take it one notch further, to make it more flexible and also usable for people with no HTML knowledge whatsoever. Another motivating factor was to just transform the data for the current page, as opposed to creating all the HTML needed for all the pages when the page is initially loaded. A leaner end user experience, basically.
It only works in IE 6 and Mozilla-based web browsers as of now. This is because of the need to do on the fly transformations on the client, which means the necessary support for ActiveXObject or XSLTProcessor has to be there. I think Opera 9 will support XSLTProcessor and probably some upcoming version of Safari too, so more widespread support in the future is very likely.
A freaky thing, which I hope is only a very unimportant detail, is that when I run it here at my host provider, I have to use the xml instead of the xslt one. However, most likely a hosting issue only.
But enough of that now. Download AJAX-S or view the demo of AJAX-S. Please let me know what you think, and if there’s any major error in the code. Not a requirement at all, but if you use it and like it, I would appreciate getting credit for it. 🙂
I’m sorry, what’s that, honey? When I need to get up? Well, now I guess. Thanks for reminding me, sunshine!
is how it sounded in my head. But what came out was:
Uuuuggghh… My head.. God, I’m tired… Yeah, yeah, I know I have to get up and go to work… Ooooffff… Slowly, slowly…
The background to this is that we had a Halloween party at my work last night. Since I’ve been working at a customer’s for a number of months now, it was great seeing some old friends in the office, although I didn’t have the time to talk to all I wanted to. I also had an intriguing discussion with a woman I’ve never met before about lesbians, and she told me a fascinating story about one of her female friends. Oh well, this is not the time nor the place to go on about that (maybe girlspoke is rather the place to go for hot stories)…
Naturally, it got a lot later than it should have, and I got home around 1.30. Maybe not too late for some of you, but for me it is. Especially if I have to go to work the day after. So, anyway, I eventually managed to get out of bed and haul my body down to the breakfast table. Once there, my self-pity wasn’t well-met. For some reasons, my girlfriend and my daughter, both having terrible colds, seemed to think that their lack of sleep and being in bad states, was worse than my self inflicted pain.
Just to point this out more clearly, my daughter mustered the little strength she’s got in her body right now (poor thing), to bang things together and throw them really hard on the floor. I guess I deserved it…
Took a quick shower and got on my bike down to the train station. I knew time was sparse when it came to making in time to the train, but it turned out to be worse than that. As I got to the station, the train had just arrived and most people had already gotten on it. Since it was later in the morning than usual and the fact that I’m living in a suburb, means that if I miss a train I have to wait twenty minutes for the next one. Not acceptable.
So I locked my bike, and darted across two lanes of traffic without throwing a single glance in any direction but the train’s. I heard the hissing sound of the doors starting to close, and jumped. I was literally in mid-air when the doors closed behind me. I landed in the train, bounced a little on my shaky feet, and hit a metallic trash can. It gave out a loud ring and everyone in the train turned to look at me. Well, I made the fucking train, didn’t I? 😀
Once I got to Stockholm, I picked up one of the free morning newspapers that are offered. Its first page headline read:
Every third Swede is home from work today
God, I really should’ve been one of those (it was an article about people that are unemployed). Also, this newspaper has a spot for guest comic strips. The one today, a brand new one, was called Robert’s store. It was about a guy having a record store with all kinds of hard to find records, but apparently, the income from selling them wasn’t sufficient to make ends meet, so he sold second hand porn magazines in the back. Felt like a worthy line of work for someone with my name…
Oh well, I’m glad it’s Friday at least. Have a nice weekend! 🙂
I’m really in a good mood, and it feels great! Have been for a couple of days. It might be because things are going pretty well at work, although stressed as hell, and it might be because it has been days of JavaScripting instead of fucking around with inconsistency CSS bugs in various web browsers.
Normally, I’m very ironic and sarcastic, so yesterday when I was exclaiming things like:
This looks great!
Man, this is really fast!
Wow, I love the design of this!
Nobody around me thought I was being sincere. Maybe I need to try and say what I mean more often. 🙂
Someone who’s feeling a little blue is Molly. So go there and cheer her up, if for no other reason that her work in influencing Microsoft to adhere to web standards will make your life so much better.
Attitude. Being humble and have enough self-distance to react to criticism in a constructive way.
Yesterday I contacted a very well-known blogger since I didn’t like a certain part of his web site. I tend to be very open and direct (some people would call it blunt), so the first thing I did was to compare his web site to another really lousy one when it comes to this aspect. I really didn’t know how he would react and how offended he would be, so imagine my surprise when his initial reply was laughing about my comparison.
After that we had a discussion about it, I expressed my opinions and he his, and he was totally open about it. And that, my friends, is what separates a big name from a nobody.
PS. “Mr X”, if you’re reading this, feel free to reveal yourself if you feel like it. I thought it fair to let you be anonymous if you wanted to. DS.
Tonight the company I work for host a (late) Halloween party for its employees. What I’m going as? A prostitute. Or rather, I’m wearing slacks and shirt, going as as a consultant. Same shit, different name…
