“Touch-Screen” iPod confirmed by Apple !

http://duggmirror.com/apple/Touch_screen_iPod_directly_confirmed_by_Apple/

Boy I'm glad to hear this!

Firefox 2.0 - Necessary addons

Here is my humble opinion of the must-have's for Firefox 2.0
These are items that I use on a daily basis. Somehow i've convinced myself that i can't live without these.

• All-in-one Gestures
  If i could do a life hack and create controls for hand gestures, I would rule the world. Whenever I go to use someone else computer i find myself flicking the mouse in silly directions with no result.
  
  
• All-in-one Sidebar
  Instead a 50 annoying, yet useful, windows open from firefox, this combines them all into a disappearing side bar. The screenshot on the right came from this wonderful plugin. ----->
  
  
• DownThemAll!
  I don't understand how this works, but I know it does. Somehow it gets much faster transfer rates out of normally slow servers. Downloads are effortless with this.
  
  
• firefox Showcase
  I'm still playing with this one. Either in the side bar or in a tab will give you thumbnailed screen shots of all the tabs and/or windows you have open. As i am very visual, i'm enjoyin this one.
  
  
• FireFTP
  Can't live without it!! Dreamweaver seems to always choke on uploads that are time sensitive or extremely important. Complaining of the server not responding or some crap. FireFTP uploads quickly with no questions or complaints. All from the comfort of a tab in my proofing window of Firefox.
  
  
• Forcastfox
  Again, can't live without it. Check the mail, check with weather to see if it's good scootering weather. I've been stuck coming home from work in the rain on the scooter, and it's no fun.
  
  
• Gmail Manager
  Small, clean line in the status bar that allows me to be one with the gmail.
  
  
• Google Notebook
  I can only describe the notebook as super cool online bookmarks. It let's me take notes for any page on the web. All my notes are stored online and are accessible from anywhere.
  
  
• IE Tab
  MUST HAVE. I don't know why the world still clings to IE, but they do. While I'm working on a site here's how my proofing windows tab list reads:
  | The Site (Firefox) | The Site (IEtab) | FireFTP |
  
  With a simple flick of my mouse gesture all these items refresh to reflect whatever change i'm working on. And it all minimizes to one little item on the taskbar.
  
  
• No Script
  In the evil world of popups and porno, this is a Godsend. It will be annoying at first but once you have all your normally visited sites in it's list, you'll never go back. It blocks all unwanted scripts from the originating URL and outside.
  
  
• Tabbrowser Preferences
  Give tabs a ton more flexibility. You can move them, rename them, all sorts of good stuff.
  
  
• Web Developer
  If you have to update or rework a site this is pefect. I can visually tear apart a site, on the fly edit CSS and HTML, and break source code apart better than any program i've seen.
  
  
• Wikipedia Lookup Extention
  Have you ever met those people that seem to have all the right answers? That just means they frequent Wikipedia.
  
  
  

Website Overhaul

Ugh, another night were i know i should have gone to bed a long time ago. Been working away on some updates for the site. I think i've finally got the user experience so they don't have to leave the site. 'Cause if they leave, I loose them. It's sad because most of the work is for the client portal. So not many people get to see all my handy work.
It's becoming apparent to me why there are entire office buildings of people that maintain large sites. This site is so small, and yet I can see it getting out of hand in the near future. I've tried to put automated systems in place to make it faster, but i'm still hand coding a lot of it.

Who am I kidding? No one looks at this thing. That's probably why it feels like i'm typing to a brick wall, or at least a drywall slab.

Client portal of the late night

AAHH!!! I've been up two long working a client portal for my website. This silly website was designed to be a static resume basiclly. I've had a call from the website alot faster than expected! SO of course I decided out of the blue that I need this stupid portal.

Several hours (that should have been spent sleeping) later I've finished this thing for now. With a little help from my programmer buddy Josh, I have a cookie based secure sign in.

Thanks Josh, you're my hero.

jon-allen.net

Again I've created something that only my mother will view. Hopefully this can be a sort of resume I can refrence to for future work.

If anyone can help me with a PHP include for the flickr site, please let me know.

Making a podcast is actually easy!

Hot off the presses
SONICcast #1

I was listening to TWIT (This Week In Tech) podcast the other week and thought to myself, "I love this podcasting stuff. Some day maybe I'll figure it out." At work (Industrial Strength Marketing) we were meeting about a huge new web project we're taking on. A many thousands of dollars worth of website, backend databases, and fancy store front. I mentioned the importance of offering an RSS feed for the newsroom portion of their site. Of course I didn't really know a thing about RSS.
The one place I have seen RSS used was on newssites, so i went to reading code. Come to find out RSS is really easy to script. Then i stumbled across TWIT's RSS feed. Which come to find out that's all a podcast is; a very simple RSS feed that points to mp3 files!

Well i jumped right on it. I read every bit of the TWIT code and noticed a link to a Harvard law site. Which apparently is the mecca for all RSS 2.0 info. I also noticed in the TWIT code some strange tags that i wasn't sure about. Well luckily apple actually has some help on how to code a proper RSS stream for an itunes podcast. This was helpful but is good only for an itunes podcast. I want my stream to be good for newsreaders and itunes. So i just messed the code from the Harvard site and the Apple help.


Well the first one is out, but i'm so boring in it!! I think maybe I was too excited to just post something without really thinking about my inflections. I also worked tirelessly into the late night to finish it. Well I'm all jazzed up about some of the future episodes. They stand to be much better.

Classic Web Browser Emulator

See how today's web would look like on various classic browsers, such as Internet Explorer 2.0, Mosaic 1.0, and Netscape Navigator 1.0.

I think this is great. It takes me back to the days of Jr. High.

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