If you haven’t heard about Ubiquity, I advise you to check it out. It’s a great Firefox plugin that allows basically any service to be at your disposal. The basic premise is you highlight some words, start typing an action, and it will find a service that meets your needs. Check out the video below for a better explanation. Watch out for a Grooveshark command later on.
For the longest time, I’ve been trying to find a fairly simple solution for showing the real progress of file uploads. Most of them that I have found involved patching PHP to allow this functionality. What I think is going on is that during a file upload, PHP allows the web server, most of the time, apache, to handle the actual uploading of the file and only after the file is completely done uploading does PHP have access to the file itself.
Instead of using html based file uploads, flash is available. By using jqUploader, one can allow people with flash enabled browsers real time progress of their uploads. This is really handy for large images, zip files, or any file larger than 3mb.
Update: I have to give some props to John David at Conceptual Arts for initially telling me about jqUploader.
It has been a really long time since my last post. Lots of stuff have been happening at Grooveshark. We’ve created a widget site for sharing music across various social networks using Clearspring. Here’s an example below (you can also find it here):
I started part-time work with Conceptual Arts a local Gainesville web shop. The people are really cool and smart, so I’m really excited to work on lots of cool projects.
I’m also going to start tracking personal projects I work on in my Projects page. Hopefully by posting it online, it will force me to stop abandoning projects and create complete prototypes of each.
Working with Mysql a lot, I’ve come across a lot of resources for finding ways of improving Myql performance in relation to configurations, queries and importing/exporting data. Here’s a list of sources I use a lot:
MySQL Performance Blog: This is my favorite Mysql site and was absolutely indispensable when first starting out with Mysql. They pretty much cover any Mysql related topic.
MySQL Reference: The actual reference site is a must have. It’s fairly thorough and covers everything in simple detail.
Travis’s Mysql Postings: He’s the most knowledgeable database person I know and is usually the first person I go to with anything Mysql.
Jay’s Mysql Postings: He’s the 2nd most knowledgeable database person I know and he’s always spot-on with any tips he gives.
The rest are just a list of sites/pages that I find useful for whenever I need something specific:
Speeding up InnoDB Imports
10 Performance Tips
84 Performance Tips
Google Search
One of my biggest pet peeves about Firefox was the inability to see the entire title attribute of a DOM element. The title attribute is the text you see in a small pop-up box when you hover over an image, link, or anything on a page. It allows the site to give further information about any element on a page.
The developers at Firefox decided to truncate that text to 60 characters so the user won’t get a huge text box covering their screen whenever they hovered over an element with a long title attribute. In most cases, this would be just fine but I happen to be a big fan of xkcd, a geeky internet web-comic which uses the title attribute to add funny quips.
Using the Long Titles extension, you never have to dig around to read the entire title attribute again. Being such an open browser, I find it rather annoying that Firefox developers refuse to make it an option in about:config to change the cutoff limit for title attributes.
The good folks at jQuery just released a new version of UI library. For the uninitiated, jQuery UI is mostly a visual effects library that allows one to create AJAX-style user interfaces and interactions really quickly and easily.
I’ve used the older versions and they were pretty buggy and unstable. Since then, the jQuery team has received corporate backing and really improved the core jQuery library. If the new jQuery UI lives up to its billing, it might push Mootools out of being my favorite Javascript library