March 5th, 2010
For those of you who are not familiar with the project management software called The Trac Project please proceed to the Trac Guide. I’ve been working with this project management tool for quite some time now and the latest upgrades are just awesome. I believe the solution for private projects’ RSS feeds has been found a few months ago somewhere here. The iCalendar issue remains, but it’s probably solved the exact same way – http authentication, although not all iCalendar clients and RSS aggregators support that yet. My favourite Feedly doesn’t.
Effective Project Management with Trac
Before showing off the snipets that I wrote for Trac Reports I’d like to give you one little hint if you’re running Trac on an old (but stable) OS version, such as Fedora Core 8. Amazon EC2 still ships the Fedora 8 operating system as default for Linux-based EC2 instances, and a simple yum install trac will get you version 0.10.x, which is outdated. The trick here is to install:
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| yum install python-setuptools
yum install python-setuptools-devel |
Which include a package called easy_install. Since you’ve got an old version of Trac installed, use easy_install to update it, like this:
Bam! Wasn’t that easy? One more situation where you can use easy_install is to install Trac plugins directly from their repositories (instead of the old way by uploading source files).
Okay, now back to the reports. I made these with a little experimenting with the Trac database. It’s structure is pretty much transparent and obvious, so if you’re an SQL genius then go ahead and write your own. Here’s my most useful list …
Read the rest of this entry »
February 25th, 2010
This is all about an experiment I started back in July 2009, called TwiBots. Initially it was supposed to be a simple 24/7 online tweep (Michael Davis) saying a bunch of stuff randomly. But then we (Michael and I hehe) started picking out certain topics, feeding content from certain RSS feeds, filtering all content by keywords and regular expressions.
Davis Got 4500 Followers in 6 Months
When the new Retweet API came along, I wrote an RT module which uses the Twitter Search API to find relevant tweets and users, then retweets those messages or just somehow interacts with a user. As soon as the Twitter Lists API was announced, I started working on the Lists module, which eventually became a simple “sorting-the-tweeps” based on their keywords – web design, design, wordpress, etc. Soon enough, I found out that Lists couldn’t contain more than 500 members (although some glitch made 501 possible). Web design 2, wordpress 2, etc wouldn’t be as fancy. I also tried building a conversation list of tweeps that by any means talked to the robot, but then again, the 500 limit broke all my hopes ;)
There were other modules which I worked on really hard, such as RThx module or Random Buzz, DM Control. Some of them worked, some of them were turned off after a few days (yes, you guessed it – Random Buzz, that really made some noize ;)
So, what did I achieve? Me – nothing. Michael did though, in 6 months he went up to 4500+ followers, while following a little more than 200 people himself, has been featured in ~ 250 lists, sent ~ 55,000 tweets and retweets all based on four keywords (or hashtags) – design, web design, wordpress and jquery. Built 4 lists based on these keywords, 500 members in each. Total list followers is a little less than 150 (which is quite good actually).
For comparison take a look at my account – (@kovshenin), in a little bit more than a year I got ~ 1700 followers. It took Michael a couple of months to reach that. The chart below illustrates the followers growth during the last three months. Human (me – blue) vs Robot (Michael – red). Yeah, I added a new module in mid December ;)
I manually logged into Michael’s account recently to check out how he’s doing, and I was kind of surprised to see that people really are talking to the guy, thanking him for retweets, asking him for further reads, wishing him a great day and handing over some coffee. Michael doesn’t usually reply to these and he’s a little bit shy sometimes, besides, he never drinks coffee ;)
A few days ago I decided to give Michael a rest, so tuned his backend to a new Twitter account with a few different settings, especially in timing. I’ll be switching to other keywords and feeds in the next few weeks. So let’s see if he’s as good as Michael, or perhaps better? ;)
I’m not sure what I’ll do with Michael’s account. TweetValue said it’s worth over $5k … anyone? ;) Or should I just throw it away.. Or run a contest for his password? …
February 15th, 2010
This is totally rediculous, but it’s a fact. Some version of Microsoft Internet Explorer do not handle empty anchors at all! Unlike Firefox, Safari and the rest, IE simply doesn’t see them, so anchors lead to nowhere (top of the page). This is just a note for you (and me) to keep your anchors filled with something, at least a whitespace character ;)
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| <a name="bookmark"></a>Bookmark Text <!-- Bad! -->
<a name="bookmark">Bookmark Text</a> <!-- Good! --> |
Keep that in mind ;) Cheers!
February 11th, 2010
I recently came across an awesome plugin for jQuery which is called Facebox. Facebox produces a clean lightbox that can be a container for popup images, text and basically any HTML layout as well as AJAX powered content.
Facebox: Creating Facebook-like Dialogs
The problem with Facebox is the lightbox placement. The dialog itself is placed in the center of the page horizontally with a preset margin from the top, which looks good, but what I did notice is that the box containing the loading icon is being placed somewhere to the left part of the page. Well at least on Firefox 3.5.7.
I couldn’t help but noticing that FamSpam and StaffTool are using a different set of functions and styles for the lightbox placement and copying them into my code solved the issue.
The two functions are called getPageScroll() and getPageHeight() and are marked as quirksmode.com inside the code. The #facebox style in the CSS lacked a width: 100% which seems to have solved the issue for now. There’s also a certain overlay in the original version which includes an interesting IE6 hack:
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| height: expression(document.body.scrollHeight > document.body.offsetHeight ?
document.body.scrollHeight : document.body.offsetHeight + 'px'); |
The versions at Stafftool and FamSpam however don’t mention any overlays in there code. Pretty messy, huh? Well, other than that, the plugin is very lightweight and cross-browser, works well in IE and closes the popup when pressing Esc, which unfortunately has to be hand-coded in other versions of the Facebook-style dialog boxes.
Grab the code at GitHub and enjoy: Facebox for jQuery.
February 9th, 2010
One very awesome and useful plugin for jQuery is jQuery Cycle, which pretty much works out of the box, but browsing through the second part of the Intermediate Demos we’ve seen a click transition called Pager, which is somewhat tricky.
Neat Transitions with the jQuery Cycle Plugin
Pager is nothing but a few links next to your cycling block with page numbers, which switch the cycle upon click. It’s very useful when you have to create, say a list of services a company provides, with sweet lightboxes (don’t confuse with the Lightbox plugin), perhaps with some images, cycling through their descriptions, yet we’d like our visitors to be able to switch through the services manually, without having to wait. This is exactly what the Pager transition does, but hey, who the hell would want page numbers instead of their services names?
This is where pageAnchorBuilder comes in, and it’s not quite obvious what has to be done to make this work. According to the jQuery Cycle documentation it’s:
pageAnchorBuilder – callback function for building anchor links: function(index, DOMelement)
So here’s a demonstration of how this would work. Let’s setup a quick cycle, with a few options. Perhaps you’ll need more than I listed below ;)
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| jQuery('#fade').before('<div id="nav" class="nav"></div>').cycle({
pager: '#nav',
pagerAnchorBuilder: paginate
}); |
So paginate is a callback function which takes two arguments, the index and the DOM element. Using the index will work just fine. Let’s see how this works with text:
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| function paginate(ind, el)
{
if (ind == 0) return '<span>Service One</span>';
else if (ind == 1) return '<span>Service Two</span>';
// and so on
} |
I think that’s pretty straightforward once you understand how it works. Let’s try some images:
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| function paginate(ind, el)
{
return '<img src="http://whatever.com/services/service' + ind + '.jpg" />';
} |
So name your images service0.jpg, service1.jpg, etc. And my favourite, CSS classes:
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| function paginate(ind, el)
{
return '<div class="service' + ind + '"></div>';
} |
Then just add a few .service0, .service1, etc. classes in your stylesheet, voila! Hope that helps, and don’t forget about the other useful options. Cheers!
