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December, 2007 Archive

A Third (Smaller) Option for Embedding Flash Using JavaScript

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

In January (2007), I wrote a howto for embedding Flash using JavaScript. The examples I gave were for SWFObject and Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) — the howto was for UFO. Now there’s a third viable option for embedding Flash using JavaScript. It’s called FlashReplace and was written by Robert Nyman.
The unique feature of FlashReplace is [...]

Posted in Flash, Open Source, Web Design | No Comments »

How to View the Generated HTML Output from JavaScript Web Widgets

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

One of the best things to come from social networking and the so called Web 2.0 is the Web widget. Web widgets allow users to easily drop JavaScript code into their own website and instantly add content and features. Most Web widgets contain CSS ids and classes that allow the webmaster to alter the look-and-feel [...]

Posted in Firefox, How To, Web Design | 7 Comments »

sIFR 3 Beta is Getting Closer to its Final Release

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

Mark Wubben announced on Wednesday (December 26, 2007) that sIFR was getting closer to its final release. In a message to all of the developers and beta testers, he said:
Good news, I’m running out of bugs to fix. Pretty much the only thing left to do is support page zoom in Firefox 3, IE 7 [...]

Posted in Flash, Usability, Web Accessibility, Web Design | No Comments »

Google Introduces New Sliding AdSense Ads

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

Google continues to test and introduce new ways to make their AdSense ads more profitable and useful. Their latest innovation is sliding ads. I first spotted it on a client’s website. It was active on a banner ad (468×60) and displayed left and right buttons for cycling (sliding) through ads. The video below shows what [...]

Posted in AdWords, Google Adsense, PPC, Tech Industry | 3 Comments »

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Announces Limited Beta for New Database Service - SimpleDB

Friday, December 14th, 2007

The Amazon Web Services team just announced SimpleDB - the long anticipated database service to complement S3, EC2, and SQS. Now there will be an alternative to managing your own SQL cluster within EC2. Here’s what they had to say:
Dear AWS Developers,
This is a short note to let a subset of our most [...]

Posted in Amazon, Programming, Tech Industry | No Comments »

New Flash Player Breaks sIFR

Friday, December 14th, 2007

Adobe’s new Flash Player (version 9,0,115,0) does not work with earlier versions of sIFR 2. Mark Wubben, the current maintainer of the sIFR code, sent out an alert early this morning notifying everyone on the sIFR developer list. The problem arises when a designer has specified a hover color to a link. If they have, [...]

Posted in Adobe, Flash, Web Browsers, Web Design | 2 Comments »

Implementing Contextual Feedback and Help to Improve the Usability of Web Applications

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Traditionally, communication between developers and users has been sparse. Developers have always provided limited help through a single help window and users rarely get the chance to offer feedback and bug reports. However, those limitations have been changing in recent years. Many software developers have created help forums where users can discuss issues with other [...]

Posted in Just for Fun, Usability, Web Accessibility, Web Design | 1 Comment »

How to Make Files Publicly Accessible on Amazon S3

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) allows webmasters to store and deliver files cheaply and quickly. S3 is perfect for hosting large images, documents, audio files (MP3s) and video files. An excellent real-life example of how S3 can be used is with podcasting. Most podcast files are quite large and hosting them can be expensive, [...]

Posted in Amazon, How To | 1 Comment »

Day One At PubCon Las Vegas 2007

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

So far, Pub Con Las Vegas 2007 is off to a great start. This is easily the largest attendance I’ve ever seen at a PubCon conference. The picture of Scott in the keynote auditorium only captures about one third of the attendees.

Craig Newmark’s keynote presentation was a bit ho-hum, but the regular sessions have been [...]

Posted in Conferences, Tech Industry | No Comments »

Decoding Your DNA: Does First Class and Economy Already Exist?

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

I was intrigued by a recent Wired Magazine article, 23AndMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics. Although I don’t have $1,000 to have my DNA decoded right now, I’m still fascinated by the idea of learning what my genetic predispositions are. For example, did I inherit my dad’s genes [...]

Posted in Commentary, Tech Industry | 1 Comment »