January 2007

A thing I’ve noticed today when I wanted to validate my feeds to ensure that they are well formed and viewable:

This feed does not validate. [...]author must include an email address: [...] (10 occurrences) [help]

I have to say that I strongly disagree with the specs (which is kind of useless, I know) but in the age of spam you should do everything to prevent your mailbox from overflowing with unwanted emails. The help suggests using a nospam mail address but I’m quite sure that spammers are not that dumb and they know how to use regexp (as we do).

Shaun Inman’s version 2 of Mint is really nice and works great on this blog here. However I have to admit that GeoMint doesn’t work at the moment which is due the new staggered loading of Peppers (but I’m already working on alternatives to the current implementation of the map-loading).

I had one issue when I wanted to use the Bird Feeder Pepper with my Wordpress installation on stopbeingcarbon.com. I had to add an extra line with global $Mint or you can also copy the two lines containing the define and include of the Bird Feeder below the header line for the feed.

Thanks Shaun!

I’ve found a wonderful piece of design work today on Swissmiss, a blog I’ve discovered a few days ago which provides me with great inspiration every day. One of the last posts showed a clipboard by Felix Stark, which is nice, but Derina is even nicer. I bet you can do that on your own.

Alex Tew, who had great success with The Million Dollar Homepage, might not be so happy about his newest project, Pixelotto. Nearly two months after the announcement on his blog, Tew could only sell pixels for $150.000. It seems that his “exciting new project” will fail - or at least won’t make as much profit as expected.

For me the reason is quite obvious: It’s nothing new, it’s about selling pixels on a website. Tew already earned one million dollars with that idea, it’s quite unlikely that it will work again (speaking about the same idea - same person constellation). Another point is that Tew’s first project was aimed at business people and companies who want to increase the traffic to their website but Pixelotto is more for individuals - or does a company really bother about winning $1.000.000?

When he wrote about his new and exciting project I thought he would invest his money to start a real company, with a real product, something you can live on. I guess that it would have been quite easy for him because he already knows all the people (at least I don’t know a single newspaper or TV channel he was not on). Well, I guess I was wrong.

I’ve just upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 “Ella”, which went really smoothly. Doesn’t feel very different (the first thing I’ve noticed is the Autosave functionality which tells me that Firefox can crash if it wants and I don’t have to be afraid of loosing my unsaved posts) but it’s still nice to hear something new from Wordpress.org.

Download from Wordpress.org

Consider the following code

[code lang="javascript"] Array.prototype.indexOf = function (item, start) { for (var i = (start || 0); i < this.length; i++) { if (this[i] == item) return i; } return -1; }; [/code]

which enhances our Array class by a function indexOf, which is new in JavaScript 1.5. And now the following test scenario:

[code lang="javascript"] function doArray() { var arr = [1,2,3,4,5]

for (num in arr) {
  alert(arr[num]);
} 

} [/code]

The function doArray() gives you a message box with the value of each element in the array (at least in Firefox 2.0.0.1). If you try the same with Internet Explorer (6.0.2900.2180) you will get the function body of IndexOf() as the first array element. Strange thing is that it only happens with the indexOf() function, I’ve tried some others - push(), pop(),… - but there everything’s fine.

WTF? Does anybody know about this behavior and maybe even has a solution?

You can test it here.

Got it: JavaScript “Associative Arrays” Considered Harmful

Taken in Stockholm, Sweden. Original image on Flickr.

Douglas Coupland on jPod

You can now get a small preview of a really promising text editor for Windows, called Intype. I’ve written about it before (and you can get all the info from the creators’ website and the corresponding blog post).

Intype supports Textmate’s snippets and syntax highlighting, to name the two most important features which are implemented in the alpha release. Perhaps you could criticize the missing Undo-command but hey, it’s an Alpha!

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