studiowhiz ramblings

Evernote is an interesting concept. You pass notes, images etc to Evernote and their very clever system will store them, helping you to remember everything and anything.

The great thing about Evernote, is the fact that it can read and index your images. I’ll give you an example. I had a brochure that I needed to store digitaly but it was a printed copy. So I simply hold it up to my iSight and snap a pic - not very good, as the page was curved.

I sent the image to Evernote and badda bing they index it. What do I mean by index? I mean they scan the image and find words in it. Now 2 weeks later I’m looking for this document, I simply type in some keywords I remember from the brochure and Evernote brings the photo forward for me.

Invites:
Currently in beta only Evernote is not easy to get into. Matt sent a Tweet out this morning asking for an invite. I’d forgotten I had any. Anyhoo, I have a handful of invites for Evernote left, so drop me a note in the comments if you’d like one.

PS:
Yes I’m now on twitter.

Well, it looks like Wordpress 2.5 is out. I’ll be looking to update around here, however I have to make sure things keep working ey! This is why there haven’t been too many posts just now. Trying to sort out a few things before we look to update.

I thought it was high time that I got back into some photoshop work.

Now I’m not a photoshop guru like some of my mates, but I can tinker around in it. I’m leaning on www.psdtuts.com right now to bring my skills back up.

Here is an image I created for Studiowhiz.com and I’ve thrown it up on flickr.

Check out the Studiowhiz Wallpaper here and if you want it in a larger size (I’ve made it at 1600×1200) sing out in the comments.

I’ve written about this before here on Studiowhiz, in fact I was involved in early beta tests with the Macromedia team to create a way to allow developers to drive internet based applications without the need of a browser. Kevin Lynch was then one of the top dogs at Macromedia, he coined the term “KevinCloud” and was probably one of the first to think of the internet as a cloud.

Today GigaOM and the New York Times both talk about how Adobe is gearing up to release AIR to the public. Of course this is a good thing and I for one am happy to see this come about. After all I’ve been saying for years it’s time for the internet to operate outside the browser. Read the rest of this entry »

A Short Primer

You have probably already heard about Microformats. You’ve probably also wondered what they are. So let me tell you: microformats are set a of predefined attributes that you add to already existing markup. These enable both humans and machines to easily access the data they hold. Simply, they are small semantic tweaks to your web pages’ HTML/XHTML that make available previously inaccessible information. This information can include:

• Contact information
• Event information
• Resume information
• Reviews
• Bookmark information
• Syndication information

The beauty of microformats is that they don’t affect how your web pages are rendered by a browser. They are built upon already existing standards that you know and love: the class, rel and rev attributes.

An Example

This is a review taken from a popular online store.

This is how the code looks:

<div>
<p>
 <img src="/img/5-stars.png" alt="5 star rating"/>

 <strong>this book will change your life</strong>, January 3, 2007</p>
 <p>Reviewer: <a href="some-link">kristen</a> (San Francisco, CA) -
 <a href="some-link">See all my reviews</a>

</p>
<p>If you build web sites (or intend to have one built for you), and you
 haven't read this book, then stop what you are doing and buy it. When
 it arrives, stop what you are doing, and read it. It is awesome, and
 funny (believe it or not) and you will be happy that you did.</p>
</div>

Now consider the following code:

<div class="hreview">
 <p>

  <img src="/img/5-stars.png" alt="5 star rating" title="5" class="rating" />
  <strong class="summary">this book will change your life</strong>,
  <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20070103T1146">January 3, 2007</abbr></p>

  <p>Reviewer: <a href="some-link" class="reviewer vcard"><span class="fn">kristen</span></a> (San Francisco, CA) -
  <a href="some-link">See all my reviews</a>

 </p>
 <span class="type" style="dispay:none;">product</span>
 <div class="item" style="display: none;">

  <a class="fn url" href="http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Standards-Jeffrey-Zeldman/dp/0321385551/sr=8-1/qid=1171921047/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-6812629-1991344?ie=UTF8&s=books">Designing with Webstandards</a>
 </div>
 <p class="description">If you build web sites (or intend to have one built for you),
 and you haven’t read this book, then stop what you are doing and buy it. When it
 arrives, stop what you are doing, and read it. It is awesome, and funny (believe
 it or not) and you will be happy that you did.</p>

</div>

Not that much different - just a few extra class attributes (in bold) and a new HTML element here and there. That is what makes Microformats so cool - you don’t need to learn any new markup language - it’s all the same stuff you work with everyday!

How is this useful?

Having all this information available in a format that can easily be gathered is the key to Microformats. Not only can third party web applications easily access this data, but desktop applications can store it, too.

Imagine a world where you visit a web site and your browser tells you there is contact/event information available on that page and gives you the option to save the date to your address book/calendar application of choice.

Imagine a world with search engines that return resumes, reviews or events from millions of web sites. All this can be achieved by using Microformats.

Currently there are few smart applications and bits of software that can deal with Microformats:

• Finda
  All finda’s company listings are marked up using hCard so you can simply save their vCard to your address book
• .Mac Webmail
  The .Mac Webmail service now supports hcard
• Microformats Extensions for Dreamweaver
  Dreamweaver Microformats Extensions (download) support authoring hCard, hCalendar, XFN, rel-tag, rel-license
• Firefox Extensions
  Operator - provides an architecture for Microformat parsing which is likely to be incorporated into the core of future versions of Firefox.

  Tails - The Tails Firefox Extension allows you to view microformats embedded on a web page, and perform customizable actions on the microformats via Tails Scripts.

• hKit Microformats Toolkit for PHP5
  A php toolkit to extract common Microformats from a page
• Technorati Contacts Feed Service
  Technorati Contacts Feed Service is a deployment of X2V to convert hCards to vCard (.vcf) format.
• Technorati Events Feed Service
  Technorati Events Feed Service is a deployment of X2V to convert hCalendar events to iCalendar (.ics) format.
• Technorati Microformats Search
  Technorati Microformats Search. Search for contacts (hCard), events (hCalendar), or reviews (hReview) published on blogs and other web sites.
• Upcoming.org
  Upcoming.org - hCalendar support in events listings and individual events.
• X2V

  Brian Suda has created several XSLT files to extract microformats from HTML. From that the X2V webservice/favelet emerged. The XSLT and favelet extracts hCard and to produces .vcf (vCard) files and hCalendar to produce .ics (iCal) files.

• Yahoo Local
  Yahoo local supports hCard, hCalendar, and hReview.
• Yahoo UK Movies

  Yahoo! UK Movies supports hReview.

Conclusion

We - as web professionals - need to start using Microformats in everything we build. The more we use Microformats in our web development the quicker it’ll be embraced by software houses and application developers. We need to bring Microformats to the mainstream and it’s only you and I that can help that push!

Don’t be scared of Microformats. Embrace them, use them, love them. It’s easy!

Hey there all you web nutters … I’m thinking of a little side project. And I need your input. If studiowhiz was to offer hosting to you would you consider using it? I’m not just talking any old hosting, I’m talking about hosting that will allow you the ability to run PHP beside ASP, Perl beside Ruby on Rails, MySQL beside MSSQL, pop, imap and all that usual stuff.

We could give you the flexibility you need to build the web apps you always dreamed of. Our hosting would scale as you do, with a small monthly fee & pay as you go add ons, hosting with us could be the advantage you need. You’d have access to 24hr, 7day support, your site would be hosted on some of the most robust systems on the net today.

Would you be interested? I’m considering this as one way of helping grow Studiowhiz. As this site continues to grow and I have more ideas we need community support to do that. By offering a service we all need & use we can get fantastic hosting and any profit will be funneled directly into the growth of Studiowhiz from a blog to a resource.

I would need 10 people/websites to consider driving this forward (that would see you paying around US$13 a month). Oh and yes this would potentially be a ‘cloud computing’ solution (don’t ya love buzz words). Register your interest by either a comment or drop me an email webmaster [at] studiowhiz (you figure the rest out).

Edit:
I now have 2 or 3 other parties interested so need maybe 7 more to register interest

As you know from my earlier post I’m rusty when it comes to coding. We’ll I’m working on a small project in my weekends (which I’ll unveil in the coming weeks) and while it’s more a proof of concept than anything, I’m using it as an excuse to brush up on my PHP skills - not that I program any more in my day job (yeah!)

So I thought I’d share a couple of things I’ve found - that are probably old news to you.

Remove duplicates from an array: a really, really simple thing to do.
Lets say I have an array $myArray = (’Red’, ‘Green’, ‘Red’, ‘Blue’, ‘Red’, ‘Yellow’) and I didn’t want Red in there 3 times. PHP has a nice little function called array_unique().

$myArray = ('Red', 'Green', 'Red', 'Blue', 'Red', 'Yellow');

$clean_array =  array_unique($myArray);

$clean_array now looks like (’Red’, ‘Green’, ‘Blue’, ‘Yellow’)

Insert multiple rows with one insert:
I always thought you couldn’t add multiple rows to a table with an insert. I thought each insert had to be a single row. Well this is not so as I found out today. Lets say you are adding 10 items to a ‘tag’ table (id, tag) you can do it like this:

INSERT INTO 'tag' (tag) VALUES
    ('apple'), ('windows'),
    ('css'), ('seo'), ('html'),
    ('design'), ('xhtml'), ('lcd'),
    ('usb'), ('crt');

Of course you can dynamically build the values and pop in many rows at once. I saw a post on some blog (I’ve misplaced the link since getting this to work) that mentioned adding many megabytes of data this way - I can’t say I’d recommend that as a particularly efficient way - but for adding maybe 50 tags it’s jolly fast.

On a side note, anyone know of anyway to get mysql to return the id’s for the rows it just added. If you are adding one row at a time of course you can use ‘mysql_insert_id()’ to return the id (only if you are using auto_increment) of the previous insert. Sadly this doesn’t seem to work with multirow inserts.

We’re a cynical bunch aren’t we. If TV & Movies desensitize us to violence then the internet desensitizes us to charity & needs.

I’ve had a couple of things happening recently that have highlighted the issues faced when wanting to or needing too raise funds online and just how hard it is becoming to raise awareness and funds.

Lets take the case of my very good friend over at webhelp …
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve mentioned before that when you want to run a blog & bring in great levels of traffic you have to devote a lot of time to sculpting the content of your blog/website.

One of my issues is that I’m not a professional writer, I make no claims to being a good writer - however without content, without writing you have nothing to bring in more visitors. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow, no wonder I’m having a little trouble growing traffic. Oh well there is only one way to go from here - that is UP.
So if you have a blog, a site, anything - why not point a link at www.studiowhiz.com and help me get back into Google. Yes I have requested a resubmit… so we’ll see how that goes.

In the meantime you can help, please point to this site - pick any of our great articles.