Shiny ideas always catch the eye. I really got inspired by the “Regrets” series of films by Steve Delahoyde, the hobbies one really caught my attention, I ended up watching the rest and kept wanting more. The way it was filmed and the mood really sucked me in. The seriousness of the actors really portray a trueness to the subjects. It really inspired me seeing what others have done with their passion to create something so entertaining and yet so true. My regret is not pouring more of my heart and soul into my work.
The Apple products and community never cease to amaze me. When there is a problem to solve more than likely someone has already created an elegant solution. An experience I had today reinforced my findings ten fold.
I have a few shares on a network drive that I connect from OS X via Samba. Files get populated into those folders by other applications and when they are ready I goto the directory and pick them up. Well Finder has a mysterious refresh rate for directories… I have never been able to figure it out and there is to my knowledge no hotkey to manually refresh.
So I goto good ol’ Google to find a solution… Looks like nothing built in, but there is this nifty utility called Refresh Finder. Built on AppleScript it is lightweight and does what it needs and gets out of the way.
I hate to say it but it far surpasses any elegant solutions I have seen for Windows. Usually those include some constantly running application in the background, starting at startup, always looking for an update, and probably costing $19.99 nagware.
Downloaded and installed in 2 minutes. This will save a lot of time, usually I end up having to just randomly click on folders to hit something that is not cached so Finder can do a refresh. Now there is a refresh button similar to on Safari in the Finder toolbar and life is quite a bit less stressful.
A definite download for any Mac user. If I were to rate it a 10 out of 10 would be in order. Great work S�derhavet.
Staying motivated while the going is touch is a pretty daunting task, especially if the big picture is just out sight. Weather it is for a short period of time or half the year everyone hits a hard point in their life. The key is to not think of yourself as being singled out, things just happen, getting past it is the first step and then getting things done is the second.
Getting things done really means keeping yourself upbeat, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. The more thought going into the situation the less amount of time you have to work on a solution.
Think of the big picture is my solution when I get into tough times. Thinking about how I will learn from it when I am old and grey. Challenges are meant to be solved, its like any good math problem, some solutions are elegant and other are just plain ugly but there is always a way to an answer.
Know when to move on and either cut your losses or start a new path. A key think for me is not getting comfortable in a situation that does not allow for growth. Not only in a work environment but in any personal situation. I always look for that next chance to improve or to improve on someone else’s life. If there is a point where no more can be done and idle is the best you can do it is time jump to a path with open arms to learn and grow.
Plan for the brick walls because they are unstoppable and unbreakable. Always have at least two or three options open as backups. Mainly when it comes to generating money, sometimes the most creative ways surprise the best of us. And small side jobs end up taking the burden from working crazy hours and keep things flexible.
Always showing your best work when doing any task. Impressions happen all the time and you cannot tell someone you are about to impress them, it just happens like a brick to the face. If always showing your best work means working an extra mile instead of a few feet then you are in the wrong business. It just comes down to thinking more about others than yourself, you are not doing something to benefit yourself you are accomplishing a task to help someone.
And always ending on a good note will never hurt your integrity.
The web is filled with forms and the more social sites get the more forms required. At Wayne State we end up creating a lot of forms for a lot of purposes. I am going to take for for example and show how we have come up with a fully flexible html form and how you can adopt it too.
Launching a new site got me exploring some new code bases and I became disappointed with the disregard large social sites have for html validation of snippets they disburse to their user community.
Since I wanted my site plain and simple to start instead of writing a bunch of code to use common API’s I decided to first go with includes and badges from sites I commonly use. The three that I experienced while creating this site astonished me on their lack of attention to detail. At least they are trying to be compliant but unfortunately they are not fully committed yet.
Twitter HTML Badge
Twitter offers a nice super customizable HTML badge to include on a site. Which is great because it is a basic div, header and unsorted list and style is up to you. Placing the code they supply on your site makes it no longer validate. On their script tag they use an invalid parameter “text”. This looks like a typo and something simple to fix but where is the quality control? Shouldn’t someone test these types of things before they are rolled to production?
Flickr offers two types of badges the HTML one does surprisingly well except they do not escape the ampersands in the src of the script tag but that is something that can easily be done by the user.
The flash version on the other hand includes an html page into an iframe but unfortunately the code in their html appears to have also been skipped by quality control. It has two main issues. Script and style sheets above the head of the document and non escaped characters in an html string that is outputted via document.write().
Rails applications have been known for their agility and standards. It takes more than just a script kiddie to get a rails application into production. So when I installed and started to customize SimpleLog 2.0.2 for my site something stuck out like a soar thumb, the archives page in the default theme did not validate. There are two options for the html, an unsorted list or definition list. Neither of them are nested correctly which makes it almost impossible to apply a consistent style across browsers.
Without re-writing the entire helper for my site I just put some extra li elements in the output and cut it down to just one missing li. I have not had time to checkout the SVN trunk and create a patch.
Final Thoughts
By far the number of pages that do not validate outweigh the ones that do on the web but it is a shame to see small agile companies acting like large corporations when it comes to quality control. One of the benefits of having a small group or an open source application is the amount to time and attention each piece can get before it is released for peer review. It was put best in Jason’s A collection of details post when he quotes Wil Shipley:
“This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.”
Web standards need to be enforced by the community and it is our job as web professionals to validate our own code and when possible give some helpful hints to other developers or companies who are not taking the appropriate amount of time to validate. I put in a ticket with twitter about the “text” element and in the process of creating a patch for SimpleLog’s archive page. I encourage all developers to run with standards and not be afraid to send an email or two to promote the health of the web. Who knows you could send that one simple email that turns thousands of pages valid.
