schmichael's blog » Uncategorized

Join #webdevpdx on Freenode

Michael Schurter — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:59:33 +0000

Chris just created a channel for web developers in Portland, OR on Freenode, so if you’re a web developer (or sysadmin or dba or designer or manager forced to deal with us webdevs) come on in!

#webdevpdx on irc.freenode.net

New to IRC? Try one of these clients:

Pidgin (but not really Adium)
Chatzilla
and of course The Client of the Future: irssi

Update: I should have mentioned I’m schmichael on IRC.

Official Song of Summer 2008

Michael Schurter — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:38:31 +0000

…according to me at least.

Update: Just realized my fancy widgets aren’t showing up in feeds. Click through if you care.

Thanks to The Current I found my song for this summer:*

Michael Franti & Spearhead – Say Hey (I Love You)

It was just released today, and the whole album doesn’t come out until September 9th. Hopefully it will be on eMusic then!

Amazon’s MP3 player widget broke when I searched for the song, so you’ll have to make due with 2 other excellent songs I can’t get out of my head thanks to The Current.

* Yeah I know its pretty late in the summer to be picking a song, but I just hadn’t heard the one yet. Summer of 2006 was easy with Gnarls Barkley’s debut, but I don’t remember what the official song was last year…

Hzzah: AJAX Searching, Grouped Searches, and Version Numbers

Michael Schurter — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:37:23 +0000

AJAX Searching

Thanks to jQuery and the jQuery History plugin, searching is now done via AJAX but it doesn’t break your back and forward buttons.

The navigation callback in JavaScript ought to be more of a proper state machine, but considering there are only 3 states (blank, about, and searching) I’m not too concerned.

Grouped Searches
I played around with hzzah a bit more after I noticed its search results were far worse than those on Yahoo.com

It seems Yahoo.com only returns 1 or 2 hits per domain, whereas the BOSS API will happily return hundreds all from the same site.

This means if you’re vain like me and search for your name, you get pages of links to your blog and nowhere else. The Yahoo.com results are pretty good and only return 2 hits for my blog.

So I grouped hits by domain name, but since I broke pagination in the process, searching for myself is completely worthless now.

I have some ideas on how to fix that, but they’ll have to wait for another time.

Version Numbers

Squint at the bottom of the page to see the current revision number.

Anybody know how to have that increment automatically when I do bzr up on my server? I haven’t looked for a post-update hook which would do the trick.

Man Babies

Michael Schurter — Fri, 09 May 2008 01:07:38 +0000

Right after I graduated from college, I taught 2 low level CS courses over a couple of semesters. Two of my students created some sort of chat program where you could punch your friends in the face if I remember correctly. It was awesome.

Now they’ve graduated and brought something even more amazing into this world: ManBabies.com

I could try to describe it, or respond to it, but I really think you just need to see it for yourself.

I’m so proud.