Brainspill

Upgraded this site to WordPress 1.5 today. I like the new features, I even like the look.

What I don’t like is that 12,000+ other sites just did this too, and we’re all using the same theme.

There ought to be a project out on the web somewhere that creates an amalgam of what every known website looks like on its front page. I’ll bet you’d notice a significant number of faded blue headers..

Oh well. Digital camera and StockXChange membership in hand, I’ll get to fixing that soon.

Update: How’s that?
Update II: Wow. Toss in some SIFR and it gets so pretty I keep coming back, just to look at it.

http://maps.google.com came out late last night, and these are my notes on having played with it for just a few moments.

Zawodny says goodbye to Mapquest… I’m not so sure:

Love the map appearance – no more stick lines like mapquest or yahoo – google’s lines are smooth and look more ‘real’ to me.

Love the “stick-pins” and detail bubbles that seem to float above the map and cast shadows down onto it.

Love the accuracy – google gets my work address right, when nobody else does, and my home address is almost right, too.

Love the drag & move functionality, and +/- zoom.

Hate that I can’t easily make an image of the map on screen, or I’d quickly replace all of work’s maps with these images. Might still do it with links to get driving directions easily… need to read up on the licensing. Why isn’t that right on the page?

Hate that there’s not an easily usable list of recent searches I can pull up again, or link between for driving directions.

The driving directions are ok, but the step by step image option isn’t obvious (you have to click on the direction #), and not easily printable, either.

The printable version of the driving directions doesn’t highlight the route, or print turn-by-turn images in the instructions. Damn, I miss those.

I like Microsoft Streets & Trips’ option to customize your driving style (faster/slower than posted limits) to tweak the drive time estimates. That’d be nice here.

Overall it’s the best looking free-for-use system I’ve seen, but there’s sufficient drawbacks that keep it from being my outright favorite. I’ll probably look at it for personal use, but for professional use I’ll stick to Mapquest for now.

Nice version 1 though, Google.

Note to self, PPK does this better than I do. Did. It’s !Spiffy! Thanks PPK!

JavaScript Triggers: A List Apart

Once upon a time I created an app for work that utilized Internet Explorer’s pathetic “Behavior” system. I’ve wanted to rewrite it ever since it became obvious with real data, that its performance was awful.

The flaws are that the behavior file is downloaded (or reparsed or something) from memory for every element it applies to. The result is a thousand little hour-glass flashes as the page loads – not to mention even slower load time than usual.

What makes PPK’s solution great is that:

1. It doesn’t use the behavior crap I tried with IE,
2. That makes it cross-browser compatible and I can finally push to get rid of that stupid browser at work,
3. Modifying the DTD would work wonderfully on our site, making the code clean, the css clean, and the javascript self-contained and clean, and
4. It continues the notion of custom attributes I’ve been using in tags for quite a while with JS, but shows me how to do it with the DOM so it’s cross browser happy (and tested) instead of my “hrmm, works in this browser” justification.

Personally, I don’t care that W3C Validation fails on it. It’s a tool, not a requirement.