11
Jun
I set about a few days ago learning the in and outs of writing a Chrome Extension. I’ve been using the browser a little more recently after being a die hard Safari fan. Although Chrome is awesome and very fast I’m not ready just yet to claim it as my default browser over Safari. However I couldn’t pass up the chance to learning a few new things and release an extension for Chrome (and next up Safari).
Like many others I use a social checkin/location/whatever app. For me personally its Gowalla. I have used them for a little while and they have a much better interface then Foursquare. So, why not have an easy way to see where your friends are by clicking a little icon in your browser. Thats exactly what this extension, Gowalla Friends, does. It sits in your browser and upon click will show you a nice list of your friends recent checkin’s. It is the same feed you see on gowalla.com when logged in and has the same style, Gowalla has an awesome design so why change it?
You just specify your Gowalla username and thats it. To avoid overloading Gowalla’s servers I am caching the feed for 10 mins. I may change this in the future or at the very least allow you to set your own caching time (depending on how many people you follow and how often people check in). I also plan on making the code opensource and post it on github in the coming weeks so keep an eye out for that. There is nothing major in the code as its just parsing an xml feed from Gowalla but I’ll make it available non the less.
If Gowalla will open up their API more and allow me to pull in recent friends checkin’s (besides using an rss feed), allow me to get comments and photos posted, and even allow replying/leaving a comment on a friends checkin then I would love to update the extension to allow more features but as it remains the Gowalla API doesn’t seem to allow much of what I would like to do with this extension. Either way this was more of a learning experience in writing a simple extension and releasing it to Google. There might be a future blog post about it as well.
Enough of all this talk, go install the extension and let me know what you think. Download Gowalla Friends for Chrome.
09
Jun
Sometimes you just want to display current weather on your website. We have actually had several clients recently request displaying local weather on their website. There are times when displaying weather is useful as in one of our clients who is a realtor and targets people moving into town. While they are browsing homes for sale they see the current weather at a glance. Nothing intrusive but simple and clean. Once again I set about finding a simple, lightweight, clean and easy to use jquery plugin to accomplish this. Although several exist none did what I wanted. Some don’t let you use a zipcode or location name and instead require a unique id from Yahoo. Others return non valid or bulky html which is just as bad. A few weeks ago I created simpleWeather a jQuery Plugin.
simpleWeather uses the Yahoo! Weather API to return plenty of weather data for a location. I recently updated the plugin (v1.4) which now gives you the ability to use a US Zipcode or specify your location. Example: 90210 or London, United Kingdom. Yahoo! does a pretty good job of returning the correct location, however in some cases a location may have multiple spots reporting data (such as the city itself and then the airport or military base). In this case, if the correct location is not being returned, you still have the ability to use the unique GEOID that is assigned to every location by Yahoo. More details on using and getting this id can be found in the plugin wiki. For now lets show some code to display a little weather data from Wichita Falls that we could stick in a sidebar. First the javascript to get the weather using simpleWeather.
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30
May
Last week we took our second family vacation, the first was last year to San Antonio, Austin and SeaWorld for a week. Melissa has been talking about going on a cruise for awhile now so we figured no use in waiting, lets go. Back in January we booked a 4-Day Carnival Cruise to Cozumel, Mexico. This vacation had several firsts for all of us. First time on a ship, on an island, out of the country, in Mexico, at a beach, and open water (only man-made lakes before). Needless to say this excited all of us.
We left Wichita Falls about noon on Wednesday to make the 8 hour drive to Galveston, Texas. We had booked a room at the Harbor House Hotel for the night since we boarded the ship the next day. This hotel was amazing. It sits directly on the pier which of course gives a great view to the harbor and the ships. In fact you take one step outside and your standing in front of the gulf with a big NOAA ship (the Thomas Jefferson) in front of you. We walked around the pier, snapped a few pictures and walked to the Port Terminal to get an idea of where we would be going the next morning. Thursday morning we woke up a lot earlier then we planned, but looking out the window we got to see the Carnival Ecstasy pull into the harbor and dock, the same ship we would be getting on very soon. Since we were up and excited we got our bags and walked down to the terminal, knowing they wouldn’t let us on for an hour or two. We got lucky and they were already letting people go through customs, get their Sail & Sign cards and start boarding the ship. Which means we didn’t have much of a line to wait in and got to board the ship and go straight for the food.
The ship is beyond huge. At least for us, who have never been on anything that large before (none of us have ever flown before either). I was prepared that I might get sick from the ship’s motion, but got lucky again and did not. I could feel the ship rocking which caused me to wobble some while walking around and sitting at the tables. Melissa and the kids seemed fine through out the trip. The ship has so many lights, bars/clubs, places to eat and lots of music and shows. I fell in love with the view all around the ship. Nothing but water as far as you can see, the wind from the gulf, ships and rigs in the distance, I did not want to leave. We did get a room with a window on the port side, which was really nice. First thing that you notice is how much food there is on board. They said if you planned your day around just the food, you could have 14 completely different meals every day while on board. The menus changed for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert every day. Needless to say, that was awesome.
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