Ups and downs in professional nerdery
Sun 3 Jun 07 17:32 | Tags: Meta
Hey, all. Just thought I'd catch you all up on where my life's been in the past month. It's been a heck of a ride…
Last month, I announced that I had managed to get a full-time job as a PHP programmer at a financial data company. I really enjoyed that job a lot; it was exercising my skills and knowledge in a way no job had ever had before. So when I was called in to a meeting with the big boss on the 15th, and I was told that he had just defaulted on a huge loan and that I and over a dozen of my peers were now out of a job… Well, I took it a little hard.
However, the next week, I managed to get another programming job, this time with an advertising agency in my home town - partly on the recommendation of my immediate boss at the previous company (not the one that fired me). I'm not earning as much as I was and I can't listen to my iPod while working anymore, but on the other hand, I don't have to drive about forty miles each way to get to work and back. And I get to work on a Mac. With two monitors. Nice.
So, like that, the shortest period of employment in my life was followed by the shortest period of unemployment. Funny how these things happen.
My last project at the earlier company - I was literally in the now-how-the-hell-do-I-get-this-to-work-in-IE mode when I got called into the office - was a JavaScript-powered table grid for web pages designed for holding and displaying massive amounts of data without slowing down the browser or the web server. There are other controls out there that do this, but none of them worked exactly the way we wanted them to, so I finally just tried writing my own, despite the fact that I wasn't very familiar with JavaScript when I started - this was definitely a learning experience. It uses JavaScript to determine what rows of the grid are currently visible on the user's screen, and it only fetches the data for - and draws the grid for - those rows. When the user scrolls, the script determines which rows are now visible and updates the grid, again by only fetching the data for and drawing the rows which are visible. The data is cached by JavaScript in order to reduce network access, but it still only processes and draws the rows that are visible. The grid columns are fully sortable, spreadsheet-style. It's pretty slick, if I dare say so myself. My contract disallowed me from sharing code I created for the company while I was employed by them, but now that I no longer am, I believe such clauses are no longer enforceable (and even if they are, I could still simply rewrite the code from scratch, now that I know how to do it). Would anyone out there be interested in something like this? Let me know.
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Conflagration: A better web feed subscriber widget
Sat 26 May 07 19:19 | Tags: Blogging, Meta, Software
Here's one for my fellow bloggers out there, specifically those who use the FeedBurner service to tweak and serve their web feeds. FeedBurner allows you display a little widget on your blog that shows you how many subscribers you have. Even if you don't use FeedBurner, you may have seen it around the web at big-name blogs like TechCrunch and John Chow, as well as smaller (though not as small as RGR…) blogs like Mac OS X Tips and Kumiko's Cash Quest. It looks like this.
I used to use this widget myself, for somewhat selfish reasons, but I was never too excited about it. Why? Because at every site it's displayed, it looks exactly the same, save for slight color variations. The same boxy design, the same ugly aliased font.
Now, if you look over to the sidebar on the right, you'll see a feed widget with a number that is quite different. How did I do that? I made my own widget which I call Conflagration. It gets the subscriber count from FeedBurner and creates a prettier and much more original image with it. I've even implemented a simple theme system which lets me create new designs apart from the code itself, so you don't have to know any programming to create new "themes." Along with the "RayGunRobot" theme which I'm using here, Conflagration also comes with these themes "out of the box:"
"BigTimeSkyBlue" theme (also comes in gray, pink and green).
"Tilted" theme. (It could use a little more work…)
Also, back when I began offering two versions of my feed, I wanted my widget to display the total subscriber count of both feeds. So I added a feature to display the total subscribers from as many feeds as you want.
Today I am making Conflagration available to the public at large for the grand price of zero, zip, zilch, free. It's still in "beta," so more features should be forthcoming, but it seems to work fairly well at present and there's no bugs that I know of. It's a little more difficult to set up than the standard FeedBurner widget, and you have to have a server which you can run PHP scripts off of (so Blogger/TypePad/LiveJournal/etc users are out of the loop for now), but if you're looking for features above and beyond what FeedBurner's widget can do, give it a try. And please don't hesitate to contact me or leave a comment if you have any questions, feature suggestions, or found bugs.
Also please contact me if you've created an aesthetically-pleasing theme which you'd like to share with others. I'm a programmer, not an artist, so I'd be glad to see more and better-looking themes made available for Conflagration than the ones that are currently included.
Oh, and have you checked out SigFeeder? That's another cool tool for bloggers which I've developed.
(By the way, if it looks like I'm linking to all those blogs in the first paragraph in the hopes that they'll notice the incoming link via Technorati, check this out, then start using Conflagration themselves and then link back to me, well, that's exactly what I'm doing. It's just one of those sneaky things bloggers do.)
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The candidates and their web feeds
Sat 19 May 07 21:02 | Tags: Internet, Meta
Earlier today, I spent some time working on Siteb.us; specifically, the USA08 section, which aggregates posts from the web sites of various candidates for next year's United States presidential election. I looked through the list of blogs I have on the section and compared it to Wikipedia's list of candidates to make sure that all candidates whose web sites had working web feeds were represented on the page. (For my own sanity, I decided to limit it only to all candidates from the four most notable parties, the Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Libertarians; sorry, Constitutionalists, Prohibitionists, Nazis and the two dozen or so Independents, but there's just too many of you otherwise.) There were a few new candidates since when I first added the section to the site, and some older candidates had new feeds. Here's some observations.
Greens seem to be real luddites. Wikipedia lists four Green candidates; three of them have web sites (including Kent Mesplay, whose site is the most ugly and amateurish of all the eligible candidates' sites I visited), but no sort of web feed. The fourth has no site at all.
On the other side of the third-party ticket, the Libertarians seem to be all over the feed thing. Before today's update, the section listed two Libertarian candidates; now there are four. I don't have the stats in front of me now, but that seems rather disproportionate compared to the presence of that party in the US.
Speaking of Libertarians, I used colors to offset the sections of the various candidates by party; Democrats are blue, Republicans are red, and Greens, should any of them get some feeds up and running by the next time I update the site, will be green. Libertarians don't have an official color, but I decided to go with yellow, to match somewhat with the gold color displayed prominently on the party's official website.
It's interesting how many of the Republican candidates try to position themselves as the "only" or "true" conservative in the race. As far as I could tell, no Democrats were calling themselves the "only" or "true" liberals.
Some major candidates are offering feeds, but unfortunately, they're unusable by SiteB.us and therefore they have no presence on the page. Namely, that'd be Republican John McCain, whose site features a blog which splits up the web feeds by topic, instead of offering a single feed for all posts; and Republican Mitt Romney, whose feed does not validate. I could probably write work-arounds for these problems - aggregate all of McCain's feeds into one, and code around the glitches in Romney's feed - but it wouldn't be fair, I think, to have to modify the code just to suit particular candidates.
The presidential election will be held on the fourth of November, 2008. On the next day, the fifth, it will all begin again.
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RGR: Now more link-happy than ever
Tue 15 May 07 00:09 | Tags: Meta
If you just read Ray Gun Robot via the web feed, you haven't noticed a recent change to RGR's front page. (Not that I'm blaming you; I prefer to read many sites via web feeds as well.) Over the weekend, I've added a feature which allows me to quickly post links to interesting sites and articles I've come upon; sort of like I used to do with the Today's Links articles. The system is a hand-coded hack; I originally tried to integrate my del.icio.us page into things, but I wasn't satisfied with the short limit del.icio.us has on their description field, so I rolled my own version. So far, it seems to work fairly well. This will help me be able to quickly add at least a little new content to the site when I'm too busy or tired to write full articles, which is pretty much all the time nowadays (though I do have a couple ideas I'd like to touch on soon). The links will show up in chronological order in between full blog posts. As with other things, Daring Fireball was a source of inspiration for my implementation of this.
If you want to get in on the linktastic action without visiting RGR's front page, my hack can also send my linked articles to your feed reader, but with a slightly different feed address; from now on, the "articles only" RGR feed will be at the original address at http://feeds.feedburner.com/RayGunRobot, whereas the feed with both articles and links will be at http://feeds.feedburner.com/RayGunRobot/Links. If you'd like to switch over, please update your feed reader accordingly.
I hope that this will, in some small part, help mitigate the recent lack of content due to the typical life realignment that comes with a new career. Once again, thanks for reading RGR, and I hope you'll stick around.
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A nerd by trade
Sat 5 May 07 13:39 | Tags: Meta
I've seen it said that bloggers should never apologize or make excuses for their periods of absence, and should instead just start posting quality content again. Well, my semi-official copy-editor and occasional commentator Josh has been bugging me about not posting any new articles in… sheesh, almost a week now, and the reason I haven't really is on topic for this blog, so I just thought I should finally let you all know that…
I am now a professional computer programmer! Yup, as of last Monday, I've been working with a local financial services company, working on a customer-facing web site for sorting and displaying data about mutual funds. The work involves a whole lot of database work, and the database contains data on mutual funds going back seventeen years - it's huge.
When I went in for the interview, my boss said he was impressed by SigFeeder. Looks like that project was not a completely unprofitable diversion after all… Anyway, it's pretty great having a job doing what I really enjoy doing; doing what I was doing for free anyway. The hours are good, the pay (once I get past the probationary period, anyway) should be pretty decent, and I'm continuing to learn new things about programming and databases as I go along. Needless to say, I'm pretty happy.
Of course, the downside is that when you go from being unemployed to being employed full-time - in a job that's about forty minutes away, no less - you have much less free time. Thus why I haven't written any articles since last weekend. I'm also backed up on my usual feed reading (just 130 articles to go!) and forum browsing. But I'm not ready to give up on RGR just yet. The number of articles may drop precipitously during the weekdays, but I've still got some things I'd like to share with you, so I hope you'll stick around. Thanks again for reading Ray Gun Robot.
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