Tag Archive for 'tools'

Webpage Thumbnails — Screenshots via Page Glimpse in JavaScript

Published on April 14, 2009 in Code. 20 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

For quite some time I’ve had a desire to fetch screenshots of webpages in thumbnail form. My last round of development in the area involved a somewhat overly complex solution using Amazon’s AWS Alexa Site Thumbnail service. I chose to integrate with the AWS Alexa Thumbnail service over other services because it just returned an image, no extra crap (Snap’s thumbnails are grotesque) and no ads. Although the service wasn’t free, it only cost a few pennies to use.

The other requirement I have is to retrieve the thumbnails in JavaScript. This lead to the creation my Ajax Alexa Thumbnails project. The AWS Alexa Thumbnail service required a client to interact via a XML web service (similar to the other AWS services), this means signing the request with your AWS credentials; something I wasn’t going to do in JavaScript. The project became too complex for the task; it involved making an Ajax request to a local PHP file which dealt with sending the request to and receiving the response from Amazon. Crazy I know, which is why I’m deprecating the Ajax Alexa Thumbnails project along with the deprecation of the AWS Alexa Thumbnail service in favor of my new solution [below] using Page Glimpse. Continue reading ‘Webpage Thumbnails — Screenshots via Page Glimpse in JavaScript’

YUI3 is Sizzling Hot

Published on March 17, 2009 in Code. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Great news for YUI3: Matt Sweeney, a YUI Developer, has integrated the Sizzle JavaScript Selector Library in a branch of the YUI3 code-base on GitHub. There has been interest from the community about this integration for quite some time. I personally was hoping for Sizzle adoption into YUI3; this now appears to be the case.

Using the Selector utility in YUI2 I would find myself hitting bugs and roadblocks where my expectations weren’t matching the outcomes. I’ve felt since first using the selector engine in YUI that it didn’t compare in speed, robustness, or completeness to jQuery’s. With the Sizzle project, there’s a narrow focus and distinct vision: To make the best damn selector engine. Since a selector engine is an essential component to any modern JavaScript library, why not make one really good one for all libraries to use? That’s the route the Sizzle project has taken.

Once Sweeney’s branch is merged into the YUI3 Master Head, I’ll be doing a git pull and give it some exercise.

Using Bazaar On a Mac

Published on March 4, 2009 in Techniques. 6 Comments Tags: , , , .

Bazaar has become a tool I’m using all the time. Using Bazaar as a version control system means using a command line interface. I haven’t found a feature-rich Bazaar GUI tool like the ones that exist for Subversion. I feel alright with using a command line interface for executing commands; but it is frustrating to edit text, review diffs, and manage merges in a command line environment. It just sucks! I want something better: a work-flow that keeps me productive, and an appropriate interface for the task at hand. Specifically, I want my version control system to be integrated with my Mac and the existing tools I use; I want to be able to:

  • Manage my files and folders using Finder
  • Write commit messages, view diffs, and manager merges in TextWrangler

Continue reading ‘Using Bazaar On a Mac’

Browser Testing IE On a Mac

Published on January 28, 2009 in Techniques. 13 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

For the past couple of years I’ve been trying to get a reasonable setup for testing Internet Explorer on my Mac. With the recent release of IE 8 RC1, I thought it might be a good time to revisit my browser testing setup.

I use an Apple Macbook (the black one) with OS X 10.5 and 4GB of RAM as my sole machine. With my Mac I should be able create a reasonable setup to test all major web browsers. I’m less interested in testing all OS and browser combinations simply because that seems unreasonable for most projects.

Operating System and Browser Testing Combinations

The following is the list of OS and browser combinations I want to be able to test; each OS has browsers listed in the order of which I care most about supporting:

  • OS X 10.5
    • Firefox 3
    • Safari 3
  • Windows XP
    • IE 7
    • IE 8
    • Firefox 3
    • IE 6
    • Firefox 2

Developing on a Mac, I’m always running things in OS X 10.5 / Firefox 3, making the combination always supported. I will also occasionally checkout how Safari 3 is doing while developing, although it’s usually fine.

When in browser testing mode (not developing new features) I’ll run through the Windows XP / Firefox 3 and Windows XP / Firefox 2 combinations; mainly to checkout how the font-renderings are holding up in Windows.

Then comes IE testing. I start with IE 7 which I find not too difficult to get working, usually just have to fix the hasLayout issues. With IE 8 coming into the mix soon I’m going to start testing it; hoping that it will be even easier to get working than IE 7. JavaScript frameworks like YUI are pushing hard to support IE 8; which is great as the CSS support in IE 8 seems to be much better than in IE 7. Of course the hardest of all to get working, IE 6; some projects need to support it no matter what, others can just not worry about it (like my personal web page).

I feel that I’ve found a testing setup that will allow me to carry out my browser testing process much easier than I could in the past.

Continue reading ‘Browser Testing IE On a Mac’

YUI Opens Up

Published on January 22, 2009 in Code. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

There’s been some changes with the Yahoo! User Interface library (YUI) project to make it more open. Contributing to YUI in the past was an odd burdenson process as the public-facing YUI project on SourceForge was essentially a proxy to an internal project at Yahoo!.

Over the past month many changes have come to the YUI project that are more than just code:

Continue reading ‘YUI Opens Up’

Amazon EC2 Web Console

Published on January 9, 2009 in Deployment. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

This is great! What I’ve been waiting for from Amazon Web Services; Manage Amazon EC2 With New Web-Based AWS Management Console.

My initial reactions are very positive when using the AWS Management Console, the app is clean, stable, easy to use, and useful. I really disliked using the ElasticFox plugin to Firefox and held off on paying the $66 for a Jollat license while anticipating a useful take on GUI AWS management from Amazon.

The app appears to be written on a heavy usage of YUI which is great; YUI is my JavaScript library of choice. The developers of the AWS Management Console have done a great job creating an Ajax GUI that’s using the full power of the YUI library.

I’ve been following Amazon EC2 for quite some time but haven’t decided to start really working with it until, well, this week. Essentially my experience has been frustrating using ElasticFox for a day and rewarding and educational using the AWS Management Console last night.

I look forward to the S3 and SimpleDB components to the Management Console, I suspect I’ll have the same great experience with them too. :-)

Thanks Amazon and the dev team who made the Amazon EC2 Web Console!