Adobe have released a free PDF book on creating Adobe Air applications for JavaScript developers.

Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide

For those of you who have not heard, Adobe Air represents a fantastic advance in web development technologies. By using the HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the standard bread and butter for web developers, you can leverage those existing skills to create fully fledged desktop applications. Complete with standard OS install, uninstall procedures, custom taskbar(XP)/dock(Mac) icons, the works!

No messing around with C and MFC ( the horror!! ) when developing WinXP apps any more. Plus an Adobe Air app is platform independent. You can build an Adobe Air app and it will run on any OS that has the Adobe Air runtime installed. And what’s more, the Runtime Install procedure is the thing to behold too for it will install painlessly the first time you decide to download an Air app.

Adobe Air will change the way we understand the web, and continue to blur the line between the OS and the browser. It’s my guess for web technology of the year.

I came across this problem today. I was attempting to create a new binary file using Ruby and tried the following:

While this worked on the *nix os, it resulted in a corrupt binary file when run in WINXP.

Solution

To create a binary file in ruby you will need to include the “wb” option. See below.

Bye!

I’m a list junkie and Remember the Milk is where I get the hit…

If you ‘re the same you can download a simple Adobe Air application I put together with the Remember The Milk website inserted in an iframe. Plus a little extra.

Why bother

Doing web development work my browsers and WinXP taskbar can get messy. In a typical setup, I’ll have Firefox running(with several tabs), Internet Explorer 7, possibly 6 too, an IDE EG Aptana Studio or Editplus, probably a few explorer folders and 4 console windows too.

Yes messy I know.

Now you can imagine what that taskbar looks like, and in the midst of this boiling cauldron, in a Firefox tab will lurk http://www.rememberthemilk.com/. It can be a pain to find it.

Wouldn’t it be great if I could keep the http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ seperate from the rest of the Firefox tabs? Perhaps with a distinctive easy to locate icon too.

Ideally I would have http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ running in system tray, not visible in the taskbar and it would disappear back to the system tray when I minimise it, waiting ready to be restored again at short notice…. if only…..

Da Ding!!

Here it is….

BTW the systemtray feature is WinXP only. Perhaps a dock version will appear shortly

Shiftthis have written a Wordpress pluginto help you with re-ordering your Wordpress pages.

It’s called the wordpress-order-pages-plugin.

I’ve found this plugin useful when to allow me to control the order of my Wordpress pages when using my wp_jquery_dropdownmenu plugin .

It provides a visual layout of your pages and you can change the menu order easily. Very nice.

Guide to install and use Subversion client for Win XP.

1. Download Subversion for WINXP
2. Instruction on installing and using Subversion

If you are starting out with Ruby on Rails you’ll probably find yourself working on the depot application from the current edition of the book “Agile Web development with Rails”. However if you have Rails 2 installed you’ll quickly run into problems. The current edition of “Agile Web Development with Rails” supports rails 1.X. However with the release of Rails 2 key changes in the framework render the instructions for creating the depot application obsolete.

To get up to speed you should find the following tutorials useful, the first 2 deal with the rails 2 method of creating a basic depot application while along the way showcasing the new features of Rails2.

http://www.akitaonrails.com/2007/12/12/rolling-with-rails-2-0-the-first-full-tutorial

http://www.akitaonrails.com/2007/12/12/rolling-with-rails-2-0-the-first-full-tutorial-part-2

I’ve also found this next PDF informative. It costs 9 dollars but for that you get 140 odd pages of Rails2 goodness that should fill the void until they get around to updating “”Agile Web Development with Rails”

Hello,
New improved version of the JQuery drop down menu now available.

It contains the extra features requested:

• Order the pages yourself by using the Page menu order feature.
• Put a link into into the menu for you blog.
• Works with javascript turned off.
• Make the the parent of a drop down menu clickable or not.
• Find out more at my original post.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Comments fixed. I was getting a reporting a missing sql comments file. The problem and the solution providerd here fixed the issue. Thanks
http://www.dazecoop.co.uk/03-04-2007/wordpress-database-error-cant-open-file-wp_commentsmyi-errno-144

Hi all,
I’m afraid the commenting on this blog is not working at present.

In the meantime if you would like to contact me feel free to email me at weeatbricks@gmail.com

Thanks
Jamie

The wp_jquery_dropdownmenu plugin at a glance:

• Create a navigation menu with drop down menus for you Wordpress blog
• Slick JQuery animated sliding down for menus and fading out.
• Works with javascript turned off.
• Auto highlight of the current page you are are on.
• New features in v.02
• Add a link to your blog to the navigation menu.
• Arrange the order of the page to suit your needs.
• Parents pages can can be either links to pages or not if required.

I wrote this plugin to provide my wordpress blog with a navigation or menu that provides drop down menus or sub navigation menus where you need them.

This plugin uses the cross browser JQuery javascript framework for the sliding down menus and JQuery is installed with the plugin.

Each ‘Page’ of your wordpress blog becomes a link in the new navigation bar. Pages that are ‘children’ populate the drop menu of the parent ‘Page’.

For example. You might have a page titled About. You can then set or create pages such as contact us, team, location or whatever and set the parent of each of these pages to ‘About’.

In your new navigation menu hover over the ‘About’ link and a dropdown menu containing contact us, team, location appears.

I’ve tested this on Wordpress version 2.31 and above. It will not work on version 2.0.x as these version does not support the concept of parent and child pages.

Try out the Demo

Installation

Download wp_jquery_dropdownmenu plugin here

Simply unzip the wp_jquery_dropdownmenu.zip and copy the wp_jquery_dropdownmenu directory into your ./wp-content/plugins directory.

Login to the WordPress Admin Interface and enable the PlugIn in the PlugIn section.

Next put the tag below somewhere inside one of your wordpress template files.
That’s it.

Usage

Example:
Insert this somewhere into one of your templates, eg header.php

<?php
echo wp_jquery_dropdownmenu(2, “Blog”,1, 0);
?>

This is the default dropdown menu configuration. If you would like to learn about how you can alter your dropmenu further please read the following:

There are four settings to consider.

The first value(2 in the above example):
0 - does not put a link to you blog into the dropdown menu.
1 - Put a lnk to your blog on the left hand side of the dropdown menu.
2 - put a link to your blog in the right hand side of the navigation menu.

Second value (”blog” in the above example):
If you would like a lin to you blog to appear in your dropdown menu. Put the text here. In the above example “Blog” is used and will probably do for most people.

Third value (1 in the above example):
0 - pages will by sorted by their ID
1 - pages will be arranged accorded to their menu order. The menu order can be set in the pages section of your wordpress blog.

Fourth value (0 in the above example):
0 - if you would prefer the ‘parent’ of a dropdownmenu to be unavailable for clicking.
1 - if you would prefer the ‘parent’ of a dropdownmenu to to click to it’ page.

Further notes

You can style the css by editing the files styles.css in the plugins/wp_jquery_dropdownmenu folder

Comments, questions or suggestions most welcome!

Enjoy.

This plugin, wp_jquery-1.2.1 is based on the wp_jquery plugin available at http://miracles.heaven.fr/wp_jquery/
It adds support for the JQuery JavaScript framework to your word press blog and admin backend.

I’ve added two enchantments:

• Updated the version of JQuery from 1.0.3 to 1.2.1
• Added support for wordpress blogs that do not reside in the root directory for a domain. For example, the previous plugin would work if your blog lives at www.mylovelyhorse.com but not www.mylovelyhorse.com/blog/. Now it does.

Download here

Enjoy!

Traffic to my blog increased by about 20 percent after installing these plugins. They work! Let’s have a look at them.

All in One SEO Pack

“Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog …”
Add titles, description and keywords to your wordpress blog post and pages. All are used by search engines to rank your blog.

Google XML Sitemaps
Creates a googe friendly sitemap which google will find and in return index your blog higher.

KB Robots.txt
This plugin gives you control over your robots.txt file. A robots.txt file gives instructions to search engines spiders on how to crawl the pages of your website. You can use the robots.txt to tell the search engines to ignore certain pages with the effect of focusing search engines attention on the pages you want index. Take a look at the robots.txt file of my blog for an example.

Be warned that the Google XML Sitemap plugin edits the robots.txt as well as the above. Be careful as it may overwrite your existing sitemap. Keep a copy of the file.
At this stage your blog will start looking very attractive to search engines and your search engine traffic in terms of unique page views should increase nicely. The next step is to capatalise on the traffic coming to your blog by providing incentives to keep the traffic moving around your website.

The following wordpress will plugins will achieve this.

Popularity Contest

You can create a most popular posts list with this plugin. Put the list in your blog sidebar to constantly promote your best content on each page of your blog.

Related Posts
Put this list at the end of each out your posts and it will automatically will generate a list of related posts.

Hopefully this 5 plugins will help increase traffic to your blog. They worked for me!

If there are any SEO Wordpress plugins that you would recommend, please leave a comment.

Thanks.

Another bug with JQuery to report.

I am using the JQuery and the Sortable functions provided by the Interface Plugin.

In IE when you drag a quicktime movie that is currently playing, the movie stays in the original location and while the rest of the draggable moves as expected.

A refresh of the page will place the quicktime movie in the place it should be.

To see it in action please have a go at dragging around the box containing the Quicktime movie
try it out here:
http://weeatbricks.com/test/sortable_quicktime.html

I’ve submitted the ticket to Jquery, view ticket.

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Google Gears API is a tool kit which provides JavaScript APIs to allow web application to work off-line.

Three ‘core’ JavaScript APIs are provided:

LocalServer A local cache html, JavaScript and image files. Also provides mapping from on-line URLs to off-line URLs.

Database Google Gears comes with an SQLite database which is accessible via the Database API.

WorkerPool I have not used this, but the Google Gears description states, it can “Make your web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously”.

I’ve put together an example which uses the LocalServer and Database JavaScript APIs.

Try out the Google Gears Example using the Digg API

Try out the following steps

• You’ll be asked to install Google Gears first, if you don’t already have it installed
• Fetch some Digg story titles from the drop down list, these story titles are saved into a local database provided by Google gears on you machine.
• This is where the magic happens! On the right hand side click capture.
• The document is now captured and available for off-line browsing. Go ‘off-line’, so in Firefox click ‘File’, ‘Work Offline’.
• View the URL again, and low and behold you will see the same web page even though you are Off-line. You’ll also notice a list of the titles that you had fetched before you went off-line.
• You can Erase the the document from Google Gears with the ‘Erase’ button too, and empty the database with ‘Empty’ if you wish.

And that’s that! Two out of three of the Google Gears demonstrated. Remember to put your browser back on-line when you’re done.

A couple of caveats

• Google Gears does not do server side scripting. The functionality that you wish to make available off-line must be implemented via JavaScript.
• Adding Google Gears functionality to an existing web application will require additional code in your application. How much code depends on the level of off-line functionality you want to achieve. You will need to insert logic into your app to check it’s off-line/on-line state and to tell it what to do if it’s off-line as well as when it’s on-line.

Please view the ticket I’ve submitted to jQuery for the most up-to-date news on this.

The ticket reads as follows:

I have found what I think is a bug with the interface/sortable plugin for jquery.

To explain my scenario. I am using the jquery and the sortable plugin from interface. The sortable items are divs as normal that contain object and embed tags to a flash swf file.

In FF when I drag the divs around the flash movie appears smooth and as you would expect.

However in IE 6 and IE7 when I drag the div around the flash movie will disappear and reappear. It will be replaced by the white rectangle that seems to get stuck and leave a trail and lingers for a split second. When I stop sorting/dragging the div the flash movie reappears..

I’ve made an example available, try drag around the Flash game here, when in IE .

Any ideas with this one?

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UPDATE: this bug appears to be fixed now.  

I mean literally.

Sign up for a developer slot in the Orkut sandbox and create one of the sample applications. Try the Sample Example: List Friends example

I use an exact copy of the code supplied by Google but when I try to run the application on Orkut, it doesn’t work, giving the following error.
Error:

opensocial is not defined

var req = opensocial.newDataRequest();

This ‘opensocial’ object provides the actual ’social’ aspect of the Google OpenSocial API. Yet it’s not found.

Something is up here.

My guess is that Google rushed the release of this api, not caring about quality assurance, to knock the wind out of the mounting Facebook hype.

Or maybe I’m just bitter because no one from Google as admitted to developers that there is a problem/bug with their api, expecting everyone to waste their time bumping into the same obstacle again and again.

Oh yeah and the Orkut server dies every couple of minutes with some silly error about ‘bad, bad server, no brownie points for you’.

Please….