I’m working on some random thingy in PHP to find videos from a handful of video sites and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is nearly an impossible feat.

When you’re doing test searches you will inevitably stumble across a video like this video of cars trying to make it up an icy hill…

…and, of course you have to watch it.  And what’s this?  A related video?  Click.  An hour later and you finally get back to programming….

After reading Safer than ActiveX: a look at Google’s Native Client plugin from ArsTechnica I finally understand where Google is headed and how they plan on taking over the world.

From the article…

The Native Client framework consists of trusted and untrusted modules that run in their own individual processes and communicate through an RPC system. Third-party untrusted modules contain application-specific programming and leverage the Native Client container to interact with trusted modules that perform any activities which impact the underlying platform, including networking operations and file system access. The container will impose security constraints on the behavior of the third-party code and will also give users granular control over the permissions granted to third-party code.

[...]

Google supplies a customized GCC build toolchain that can be used to compile portable binaries that are compatible with the Native Client infrastructure. This makes it extremely easy to port existing code. As a test, Google ported an H.264 encoder that is about 11,000 lines of conventional C code. To get the encoder to compile and run in Native Client, they only had to add approximately 20 lines of code and modify the Makefile. The resulting binaries are completely portable and can run without requiring recompilation on any operating system supported by the Native Client.

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I was doing some research for a future blog project and was trying to find out if there is a single source for all those 125×125 pixel blog ads that I see all over the place. There isn’t.

My searches did lead me to a company called Project Wonderful, though, that allows people to bid on blog advertising space on a per day basis.

With prices as low as $0.20/day for a site that is reported to have 20,000 unique visiotrs/day it sounds like a bargain for advertisers.  However, on the flip side, as a publisher I’d be reluctant to give away my traffic at that price. With that kind of traffic you are almost certain to get better returns from ::gulp:: AdSense.

I searched around for reviews and posts about PW and found a bunch raving about the service and how great it is.  But… the one thing I noticed is that of all these sites that had positive things to say, 0 used PW for their blog ads that appeared along side the post.  In addition to that, PW volunteers up tons of information about your blog–a competitors dream.

Unless someone out there can convince me otherwise, I’d say PW is great for people trying to advertise, but not so much for individuals trying to monetize.  Wow… that was catachy…

For the last couple days I’ve been dabbling with creating a Javascript that will allow visitors to one of my websites to embed my content in their sites.  (It’s done and you can check it out at http://www.angieshealth.com/article-widget/)

To make it easier on my visitors when copying and pasting the code I decided to use Javascript to select all the code when they click on the textbox.
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I swear.  Every time I get an idea for something, I am a Google search away from finding out that someone has (1) already done it, (2) done it right, and (3) just finished doing it.

My latest idea was an image search engine that would allow you to upload an image and find other versions of the image.  It would be useful if you had a piece of an image and wanted to find the whole thing or had a small thumbnail but wanted to find a full quality image.

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I do a lot of web development locally on my computer and I am always switching between local and remote servers using entries in the hosts file.  Because of this, it is hard to know if I’m actually looking at the correct version of my site.  Opera and Firefox both cache DNS to various degrees which makes it difficult to know if that change to the hosts file really did take effect.  I know you can disable the cache in Firefox — and probably Opera too — but I think this method is still useful.
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Facelift offers several options to handle many different situations.  In this post, we will take a look at a few options that may be useful to your situation. In this post realFontHeight, findEmbededFonts, and checkImageSupport are covered as well as a slightly more in-depth look at the FLIR.init function.
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Facelift can be used for more than just adding decorative headers to your web pages.  Combine Facelift with a little bit of Javascript and you can really do some pretty cool things.  This is the first part in a series of posts detailing what you can do to take Facelift further.
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It was recently brought to my attention that Facelift Image Replacement wasn’t displaying in all browsers properly when images were turned off.  It seems I only tested this scenario in Firefox 3, which beautifully handles the situation.

The rest of the browsers weren’t so nice.  Safari displays nothing, IE displays a box with the alt text in an ugly small font, and Opera puts a box around the text.
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I’ve been working on facelift v1.2 and one of the upgrades is element hovers.  And I’ve done it!  Or so I thought… they work like a dream in all browsers except Internet Explorer.  They just wouldn’t change colors.

After investigating further, I found out that IE doesn’t apply the :hover CSS changes until AFTER the mouseover event is done.  Which means, you can’t get an elements :hover style.

After playing around for a bit, I did discover a less-than-elegant solution to this problem that I’m going to have to implement, even though I don’t want to.  Using setTimeout to retrieve the currentStyle will allow you to get the proper value during the event, even when setTimeout’s delay is set to 0.  I’m not sure why this works, but it does.

I’ve setup a test page that illustrates the problem and the solution.  View “IE Mouseover currentStyle Problem” Test Page.