For the last few months, I have always collected some links from my reader every Thursday morning and published them on the Yahoo Developer Network blog. Now that I am leaving Yahoo people asked me how that would go on. As I cannot access the blog from outside the company network I said I’d build a system that allows the editor taking over to simply copy and paste the collected links in the morning.

Update: Apparently that wasn’t needed as Tom is taking over Tech Thursday:

Anyways, the script still works :)

Normally I would use YQL to do something like that but I once again found that sometimes the most simple is the best.

I am using del.icio.us to collect my links anyways, so I thought the easiest is to tag the ones I want added with “4ydn”. That took care of the collection. Now to add the description for all the links, I just used the notes field in delicious and a placeholder. For example “{3D Pong in jQuery} is quite a lot of fun”:

All I needed to do then is getting the links as a JSON object and replace the opening brace with the anchor opening tag and the closing brace with the anchor closing tag.

You can get the links as JSON with the tried-and-true delicious feed output http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/codepo8/4ydn?count=50&callback=ydntt

The function for display then is very simple indeed:

Putting all together there is now the Techthursday generator.

I’ve said it a few times before, but I love Slideshare. For a professional speaker like me it is a great way to share my decks and get feedback from people allowing them to re-use. The thing that some people complained about is that the embed is Flash based and as we all know Flash makes kittens cry and Ninjas visible so we can’t have that.

Don’t fret though as there is a way out. Say you have a presentation on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/reasons-to-be-cheerful-fronteers-2010:

Simply add a /mobile/ before the user name to see the mobile version which is images with a bit of HTML:

You could just slap this in an iframe but the chrome of the mobile version can be a bit overwhelming. No worries – the open web can fix that. Looking at the source code, you find a JSON object with all the info:

The interesting parts here are the baseSlideUrl and the totalSlides. To get the different images, just add —slide—{n}.jpg to the baseSlideUrl with {n} being the number of the slide.

Putting this together, adding some styling and a dash of YUI3 for functionality I can now present you with the embeddable HTML version:

Go to http://icant.co.uk/slidesharehtml and simply enter the URL of the slides to convert them. The source code of the converter is on GitHub so you can host it yourself.

See the flow in the following screencast:

I love open web technologies and clever converters, don’t you?

For years I have been advocating the benefits of progressive enhancement as a safeguard to deliver working code to the world. In this – my final public talk as a full-time Yahoo employee – I talk about the why and how of progressive enhancement. I take a look at examples from the real world and point out dangers of repeating mistakes from the past for the sake of showing cool technnology.

There is also a copious amount of swearing if I remember correctly. Enjoy.

The Slides

Understanding progressive enhancement – yuiconf2010

Audio recording of the talk

The audio recording is available on archive.org

I am currently at YUIConf in Sunnyvale, California to learn lots about YUI3, Node.js and YQL straight from the horse’s mouth. Yesterday I gave my first talk on using YQL in a sensible manner – coming from using webservices in JavaScript up to using localstorage to speed up your apps and keep state for your end users.

The Slides

The Audio

Now I need to write my second talk for later on – stay tuned for that one.

The other day I logged into Paypal and was confronted with the following sight:

That was the end of breakfast for me but I was also excited – I like the idea of winning a year’s salary and I had to buy a mouse for a friend of mine anyway. Normally I would go to ebay for a mouse or directly to SVP who’ve never let me down in the past. But hey, let’s win that extra income, right?

How wrong I was. I found two mice I would love to buy, from Pixmania and another one from Novatech. I clicked through and I was asked to sign up for each of the sites. They asked me for my address, they wanted my email, all of it was hidden in horrid 5 step processes. Pixmania even signed me up for their deals mailing list before I was able to buy my mouse. I then was not able to buy the mouse without becoming a Pixmania subscriber – no thanks. Novatech was even more interesting – I was able to go through the whole process just to be told at the final checkout before paying that they would only be able to deliver the mouse to the address of my Paypal account – and not the friend’s address – although I was asked to enter her address first.

In short, I gave up. I went to ebay, bought the mouse, checked out using Paypal and I was done. I couldn’t win the yearly income but I also kept my sanity. There is simply no point in the implementation of the promotion right now. I like Paypal, I like its simplicity. Why the implementers don’t recognise that I come from the promotion page to their sites and just let me pay with Paypal (as this is what the promotion is about) and send the product wherever I want is beyond me. Why Paypal pays money and promotes horrible shops like that is also beyond me.

So if you use Paypal for your shop – give me a way in. You know me, I can sign in with Paypal – don’t ask me to sign up again for you and ask for all kind of data – filling in forms is annoying. I already give you a blank cheque, just let me find a product, click it and buy it.