Christian Heilmann

Author Archive

Using Twitter as a data provider to automatically fill forms

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

I hate having to enter all my details when I fill forms – especially when I know for a fact that I’ve entered them before. Looking at Smashing Magazine’s Twitter Avatar WordPress Plugin I got to play with the show API of twitter, which gives you user information.

For example to get my information in Twitter you can just call http://twitter.com/users/show/codepo8.xml and get all I entered. This is also available in JSON and with a callback parameter. You can also do a lookup by email, by calling http://twitter.com/users/show/show.xml?email=you@yourserver.com. Using both of these together, I thought it’d be a good idea to use this API to automatically fill forms.

I’ve created a quick proof of concept: automatically filling forms with twitter data . If you want to use the script yourself (twitterfill.js), simply add it to the page with your form and give it the right parameters in the init method. For the demo page this is:




The parameters are label, which is the text of the button, loading, which is the loading message, mailfield, which is the ID of the email field (the button will be inserted after it), and name,location and url which are the IDs of the form fields you want to fill.

TTMMHTM: Biillboard Ads, Tetris the healer, Crayons and i18n

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

Things that made me happy this morning:

Personal interlude: I got myself a geek tattoo today

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

My new geek tattoo

My new geek tattoo (making of)My new geek tattoo (making of)My new geek tattoo (making of)

Somebody had to. It is life in a nutshell: you get switched on, you play and then you stop.

TTMMHTM – Dudes, hacks, pigs, unicorns and freedom!

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

Things that made me happy this morning:

Scripting Enabled Videos are available now (starting with Denise Stephens)

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Last September I was very happy to be able to pull off Scripting Enabled, an accessibility hacking event in London, England. Over two days the speakers, around 150 attendees and 40 hackers educated and learnt about accessibility barriers on the web and – in the case of the hackers – removed some of them.

The event was only possible by partnering with the right people, in this case the Metropolitan University in London, BBC backstage, the Opera Developer Network, JustGiving.com, Channel4 and last but so not the least the Yahoo Developer Network.

The presentation slides of the conference have been available and on SlideShare for quite a while now, and I am proud to announce that the Yahoo Developer Network now hosts all the videos of the talks. Opera provided the full transcriptions of the videos and I will now start publishing them one by one on Scripting Enabled.

The first video is Denise Stephens on Multiple Sclerosis and inclusive Design. Denise talks about the he effects of MS and what it means for web design. She also explains her own project, Enabled By Design which tries to bridge the gap between the design and accessibility world much like Scripting Enabled tries to bridge the gap between the developer and the accessibility world.