• Full control of the data – I can get at it wherever, however, and whenever I want to. I can also move it into different formats and systems at will.
• Full control over the service – I can add whatever features I want in whatever interface I want and not have to worry about the 15 other features I’ll never use that clutter up my UI.
• Full control over the URLs themselves – I don’t have to worry about the domain shutting down, remapping my short URLs some time in the future, or what type of header redirect they’re using to make sure I get my Google juice.
• It was fun – Perhaps the biggest reason I wanted to do this was because it’s such a simple project and it was kind of a fun exercise for me.

Anyone that is code savvy and is considering doing this – whatever your reasons – I definitely recommend doing it. It was simple and something I enjoyed, and it gives me the control I want in such a simple application. Not every problem makes sense to roll your own solution for, but this is one that does in my mind since it’s so simple.

I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if we see more web services offering their own custom URLs. It allows a bit more brand recognition and all the control issues I mention above. It also seems that short URL services aren’t going away anytime soon.

Do you have any thoughts on the merits of short URL services? Have you written your own or considered doing so?

I’ve…

• added a bunch of new filters and/or unsubscribed from a bunch of email in an effort to keep the “bacon” (basically spam you ask for) to a minimum and keep it from getting in the way of the more important/urgent email.
• gone through and attempted to condense down several email accounts into one Gmail account to give myself fewer points to check (and fewer mail clients to worry about).
• gone through my background apps (and startup apps) to cut down anything I’m not using anymore – or that just doesn’t need to run at startup.
• “cropped” my iPhone apps and my FireFox plugins.
• gone through a bunch of work related files on my computer and condensed / archived old stuff to get it out of the way.

Sometimes it’s good to cut down on all the little stuff that gets in your way. You might be surprised how much some of these little things can impact you when combined together. Now if I could just tackle my closet…

Recently I’ve been pushing myself really hard. Working longer hours trying to get through a few releases we needed to get done with work. I’ve simultaneously been trying (and failing) to complete several personal chores/goals/responsibilities. All of it has recently come to a sudden crash as it just finally became overwhelming. I found myself not sleeping, barely eating, and snapping on friends and colleagues.

I’ve since had a little time to calm down – taking a weekend off of the normal stuff to try to recover. It has brought me back to a question I’ve asked myself before, however. How do I retain my passion for what I’m doing while not driving myself to the edge and beyond? I’ve been floating several ideas that I’m planning to try, here’s the short list:

1. Take a weekend a month and schedule some time off of the normal stuff. Maybe a vacation, maybe just trying something new, but something away from the usual work/personal woes that pile up.
2. Find more balance in my day and create daily goals of what to get done (as opposed to weekly goals I’ve used in the past).
3. Force myself to step away from whatever I’m doing if I’m sinking too much time into one task or area of my life.

I’m definitely open to suggestions or feedback, but this is what I’ve loosely come up with to try. How do you prevent burnout? What do you do to make sure you recognize it once you’re approaching it?

So, how does one get around this unfortunate problem?  Well, the best method I’ve found is to set the innerHTML property when the element is not yet attached to the DOM or is attached in a “safe” place (usually at the BODY tag).  To make this process simpler, I generalized this into a function that creates a new DOM node of the same type, preserves any attributes I care about, sets the innerHTML property, and replaces the original node in the DOM with this new node having the desired innerHTML.  Here’s the function for reference:

function replace_html(el, html) {
	if( el ) {
                var oldEl = (typeof el === "string" ? document.getElementById(el) : el);
                var newEl = document.createElement(oldEl.nodeName);

                // Preserve any properties we care about (id and class in this example)
                newEl.id = oldEl.id;
                newEl.className = oldEl.className;

                //set the new HTML and insert back into the DOM
                newEl.innerHTML = html;
                if(oldEl.parentNode)
        	        oldEl.parentNode.replaceChild(newEl, oldEl);
                else
		        oldEl.innerHTML = html;

                //return a reference to the new element in case we need it
                return newEl;
	}
};

Hopefully this function will help someone out there work around this problem a little faster than I originally did.

It’s really just a prototype honestly, but it was far enough along to make me happy for now. A couple of limitations I’d like to correct some day (if I ever get around to it) would be to modify it to work with multiple open messages and to only display the image if the email address actually has a gravatar (currently it just displays the default gravatar image in this case). It would also be nice to clean up how the image is added to the email – currently it’s a long dom navigation. I’ve posted the script here if anyone is interested in giving it a try (or updating it). Also, if you didn’t already know about it (because I didn’t) the Gmail team has built a nice little API for people developing GreaseMonkey scripts.

As always, feedback welcome.

With this in mind, I decided to write a GreaseMonkey script today to address the problem. I call it Twitter Throttle, and what it does is hides (and groups if they’re in a row) tweets when a user has more than one tweet on my screen at the same time. It will then also add however many older tweets are needed to have the correct total viewable on the page. So, for example, if there are 5 tweets that are hidden (because the user that made the tweet has already made a tweet that is currently being displayed) then it will pull in the 5 previous tweets that are by users not yet represented on your page. This effectively ensures that if there are 20 items on the page there will be at least 20 different users on the page as well. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like in use:

Clicking on the links will display the tweets in case you still want to read them. I’ve posted the script here if anyone is interested. Be sure to set your twitter username and password in the script (used in the API call to add in older tweets to fill in for the hidden ones). Let me know if you have any feedback.

Once you’ve got the command installed you can check a sites stats by opening Ubiquity (CTRL+SPACE) and typing “compete”. You can also add “mv” for monthly page views or “uv” for unique visitors. If neither is specified it will default to Compete’s default (uniques). Hopefully someone else will find it useful.

Feedback welcome.

First, many people don’t want as much food as the default offers. Maybe I’m not that hungry tonight…maybe it’s just the restaurant has huge portions. In either case I think a lot of people would like this option.

The second is for people that can’t decide between multiple dishes or want to have more variety. I’ve definitely had occasions where I’d love to have 2 different entrees and being able to order 2 different 1/2 orders would make a lot of sense to me.

Many other industries are moving to more personalization and more options. I really think this relatively minor change could have a significant impact on the restaurant business. Who wouldn’t love the ability to better customize their portions or mix and match food?