Tim Brockman . com

Google Chart API rules for generating QR codes

Tim Brockman — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:51:48 +0000

Google Chart API has a number of great tools for data visualization. Check it out at http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ when you have a chance. They also have slick tools for pointers, (like thought bubbles) and easily adding properly formatted equations to the web, (great for awkward things like summations, fractions, etc.) If that wasn't enough, they have the easiest QR encoding ...continue reading...

21 New Web Fonts from Google Fonts

Tim Brockman — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:52:55 +0000

The 28th of December Google released 21 new fonts for 2011. If you haven't yet, it is time to check them out. No doubt this will inspire some great web design in 2011. Ubuntu Mountains of Christmas Cabin Merriweather Kristi Just Another Hand Buda Coda Gruppo Lekton Copse Allan Corben Geo Anonymous Pro Vibur Bentham ...continue reading...

Google Font API looks nice

Tim Brockman — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:43:00 +0000

Can nice fonts really be this simple? Google's people made some real basic web font stuff. Finally, after over a decade, this may be enough of a push behind good web fonts for the web to start looking designed. Granted you are linking to yet another external file, but better Google's many servers than mine. ...continue reading...

WordPress template redesign with object oriented CSS

Tim Brockman — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:55:13 +0000

This WordPress template has been redesign using object oriented CSS. It was long past due for a site redesign but my personal blog generally takes a back seat to what I'm working on. All the same I wanted to put a couple things to the test, and for me this is the appropriate place to ...continue reading...

Twitter based comment plugin

Tim Brockman — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:02:09 +0000

Twitter based comments you can embed on almost any site or page seems like a naturally good way to improve the visibility of your content. Every site has share this and bookmark buttons, which is great, but not overly compelling and ignored by the vast majority of your traffic, unless your the stank of linkbait. ...continue reading...

CSS Background Color Transparency – IE Safe

Tim Brockman — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 06:10:53 +0000

Creating browser compatible CSS background color transparency is super easy, but it took some investigation (Googlin' until I ended up at Microsoft's site, deciphering this article) to bring internet explorer on board. Almost every browser other than IE are fine with RGBa (Red Green Blue alpha) which lets you specify something like rgba(255 255 255 ...continue reading...

Selenium and Perl = tears of joy

Tim Brockman — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:38:35 +0000

Selenium IDE + Selenium RC + Perl's WWW::Selenium is teh GG and I am compelled to share. For dankey's years I've been scraping, and crawling, and spidering, and mashing. For most basic stuff, w/o a good API, cURL works. Sometimes I need to get my LWP on or even Mech. I've even stooped to building ...continue reading...

Leads from remote sites to vtiger CRM Webforms using cURL

Tim Brockman — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 06:30:11 +0000

quick and clean without soap... Forms that will feed leads from external sites into vtiger CRM were needed on a recent project. The problem was the sending site's server may or may not be equipped with any brand of soap toolkit. For that matter it may not even give access to server-side scripting... may be ...continue reading...

Y2K +10 = security (bypass captcha/recaptcha)

Tim Brockman — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:29:45 +0000

The eve of a new year reminds me of one of the biggest let downs of my life... Y2K! A chance for things to get reshuffled, and a bit of beaurocracy to be trimmed or restructured. A decade later we have post 9/11 patriot act craziness and more big brother than ever. The cost in ...continue reading...

fonts

Tim Brockman — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:08:30 +0000

fonts Ok, I really wanted to ramble on about @font-face and how, after the late 90's browser wars, and some other foo, the dream of having some broader choices of fonts fell by the wayside... beyond the 12 or so web-safe settings. Recently @font-face has been revitalized... there's much info on this everywhere at this ...continue reading...

Twitter API Mood Swinger 2 -command interface

Tim Brockman — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:30:21 +0000

OK part 2 of the thing about leveraging the Twitter API methods to create profiles that reflect the mood of the last status update. In the first part I wrote some quick code to programmatically change the profile color settings using the Twitter API's Update Profile capabilities. If you can't easily control it, it does ...continue reading...

Twitter API Mood Swinger

Tim Brockman — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:37:07 +0000

With the widespread usage of Twitter clients profiles often get overlooked. People who actually like to ogle each others profile pages may appreciate the option to make your profile capable of better inflecting the ever changing mood of the content. Twitter allows you to upload background images and change most of your profile's color scheme. ...continue reading...

nevermind

Tim Brockman — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:26:30 +0000

i have somethings to mention but they're still mushy they involve api-for mood-inflected profiles and some other things background food dirt -n- oil cleanup but things pile up. later

Hootsuite 2.0, CoTweet, TweetDeck, Twitterrific 2.1

Tim Brockman — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:20:02 +0000

Twitter is becoming a major interface for media giants, businesses of all sizes, celebrities, even wrestlers. If you want your company's account flexing its off shirts and grappling your audience into submission, these tools can help. HootSuite 2.0 CoTweet TweetDeck Twitterrific 2.1 Twitterrific In the cage-match of Twitter, Twitterrific is the squirrely lightweight somersaulting off ...continue reading...

W3C, addThis & AddToAny vs. DIY social bookmarks in wordpress

Tim Brockman — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:04:32 +0000

This week I spent some time submitting sites to ye ole W3 validator. Usually this is a quick process of adding the occasionally missed alt in my img tags and amp;s to my &'s but every once in a while I stumble onto something I can't fix. The standard addThis buttons will validate fine but ...continue reading...

ASCII Billy Mays, ASCII Michael Jackson, ASCII Conan

Tim Brockman — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:21:39 +0000

ASCII Michael Jackson ASCII Billy Mays ASCII Conan ASCII Sotomayor ASCII John Hughes ASCII Lady Gaga Just to name a few. Happy 8/8. My ASCII art site gen'd its first glorious ASCII art renditions of whatever is important to people on a Friday night sometime early this morning. In fact it created over 500 ASCII ...continue reading...

crons, lynxlet, wampp

Tim Brockman — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:02:26 +0000

Over the weekend my old g4 did some serious crashing. It runs most of the data collection scripts, misc processing, coordination, and other scheduled tasks I don't want to burden my hosting servers with. I'm not sure how many of you have dealt with 10.3.9 but getting everything back to where I want it is ...continue reading...

JavaScript + WordPress + DOM node navigation = laDolceVita()

Tim Brockman — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:20:24 +0000

As one who likes (W)ordPress and building/chopping/ducttaping themes and JavaScript I wanted to contribute this little bit of code for your properly Widgetized Theme. This site's theme uses ( http://script.aculo.us/ ) JavaScript for its nicely widgetized sidebar. After all it needs it to tame the (W)ordclutter. Anyway let us cutting to the chase. Most of ...continue reading...

Sweet?!? Sudden search position drop

Tim Brockman — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:33:38 +0000

In the past couple months I've been developing some sites using a content management system I developed. Before actually launching these sites I had them parked in subdomains. They were/are indexing beautifully with no real effort, actually ranking for targeted terms (like in the top 10, sometimes 1 or 2). Actually top 10 out of ...continue reading...

ASCII Art converter resampled

Tim Brockman — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 08:37:03 +0000

In an earlier post I wrote a some quick code to convert simple gif images to ASCII Art using PHP GD functions. In case you didn't notice, things get distorted because pixels are square however ASCII symbols are rectangular and have spacing between each line. In my measurements this is about 8x11 (Width x Height) ...continue reading...

Michael Jackson’s Alien DNA Shocks LA County Coroner

Tim Brockman — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:18:11 +0000

L. A. County Coroner's Office downplayed the leaking of some anomalous findings in Michael Jackson's yet unreleased autopsy. Genetic sampling and testing done to facilitate the upcoming custody war revealed some shocking results. According to an unnamed source within the Los Angeles County Coroner's office, genetic samples taken from Michael Jackson's body show signs of ...continue reading...

Twitter Trends + Google ImageSearch AJAX API = Mashup

Tim Brockman — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:37:53 +0000

Oh Twitter trends, a window to a world where currently James Brond, Harry Potter and Michael Jackson fight to be the mind pollution de jour. What could make such an amazing thing better? Pictures. Time for some information visualization work, a little bit of AJAX, and a good excuse to get some JavaScript DOM exercise. ...continue reading...

Banks Warehousing Foreclosed Properties!?!

Tim Brockman — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:41:04 +0000

Are the banks warehousing foreclosed properties in order to maintain or stabilize the values of real estate? The reasons why they would do this I can only speculate about but it does cost money to own vacant property, and there is good evidence that the bank is holding far more foreclosures than they're attempting to ...continue reading...

Twitter Trends with PHP cURL & JSON

Tim Brockman — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:27:26 +0000

Since I'm in the JSON mood I wanted to add a quick follow-up post to my Google AJAX image search post. This uses PHP's cURL functions and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) functions to get the top 20 twitter word trends for each hour the day. In case you haven't noticed yet you need to get ...continue reading...

PHP cURLing, JSON, & Google Image Search results

Tim Brockman — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:28:26 +0000

This is an old Google Image Search 'hack' I updated to work with Google's AJAX search API and PHP using cURL and JSON... For creative fun I've been working on some content sensitive visual mish-mash, and wanted to post some quick code in hopes others will do something creative with it. Back in the day, ...continue reading...

ascii art with PHP GD extensions

Tim Brockman — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:07:17 +0000

My personal fondness for ASCII art began on the BSU VAX/VMS terminals back in 1993. I found a sweet Spock portrait to append to my login script. It made me smile with crazy nerdmusment every time I logged into the account. As any good subgenius, I'll start with the Dobbshead. This is small, only 66x100 ...continue reading...

Random Design pattern logic

Tim Brockman — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 11:58:32 +0000

As expressed in an earlier post, I wasn't entirely satisfied with this site. As much as I enjoy the simplicity of this design, I felt the need to add an element of random. I also wanted a basic idea to discuss without getting to deep. Hence, the randomly generated logo-esque graphic in the upper right ...continue reading...

Real Estate content management system testing

Tim Brockman — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:47:22 +0000

Further development of my real estate content management system took place this week. Built 2 more sites using the system to see what problems I'd encounter. So far just a couple minor things that were fixed. Generally these sites will take a couple hours to deploy. Currently theres only the one skin/template so they look ...continue reading...

CelebrationHomes.info Launch

Tim Brockman — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:12:05 +0000

This week CelebrationHomes.info is going to be launched (in a matter of speaking). What I mean by that is more a matter of beginning the organic process of promotion and field testing. The sitemaps are up and functioning, Google is beginning to index the site. It has social networking bookmarks from addthis. With a little ...continue reading...

Sketch Crawl Update

Tim Brockman — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:58:49 +0000

Here's a link to the Facebook Sketch Crawl event hope to see you there.