Michiel . van Vlaardingen

What I never expected a few months ago: I actually like twitter.    Although it seems like an overflow of non-interesting information at first sight,  it’s actually pretty useful.  For me it’s especially keeping up to date with new developments without having to read through tons of lengthy blog posts.      For myself I try to keep a schedule of at least one twit a day. That should not be to difficult to stick to.  Finally I’ve added the feed to this blog (bottom right).

I gave twitter another chance.  I created an accounts months ago, but never got past the first message.  I reconsidered it’s usage yesterday.   Why?

1:  I like the Facebook status updates and a lot of people seem to update them from twitter, so why wouldn’t I like twitter as well?

2: At MovingLabs we build software for the web,  how can we build the best if we don’t understand what’s going on?

3: I was (re)reading a discussion about the usage of twitter for marketing purposes. It seems to fit in perfectly.

So after my first day I think I’m going to persist to use it for a while.  I especially like the concept that you can follow someone without the need for some bidirectional (friendship) relation.

Facebook is catching on everywhere for some time now, but in the Netherlands Hyves is still the  major player.  I had a Facebook profile for some time, mostly for exploring it’s application platform. A lot of people I know have some presence over there for some time. However the last few months I see a change:  people are starting to use it!     People I know are starting to join groups, updating their status and uploading photos. And, very important:  my sister has an account, meaning it is way past the early adoption by tech-interested men.

I believe it’s just a matter of time before  Facebook will become more important than Hyves.   First of all:  most people past 16 have a world outside The Netherlands too.   Furthermore,  Facebook doesn’t look like a highschool project gone-wrong, so you can actually connect with someone above 30 without silently laughing at them.   While at Hyves it really looks very very wrong if a parent or a teacher joins.   So I believe Hyves will probably become  for kids even more than it is now and it’s empire will sink like the previous dutch profile site that seemed unbeatable:  cu2.nl.  (do you even remember it?)

I believe execution is more important than the initial business idea.   At the same time  I have a lot of those ideas, that will never be executed by a shear lack of time.   That’s why I will start something new on this blog:  I will pitch my ideas here.    If you think it’s a good idea or know a service that already does such a thing, please leave a comment.

Idea #1:  One-time chat

Do you run a business online and are responsible for customer contacts?  You will probably recognize this:  you are the man-in-the-middle between a customer and a programmer,  continuously mailing things back and forward.  But you can’t just pass the programmer’s email or IM contact, because your customer would bother them to death for the rest of his life.     Wouldn’t it be great if you could just create a one-time conversation on a secret page where both of the programmer and customer can go  and chat?    The chat log could be mailed to both  afterwards.

I got tired of the old look of 2vi.nl and decided to go for a quick facelift.   Basically I have removed a lot of excessive layout and information  and tuned some of the colors a bit more towards orange instead of the hard red it was.    Overall I believe it looks less agressive and better reflects the type of websites I design.

The last three years I have been busy  graduating and working on some interesting projects.  Allthough these are very interesting I have decided to make myself available for design and webdevelopment projects again.  Something that I have done the years before.   So if you believe you can use my help designing or developing something  (Especially if it involves website design, website review, HTML, CSS, JavaScript or PHP)  don’t hesitate to contact me to discuss your project.

I know, you can’t keep everybody happy,  but it still feels like the best thing to do most of the time.  However, keeping everybody happy by adding more and more features to PicturePush made us run out of resources soon, making the site slower. We would have to add extra resources, making the business unhealty…  The Free model just does not work very well for us in terms of income.   Last week we almost ran out of storage space, forcing a hard decision:  closing uploads or do a major investment. We choose to do something in between: We will expand storage capacity with minor means,  but also put severe restrictions onto the Free membership level.   It won’t harm the existing wealth of photos stored there, but it does restrict new uploads to 200 MB per month.

This choice will probably slow the growth of our service down and might even cause some of our members to leave unhappy.  However, it will also make PicturePush a more healthy undertaking, making it future proof in terms of growth and self support.  In the long run we will be able to offer a service of much higher quality to those members that really value our offe

We recently decided to choose Python over PHP for a new project. I did not know Python, so I’m currently learning it.  I was always in love with the C like syntax of Java, PHP, etc. and could not really imagine someone liking anything else. However, I have turned around now.  I really, really like Python’s whitespace sensitive approach. It makes all your code look so clean and compact.

It is clear from the start that Python really forces you to take one approach. That seems inflexible at first, but ultimately it gives you less to make a decision about and improves consistency of the code.

I do think there is a lack of documentation at some point. The core language and most important modules have excelent documentation, but that is not true for everything, so sometimes I really felt the need to look at the source.  Which fortunately is very very easy to read.

What really helps me to learn Python as fast as I can is the commandline interpreter, which allows me to simply check what works and how data looks. Furthermore, the PyDev environment is a really great help, with immediate feedback about syntax errors.

If you did not give Python a try yet, please do, even if it looks a bit weird at first, it is really nice to work with.

So what do you do with a pink stone? Well, you could turn it into something like this:

I have just finished this second project. You can see intermediate steps at my PicturePush album.

I’m not sure yet, whether I’m completely happy with the result, so I might change it a bit later or just leave it as an experiment.

The use of JavaScript has evolved over the years.  In the early days we would address a form element using:  myform.elementname .      Nowadays we prefer to use myform.elements['elementname'].   A related problem I ran into and only solved yesterday was, why    myform.submit();  was not working. Google presents the answer as the first result: www.thescripts.com/forum/thread542837.html for the query form.submit does not work.

Because my button was named “submit”    myform.submit refers to the button instead of the function.

Today I encountered a similar but harder problem.    Imagine this form:

<form id=”f1″ action=”go.php” onsubmit=”return ajaxSubmit(this);”><input type=”hidden” name=”action” value=”something” /> ….</form>

So I use  document.getElementById(”f1″).getAttribute(”action”);   to get the action and submit using AJAX.   Which works perfectly well in Firefox… and not in IE…

Apparently  IE does not really get you the action attribute but simply  object.action…. which in turn is the input element instead of the action attribute, similar to the first problem.  Unfortunately I can’t come up with a way to fix the script, so I had to replace the HTML all over the place.  (removing the action named input element by defining the action as action=”do.php?action=something”).