Monthly Archives: June 2009

There’s a New URL Shortener In Town

Posted on by

That’s right. And it’s URL is bloq.in. I like to experiment with the scripts that other developers create and PHPurl is an awesome one. Written by Nile Flores, it’s a simple script that does exactly what you need it to do: shorten your URL. It also has the nice feature of allowing you to set a keyword for the URL you are shortening. For example, if the link is about the late Michael Jackson (we miss you, MJ), then your URL would be something like “http://bloq.in/michaeljackson“. If a keyword has already been used, you will be prompted to enter something else. Simple and awesome.

The other beauty of Bloq.in and PHPurl is that instead of using a random 3 or 4 characters as the URL, it goes by single digits counting up from 1. So until it reaches the 1,000′s, the URL is gonna be short and sweet (unless you use some /longobnoxioustaginstead).

The admin panel is also fantastic. It shows the amount of hits for each link users have added, which IP each link was posted from and you can also create new links and edit existing ones.

Making it all look purdy

I’m the type that likes to redesign everything to my liking and PHPurl wasn’t going to escape from my web developer clutches. So I took it upon myself to redesign the administrator panel, as well as the front-end so that everything matched Bloqhead.com.

Redesigned PHPurl admin panel

Redesigned PHPurl admin panel

So there you have it. A plug for my new URL shortener Bloq.in and a small review for PHPurl.

Selective Hearing

Posted on by

I recently posted a comment on a blog post that tossed around a false and poorly presented accusation of the pop punk/alternative/whatever band Hoobastank. Before I get started please know that I’m not even a Hoobastank fan. I don’t own any of their music or merchandise, nor do I have any sort of affiliation with them. My issue with the accusation was that it was obviously a hoax and I felt that I had to speak up, before the masses played Telephone any longer with the whole thing.

The Lowdown

On Twitter there is a user that goes by the handle @hoobastank_band. For whatever strange reason this user posts numerous irrelevant posts with the #iranelection Twitter hashtag attached to them, and cloaks their mischievous URLs to prevent the not-so-savvy users from knowing what horror lies ahead for them. I’m not going to go into vivid detail as to what is seen once you click their shortened URLs, but I’ll provide a single word for you to Google: ‘goatse’.

In a world where encyclopedias have been replaced by Wikipedia (God help us) and the newspaper has been replaced by Digg, it’s easy to be mislead by subjective source material and unconfirmed tidbits of information. Such is the case with Hoobastank. In a post titled ‘What’s that smell? I think it’s GOATSE and HOOBASTANK‘, I voiced my opinion on the matter accompanied by some common sense and logic. Something some people seem to lack, even when the most paper thin hoaxes pummel them in the face. That’s the beauty of owning your own blog though. You can delete whatever comments you see fit for deletion. Whether they contain profanity or in this case, the obvious truth, it’s up to you. Master of your own domain (bad pun). Oh well, it was a worthy attempt. Fortunately I voiced my same thoughts on the official Hoobastank forum where they won’t be selectively removed at the administrators will. The fact that my post was pro-Hoobastank helps as well.

View the forum post here: ‘Hoobastank? This is seriously despicable of you to do‘ (nice spelling, pal.) (I fail at spelling. Thanks Anon.) Scroll a little ways down and you’ll see my post. In case for some reason my post gets deleted, I’ve included a screenshot.

hoobastank_post

click to enlarge

The thing that kills me about the topic on the Hoobastank forum is that nearly every post in there was immediately condemning Hoobastank for the whole ordeal. Whatever happened to fans? People jump to conclusions too easily. If you’re going to make such a big deal out of something, you should probably do some of your own research prior to setting the buzz ablaze on the web. That blog post currently has 75 diggs. I’ve posted far better material on Digg and barely got anything. Proof that the world thrives on destruction.

So to those of you who are quick to jump on the bandwagon and spread information, check the validity first. Like the saying goes: don’t believe everything you hear (or in this case, read). Not everything on the internet is true. Before you get all up in arms, check the source.

CSS Tips For The Day

Posted on by

This past week has been a bit of a learning experience and although the items learned are small, they are worthy gems to be added to my vast CSS arsenal.

  1. CSS id’s and classes can not begin with a numeric character, otherwise they won’t even be recognized. I learned this the hard way.
  2. If you define the charset in your stylesheet (@charset "UTF-8";), nothing can come before it. I discovered that most browsers are a bit lax with this (Firefox) and will give you a pass. Safari, on the other hand, is strict and will give you some issues.

I found that if you place the charset in your stylesheet below a comment, Safari would completely ignore some of your CSS declarations. The problem I was running into was that the CMS we are using automatically places an opening and closing comment at the top and bottom of each stylesheet you create on the back end. This is done because the stylesheets are stored in the database and this is how it sees the start and end to each stylesheet.

On the older versions of CMS Made Simple, if you attached more than one stylesheet to a template, the system would automatically render them all in one stylesheet but it would have a start and end comment for each stylesheet. Although the newer release renders each stylesheet individually now, the start and end comments still exist – thus giving me the charset issue.

Being an avid Coda user, I never define the charset at the top of my stylesheet. I’ve never seen it as a diehard requirement and I’ve never encountered any problems leaving it out. My colleague is an avid Dreamweaver fan and if you’re familiar with Dreamweaver, it automatically adds @charset "UTF-8"; to the top of any stylesheet you create.