Ajaxian multi-file uploads

Over on StickBlog, there’s a nice little demo of using AJAX to provide a nice, clean interface for uploading multiple files in a web form. Only one file input is displayed at a time. As you add files, the input is replaced with information about the file, and a new file input is dynamically added. Simple and slick.

CSS-powered Slashdot goes live

The new CSS-powered version of Slashdot (mentioned previously) has gone live

After 8 years of my nasty, crufty, hodge podged together HTML, last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full complement of CSS. While there are a handful of bugs and some lesser used functionality isn’t quite done yet, the transition has gone very smoothly. […] And for the brave, download the stylesheet and start experimenting with new themes and designs for Slashdot: some sort of official contest to re-design Slashdot is coming soon, so you can get a head start now.

I’m guessing that it won’t be long before we start seeing user stylesheets and GreaseMonkey hacks for customized Slashdot viewing.

Ikea

Susan and I have been doing some furniture shopping here and there, looking for some new dressers for our bedroom, and a new couch for our family room. We had looked at a couple of different places, looking for some good deals, and trying to decide if we might want to get some “naked” dressers and do the stain and finish ourselves. We found some good prices last week at a store that was going out of business, but we wanted to check out a couple more places this weekend.

Fairly recently, an Ikea store opened in Atlanta. I didn’t know much about them, except that they were supposed to have some furniture with modular designs, and that geeks all over the net were ga-ga over them. We checked some things out on their website, and had some problems navigating, but we were intrigued enough to drive downtown to check them out on Saturday.

Wow. We’re sold. Literally, since we bought two red leather couches on Sunday. And we plan to go back to buy some dressers for our bedroom, bookshelves and DVD racks for our family room, and a loft bed for Mary.

Some observations about the Ikea store:

  • Holy cow, this place is huge! Two levels, each the size of a football field. Plus two levels of parking deck and an adjacent outdoor parking lot. And on top of that, there’s a restaurant inside the store.
  • They’ve got some pretty nice stuff. There are a variety of styles, and some of the individual items are available in different fabrics and colors.
  • Their modular items are cooler than I expected. For instance the “Billy” storage system has base units in various sizes, which can be combined into a larger unit. You can optionally add cabinet doors or lighting, purchase additional shelves, etc. There were also a couple of sofas that can be modularized. You can get a sofa and loveseat, then later you could buy a corner unit and attach them together into a single corner-sofa.
  • Both on Saturday and Sunday, the place was packed with customers.
  • Neither the website nor their printed catalog showed us all of the products available in the store. I can’t locate some of the items we liked the most on their website.
  • The prices are good. Really good. We’re going to be able to get all of the furniture that I mentioned previously for the amount that we had originally budgeted just for new sofas.

If you haven’t checked them out yet, you should. Even if you aren’t in the market for any furniture or other household items, you could get some Swedish meatballs at the restaurant 😉

Dear Spammers…

Thank you for continuing to submit your data to my anti-spam systems. I have been able to put your information to very good use, keeping my blogs and email practically spam-free 24-hours a day. The emails, comments, trackbacks, and referers that you submit are analyzed for key spam indicators, which I can then use to automatically block your servers so that your future spam attempts don’t even reach my web server.

Eventually, I hope to share my collected anti-spam knowledge to a wider audience, via WordPress plugins and web services available to the general public. Then, the whole world will be able to benefit from the corpus of information which you have so thoughtfully provided to me. I’m sure that you will rest better at night, knowing that your contributions don’t go unnoticed!

Thanks again for providing this invaluable service.

Sincerely,

Dougal Campbell

design.Principles redesigns

design.Principles is sporting a new look. The front page has a three-column layout, while individual articles are two-column. The category and archive listings are nice and compact, and there’s an easy-to-spot “Subscribe” link in the corner of the header. The main additions I’d like to see would be a search box, and an “About” page.

Oh, and it’s powered by WordPress.

Google Blog Search

I may be a little late coming to this party, but Google has introduced Google Blog Search, which limits searches to just blogs (well, in theory, anyhow). The most interesting thing about this, to me, is that GBS provides the search results for your terms as Atom and RSS feeds.

It seems that Google is leveraging blog feeds to get structured data, and monitoring ping sites for timely updates. This is something that lots of people speculated about way back before Google bought Blogger. RSS/Atom feeds from blogs are such a rich source of structured information, it only makes sense that a “mainstream” search engine should take advantage of it. I can only wonder what took them so long?

The next feature I’m looking for: “Search within X miles of location Y”, using geotagged blogs. This would be great for searching for information written by other bloggers in your vicinity.

Firefox and Thunderbird Betas

I recently upgraded to the new 1.5 beta versions of both Firefox and Thunderbird. So far, I haven’t encountered any real problems. The only thing I regret about trying the betas is that most of my extensions don’t work anymore. I’m hoping that the extension authors will update soon.

The new version of Thunderbird has added improvements to the RSS handling, so that hacks aren’t needed anymore. You can import and export feed lists in OPML format, and you can even have sub-folders now — sortof. You can add multiple feeds under a single folder. But the feeds won’t be individually selectable — the items all just intermingle together under the folder. There’s also no auto-detection of feeds, or drag-and-drop, both of which would be really good additions.

For more information about what’s new in the Firefox beta, see Simon Willison’s Firefox 1.5 Developer Highlights.

Talk Like a Pirate (and TFS updates)

Talk Like a Pirate Day is next Monday (September 19), less than a week away. Dust off your eyepatch, dig up that gold hoop earring, and practice growling, “walk the plank!” And while you’re at it, don’t forget to make sure that you have my Text Filter Suite plugin installed on your WordPress blog, and activate your Pirate filter!

Speaking of which, if you have an old version of the filters, you should download the new version. The tfs-core.php file is now version 1.1, is compatible with WordPress 1.5, and has been renamed to zzz-tfs-core.php (this forces it to load after the other filters, so it will be able to detect their functions correctly). The tfs-acronymit and tfs-pirate filters have also been updated with more phrases and WordPress 1.5 compatibility fixes.

Arrr! Prepare to be boarded, ye scurvey dog!

Update: Kelson Vibber pointed out a problem with comment RSS feeds. Updated versions of the TFS plugin or links to just the affected core file are available on the TFS Plugin post.