Tag Archives: web

ifttt : Automator for the web!

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Automator is a handy application in Mac OS X. It makes your everyday, repetitive tasks more efficient by chaining operations exported by variety of applications. It automates something you would manually do using multiple applications.

Recently I was introduced to ifttt – short for if this then that. In their own words, like ‘lift’ without the ‘l’. To me, this is an awesome tool! It provides an Automator like way of chaining actions provided by multiple web services, called channels, to create a workflow, or Task. Automating something I would manually do using multiple websites. The Tasks are set rolling on Triggers that are also defined for individual web service.

They also have hundreds of pre-canned tasks called Recipes that you can readily use.

I won’t make this a help page about ifttt. You should visit http://ifttt.com/wtf, read all about it, and start being efficient on the web.

ifttt Filters - Click for full size

ifttt filter that should push this post to Tumblr and Posterous when this feed is updated. Let’s see! – Click for full size

If everything goes well, ifttt should post this blog post on my Tumblr and Posterous. If not, I probably need more reading and tweaking to do!

The never-ending Google wishlist!

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Google, which started as just a search engine, has so many tools and services now. Lot of them are useful in everyday life.

Tool Integration related

It is nice to see how these tools/services work with each other so well:

… to mention a few. But there are still quite a few that would be nice to have. Following is a kind of a wish list of some ways Google tools could work together and enhance the user experience – from my perspective:

Google maps still seems like a standalone tool. On its own, it is probably the best online maps website. Some of the new features are really useful. My Maps, re-routing directions, the newly added third party content etc. But Google Maps doesn’t seem to integrate well with rest of the Google tools.

  • It would be nice to be able to pick locations in My Maps as venues in Calendar, for instance
  • How about a My Maps collection of all the Gmail contacts
  • My Maps collection for geo-tagged albums in Picasa Web Albums

Google Calendar is well integrated with Gmail. But it would be nice to have a Google Docs and Spreadsheets document/spreadsheet attached to an appointment. For instance, if the appointment is a party, a spreadsheet of party supplies to be bought, party activities planned, etc.

Other

IMAP access to Gmail must be on the top of many Gmail users’ wish lists. I am hoping that the Gmail team is secretly working on this! If and when IMAP is supported, I’d like to see tags in the header of messages – that can be added and read by the desktop mail application. The current POP access available with Gmail is only good if Gmail is accessed from just one desktop. And the tags, the feature of Gmail that I love the most, is totally useless with POP access.

Google Calendar plugin for iCal is something that I had expected to be out after Mac Team was formed at Google. But hasn’t happened so far. There are other solutions that provide the functionality, but something coming from Google would be nice to have (like the Picasa Web Albums plugin for iPhoto.)

I am sure there is going to be a sequel to this post some time soon, with more wishes. When that happens, I’ll love to see some of the above wishes already granted!

Pet peeve: font-family

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How many times have you noticed that a web page displays with Sans-Serif fonts on Windows or Mac and Serif fonts on Linux?

I see this more often than I would like – and it bugs me. If you view the stylesheets of such websites, in most cases this is due to the improper use of fonts like Verdana, Helvetica and the likes, that may not be available in a normal Linux installation.

The complete definition of font-family style in CSS is as follows: 

font-family: [[family-name|generic-family]
             [,family-name|generic-family]*] | inherit

The solution is that, whenever a font family is specified, its generic version must follow. For example:

body { font-family: "Gill Sans Extrabold", Helvetica, sans-serif }
.receipt { font-family: Courier, "Lucida Console", monospace }

This will make sure that all browsers display the intended – or at least the closest to the intended – fonts.

There’s a neat example at Mozilla Developer Center.

With the number of Linux users increasing, QA folks should consider testing their websites on Linux too.

AJAX Finally!

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Its been on my to-do list for a while to give AJAX a shot. Finally got some time over last couple of weekends to come up with this feed reader as a learning project:

  • News that matters…

    • Most AJAX tutorials I read on the web were helpful only if one is planning to write a monolithic JavaScript – as against object oriented, reusable code. Most JavaScript tutorials were also pretty superficial when it came to OOP. I found this one by Mike Chambers most useful. May be because his example does almost exactly what I was planning. Thanks Mike!

    All in all, AJAX seems to be a cool and easy new technology to implement interactive content on a website. I am sure things get more and more difficult as you start implementing richer feature set. May be I’ll find out if I add features to the news reader.

    I haven’t tested it a whole lot on IE, I don’t use it much anyway. But it works OK on almost all other browsers I use – Firefox, Camino, Safari – to name a few!

    Firefox-1, Flock-0

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    Like I said in my previous post, I’ve been playing around with Flock.

    So far, the only really useful feature I’ve found is this blog posting tool – which could use a spell checker, by the way. The Flickr bar, the shared bookmarks are all good features but I did not end up using them a whole lot. Shared bookmarks don’t preserve collections – when I sync bookmarks, I still have to move new entries into appropriate collections. This may be a limitation posed by del.icio.us bookmark format. Whatever it may be, its no better than importing exported bookmarks between Firefox installations.

    So, to me Flock seemed more like a dressed up Firefox – and the get up is not compelling enough. Flock seems to be heading in the right direction, so I will probably check back with Flock in near future to see how its developing, but for now, Firefox is still my default browser on both windows and Mac.