sinaiman

I have come across a need for this many times, often there's a simple trick you can do to get by it (i.e. setting an image as a background of an input element, rather than overlaying the image on top, or using transparent backgrounds along with z-index fiddling) however, I would definitely consider using this tool for rapidly building a layout. I like your presentation as well, clear layout with a brief to-the-point message.

My only concern would be performance, right off the bat I see a few nested for-loops in the code and am wondering what sort of performance hit you'd be looking at if you use this for several images on a single page. I didn't thoroughly trace through the code or anything, I am just thinking out loud here.

This is a big flaw with a hopefully simple fix. Such a small thing ruined an otherwise pleasant experience. Great job, there is definitely a need for this and it works pretty well.

Edit: with the breadcrumb and icon/file switcher views, you may not even need this hierarchical view...

Damn but I really like their new designs though, very clean! They've got a lot of good people there doing big things and Hangouts looks cool. +1

The problem with Facebook is that your network is too small and constricted, people want to expand and reach many many people, not stay limited within their circle. Think about it, you already talk to most of the people who are your closest friends in real life via phone and chat. You don't need yet another way to contact them. They should have taken the opportunity to bring down the barriers of the closed social graph.

Instead Google makes another Facebook with a different UI. It looks like a cleaner Myspace that will be embraced by a small set of techy users. No way will this ever be cool.

Slow as in I didn't wait around to see the results, like >1 minute.

It is going quite slow for me. All three tools.

Usually ajaxwhois.com and instantdomainsearch.com are completely instantaneous when I use those tools.

I answered no, but sometimes I drink alcohol during marathon coding sessions to make sure I don't stay up all night and also for fun. It always seems to help me program actually.

Looked like one of those fake ad landing pages at first glance. I think the reason for this is that there is a lot of whitespace (maybe off-white would work better) and the header text isn't stylized.

Additionally the slogan "Watching Web Videos Is as Easy as Watching TV" seems too long, I had to read it before I really understood it...imagine that! It really is a simple sentence, but somehow the meaning was a little obfuscated by its layout and sizing. I think the main reason for this was that the text was too big...bigger than the "Topchan.tv" text at least.

The 3 steps could definitely pop a lot more. Adding background colors to those boxes should help with that. They have to look separated, not really mixed in with all the other text.

You could replace the text "Watching Web Videos Is as Easy as Watching TV" and "Let you watch web videos like regular TV" with just "Watch web videos like regular TV", much more concise.

The try it now button seems uninviting, probably because of the mechanical looking font.

You could probably reduce all 3 steps into 1 step of "Try it now!" and just have a button.

You could get rid of everything else and just have the text "Watch web videos like regular TV" (centered) and under it have a button that says "Try it now" and I think it would come across better. You should then also have a "Learn More" button where you can have more text. Text is distracting, your goal is to get them to click the button, make it a focus.

Just my 2cents

Couldn't quite figure out how to use the tool, but it did manage to create a pretty rad 3D version of my site (using the "Both" setting and varying font sizes on each). I'll probably have another go when I've got less homework.

Great news, my suggestion: ditch the "time calculated" info on Wolfram results.

I personally don't care that something was "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha at Mon Apr 18 2011 19:31:47 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)"

Just "Computed by Wolfram|Alpha" would suffice

I've never had a problem with Gmail search and I'm surprised the article writes about 20+ second search times as if it's a common and widespread issue.

Bummer! I'm assuming you didn't set up any "one-click" option, and if that's the case they should go the Amazon route and only enable One-click if you say so first.

Hopefully it's separate.

I'm not sure how accurate compete.com is, but here are the stats for clubbing.com:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/clubbing.com/

They were pulling over 1 million uniques/month until January (not sure what happened in January). And now their traffic is indeed insignificant at about 200k for February 2011 (who knows how accurate this is).

However, if you factor that many of those unique hits are playing a game that fires off between 10-100 searches per play, well that's a lot of searches, especially if people play more than one game. Or maybe I'm wrong, as this is a bunch of guesstimating on my part.

Of course, I can see your point...in the grand scheme of things, Club Bing is probably just a drop in the bucket.

For anyone that can't tell what the site is about at first glance: it's a collection of word-based games (think text twist) and every time you guess/figure out some word correctly, a search to Bing is fired off in a separate frame.

The reasoning behind this Bing-fueled gaming experience is so that you can "research" words as you play...or something.

It's all very shady/hilarious.

Microsoft inflates their search share statistics with sites like this: http://www.clubbing.com

Where they bribe people to play games that "search" on Bing in exchange for points they can use to buy things.

Additionally, this site is really easy to automate bots for (there are whole communities that work on this) in order to automate the prize winning process.

Even still, that's all good for Microsoft as far as I can tell, since even playing with bots brings up their share in the search market.

Todo list:

-Allow for URL entry

-Option for putting the separate CSS directly into the head of the HTML document

-Add a link href to the stylesheet in the HTML (and temporarily host the CSS on the server)

-Preview of the page to make sure nothing got screwed up

-Be able to download HTML/CSS files directly

-Be able to have "smarter" class definitions...figure out any common properties between groups of generated classes and make just one class all those elements can refer to.

That's just off the top of my head, I'm open to all suggestions and feedback!

It's mostly explained in the "about", but I have a habit of making most of my CSS changes inline in my HTML, so I use a lot of style attributes. This is usually "bad form", and I always tell myself I'll just move it all over to an external document later, but it's really annoying to do that manually.

So I made this tool last night that takes an HTML document and extracts all the inlined CSS style attributes and puts them into their own classes and then removes the style attributes from the HTML and replaces them with neat little classes.

Definitely a ton more this tool could do to streamline the process (also I could just learn to do all my CSS in an external file to begin with), but, whatever, I'm definitely going to use this. It's a start at least!

I observe orphaned (unkillable) child processes on a regular basis (once a month or so) that prevent me from updating Chrome until I restart my computer sometimes. Additionally, when this happens, I have noticed definite slowdowns in page rendering and the responsiveness of the browser as a whole.

I've seen this behavior on my two machines: WinXP and Win7 (64-bit).

I have also seen Chrome using an excessive amount of memory on both machines. The reason for this, most of the time, is due to Chrome's design. As I'm sure you're aware, nearly each tab and plugin requires a separate process to allow for features like preventing the closing of the entire browser when a plugin crashes or dragging-and-dropping tabs from/to separate windows, etc. However, this is a trade-off between features vs memory usage, and Chrome's will inherently use more RAM than a browser like Firefox which doesn't follow the same process-spawning design.

This is the most common cause for excessive RAM usage, which could be labeled as user error (you shouldn't have so many tabs open, gosh darnit!!) but this isn't the only cause for Chrome's excessive RAM usage. I've definitely seen big spikes of memory being taken up for individual tabs, without any apparent reason. I've never taken out the time to really investigate the cause of this, but if it's not WebKit memory leaks I'm not sure what makes sense to blame.

Honestly, it has gotten better in the last few releases, but still not up to the bar Firefox 4 just brought it to. That browser just got so fast and lightweight. I switched to Chrome (and have stayed for a while) because I really dig its interface, and it feels fast. But lately, I've been dealing with weird performance issues especially when these unkillable child processes are present. I love Chrome for development though, it's got a really good set of tools right out of the box.

Basically, if Chrome's process spawning stuff was rock solid I would think it's just about perfect, and now I'm starting to think FF4 is getting there faster.

*Note: definitely not trying to start a debate on which browser is better, I use both and I like both, but I was just elaborating on what I had said about performance before.

Firefox is much more viable of a browser now that the Mozilla team has addressed memory and performance issues, additionally the new "Firefox button" view gives the browser the slim and minimal look that brought many to Chrome in the first place. I've been using Chrome as my main browser for over a year and I have to say, Chrome's still got issues (i.e. excessive memory use, instability/slowdown sometimes due to orphaned processes). As for IE9, well it won't run on XP, but I haven't used it myself so I can't list any further problems it has, but I'm willing to bet a few exist.

I guess the point is, no one browser is perfect and until that point is reached any serious offering will definitely have a future.

Does this only count public posts that "everyone" can see?

I see your point and suppose I stand corrected for the most common cases, so then I'm really wondering what the benefits of security questions are. They generally degrade the user experience and provide a publicly accessible avenue for compromising a user account.

Are there any positives for security questions?? Well, I suppose secret questions are good for preventing brute force account recovery. You can't expect to beat security questions in a timely way with an automated attack. You would usually have to rely on manual search or social engineering, as pointed out by the article. But the real question is, why even allow account recovery via a publicly accessible web form in the first place?

So, I definitely agree with the article, there has to be a change. You sure can beat security questions (at least in their current state), but it's probably much harder to get around something like email or SMS verification.

Chase.com and cardmemberservices.com are good examples of SMS/email account verification done right, which I've used with great success, but both of these sites already had my personal phone number, so SMS verification just makes sense for them.

I suppose SMS verification is probably the closest thing we've got to real user verification at the moment, am I silly to consider this the ideal venue for account recovery?

The big issue, then, is it's definitely harder to get a user's phone number than to get their mother's maiden name, but skipping all that extra input and having a simple account recovery email should do the trick, shouldn't it? Most of the times you're already collecting user emails.

Well, the biggest issue with email is that an email account can also be compromised. Perhaps getting big email companies like Gmail to remove security questions from their apps in lieu of SMS verification is the next step, while everyone else just relies on email-based account recovery (unless SMS is an option). If email security was more rock-solid, then email verification is all we need, right?

Haha, nice one, this technology will surely be bought by Microsoft to support their anti-IE6 operations.

http://ie6countdown.com/

Hummingbird's premise seems like it kind of misses the ball, it certainly would be cool to see a real-time stream of analytics, but what would you actually do with that feature? Seems kind of gimmicky, but I agree with the author in that it could find a home in some other analytics package.

Definitely a solid list of interesting options in the analytics space, thanks for the share.

Sweet write-up, I've used Etherpad way more than I've used Google Docs/Google Wave, it's so quick and simple. Not having to sign in is one of the best features. My team of 4 people use it as a huge to-do list and basically it's evolved into our personal knowledgebase. I love it, I can't imagine working without it now.

This is so awesome and inspiring, congrats!

But will it blend?

Oh I see, it's polling every 30 seconds :)

I've tried Orbited on Rails with success, it does fake comet with an easy-to-use Javascript API so you can push messages to subscribed clients. Also looked at Hookbox, which is by the same guy who made Orbited. They're both realllly easy to integrate and use in Rails, and Hookbox can be used from the public HostedHookbox service, meaning you don't actually have to install a Hookbox server if you just want to try it out.

^In case you'd like to add a push feel to this

It wasn't updating in real time for me in Chrome, I'll give it another try later. Sweet idea!

I've always wanted to be like these guys, living with nothing but a laptop and a mission haha! This has been my dream since high school, it's really inspiring to see that it's not as crazy as I thought it was.