I have been really happy with this new blog software. So happy that I want to give you your very own blog account on the notpop network.
If you’re interested, please send me an email to joshhighland {at} gmail {dot} com and we can make it happen for you.
You blog account would be in the form of notpopular.com/blogs/YOUR_NAME_HERE
Its free, what do you have to lose?
Some people fear google and their awesome power over the internet. I however, love Google and praise them for what they are going.
I have had a gmail account for some time, but before that I had a personal email address associated with my domain name. Over the last 5 years, my personal email has become useless due to spam. Spam is the price of running a popular (or in this case, a notPopular) website.
I dont know how many times people have sent me something and it just gets lost in the flood of spam.
enter gmail
gmail has an awesome feature that allows you to check you existing email through the gmail service. As an added bonus (the part that excites me the most), they have an awesome spam filter.
From my tests, google catches 90% of the spam that gets sent to me. 20-30 pieces of spam a day is much better then 200-300. On top of that I can check my gmail from my phone or any computer I want.
I highly suggest you filter your pop3 based emails through gmail. Sorry AOL users, AOL doesnt offer pop3 access, so no gmail for you 🙁
I like YouTube a lot. Recently I have started to record bands at shows and posting them on YoutTube.com. My plan was to build a collection of videos that I dont have to host, and can eventually incorporate into notPopular.com as content.
I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I read a lot of blogs. I came across a Chris Parillo posting about revver.com, so I checked it out.
revver.com is a site like YouTube.com, you upload your videos and they host them, but with a twist… revver pays you! Cash, clams, scrills, monies, dollars… anyway you want to call it, it boils down to a bigger bank account for you!
You get paid when someone watches your video to the end, and then clicks on the advertisement that gets displayed when the clip finishes.
Sure revver isnt as big as youTube… yet, and not everyone is going to click the advertisements, but if you are going to upload videos to a website, why not get paid for it?
I support revver.com over youTube.com. Competition is good for us all.
click to see the full image…
I have been working on a help documentation system at work.
There are roughly 50,000 HTML files to deal with (yes 50 thousand).
The html files have a pretty decent structure, but they are by no means XHTML.
I dont have access to a web development language like php, cfm, for asp or this project to insert
the site navigation, page headers and footers, So I decided to go with some sweet web 2.0 un obtrusive javascript.
to make life easier for myself, I had the authors of the help system insert a single line into the head of each HTML file.
The line was a call to a javascript file. That javascript then used the DOM to insert all the appropriate CSS and other JS files I needed to make the pages look clean, and do what I needed them to do.
Things looked great in FireFox. Life was good until I loaded the site into Internet Explorer.
My beautiful project looked like a pile of crap, no styles, no javascript, just a stupid javascript error.
IE isnt known for its script debugging (another reason to no use IE). It took me literally hours to track down the problem.
I was doing this for all the css files (4 of them)
var tmpElm = document.createElement("style");
tmpElm.setAttribute("type", "text/css");
tmpElm.appendChild(document.createTextNode("/some/directory/sweetness.css);"));
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(tmpElm);
Its clean, simple unobtrusive javascript.
create a style element, add the right attribute to it, add value to the style tag, then append it to the page head.
straight forward stuff.
Like I said, FireFix had no problem with it. After doing tons of test, i realized that IE didnt like me appending a style tag to the head!
Then I found this:
IE won't allow document.createElement('style')
If you try to add style declarations in the head of a document, IE borks at the name 'style' – "unexpected call to method or property access".
http://www.quirksmode.org/bugreports/archives/2006/01/IE_wont_allow_documentcreateElementstyle.html
IE gets confused between the head element <style> and the object property .style!
So I spend all that time debugging my code, which was perfectly fine, because IE is retarded and doesnt know the difference between <style> and .style!
WTF!
I removed all that sweet un obtrusive code and used this instead:
document.write("<style type="text/css">@import url(/some/directory/sweetness.css");
I hate using document.write() these days, but it works in both IE and FF now.
My life sucks some times.