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Addictomatic is a search aggregator, a way to see results from lots of sources all at once. Want to see the latest on a presidential candidate? Or the newest iPhone rumors? Or perhaps an ego search? Addictomatic has you covered.

This isn’t a traditional search engine. It’s not designed to help you find answers about some error message or the cheapest flight to Aruba. Addictomatic helps you see what’s going on now on a given topic.

We’ve implemented a number of pretty nice features on the site. One of these is the ability to drag and drop the results boxes around to re-order them.

You can also click the little X to remove a source from a page, or you can drop down the Available Sources panel to remove and add sources.

When you make changes to the results page, either re-ordering the sources and/or removing the ones you don’t want to include, you get a nice bookmarkable URL as a result. That URL will bring you right back to your search, with the layout you specified.

In addition to being able to create new searches, Addictomatic also offers a collection of NewsFix pages that gather the top sources on a variety of topics. I’m mainly visiting the Election 2008 and Baseball pages of late, though I also enjoy hitting Thought 2.0 and Web 2.0 with some regularity.

Building this service has been an interesting experience on a number of fronts, but one of the most exciting has been discovering that it’s something I want to use myself. I liked the idea when Dave first explained it to me, but I wasn’t sure how much I’d use it. As it turns out, I now use it quite a bit - it’s sticky. Much like Twitter, it’s value is hard to explain but readily apparent once you use it for a while.

The design of the site was done by well known designer Bryan Bell, who did a terrific job. We received the Photoshop files from him and created the front-end XHTML+CSS+JavaScript and all of the back-end systems.

Many thanks to Dave for letting us help him bring Addictomatic to the web.

UPDATE: Dave’s blog post is here and Bryan’s is here.

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This was a bit of a surprise as that code hadn’t changed in years. Turns out, it was the browsers that had changed.

I had moved the theme browser from my site (to reduce server load) to my hosting account at Joyent a long time ago, and set it up on the domain managedtasks.com. The frameset page and the top frame were hosted on alexking.org, while the bottom frame - the theme viewer - was on managedtasks.com.

This combination stopped working because the browsers changed their cookie security settings. If you have your cookies set to “only accept cookies from sites I visit”, then your browser was rejecting the cookie from managedtasks.com (because the URL in your browser was alexking.org).

If this cookie wasn’t set, the proper theme was not displayed; hence the theme browser being broken .

I’ve moved it all onto managedtasks.com now, and everything appears to work again.

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Hopefully as things get back to a more normal state my feed reading will become more than a weekly event (and I can begin replacing some of my dead feeds). Until then, the Atw posts will be a bit inconsistent.

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The tag auto-complete feature is very nice, and I personally like it quite a bit. However, some of our clients have thousands of tags and were experiencing unacceptable slowdowns with this feature enabled. If you are experiencing problems like this, Tag Uncomplete may help.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

We’re hiring! Want to build WordPress plugins, create WordPress powered web sites and build fun web based products and services? Join the team at Crowd Favorite.

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BusySync 2.0 allows you to sync iCal with Google Calendar, in addition to syncing iCal calendars with others on your LAN.

I’m still using BusySync and am generally pleased with it.

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• Problem With Microsoft
  

  Every step of the way, as the iPhone and similar Apple products were created, the design of the product won out, over other demands and constraints.

• They get bigger - 38 Pitches - three WS rings for Schilling, I kinda knew that but hadn’t fully realized it. Impressive.
• The X300 Review, Part 1: Hardware, Windows and More - I pity any user with a trackpad and windows or linux. It’s like driving a sports car with the e-brake permanently on.
• Boost QuickTime Player’s Volume - I had no idea about this.
• CLEARly Disappointed - I golfed with a fellow that had a good experience with CLEAR - he’s the first who has actually recommended the service to me.

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I knew from past experience that the window.load event waits to fire until all images have downloaded completely. This is why jQuery and other JS libraries implement $(document).ready() features; so you can start doing things when the DOM is ready and not have to wait for images to download.

Armed with this knowledge, I assumed this applied to images that are specified as background images in your CSS as well. This is a (partially) incorrect assumption.

My testing indicates that Firefox fires off the onload event for the page after all inline images (img) have loaded, but before images specified in your CSS have loaded.

Safari on the other hand waits until all of your images have loaded, including images specified as CSS background images, before kicking off the onload event.

I did some web searching before I did my tests, but didn’t find anything on this topic. Naturally, I found this as I was writing this blog post. It indicates that IE behaves similarly to Safari.

For our usage, it is actually preferable to have the onload event wait until after the images specified in the CSS have loaded, so I’m looking for a workaround or a Gecko-specific event for this for Firefox.

Time to send this blog post off to some good folks at Mozilla. I’ll update this if I get more answers.

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• Show a link to the tweet being replied to for @replies.
• Option to exclude @replies from the sidebar tweets list.
• Make all @usernames clickable.
• Check that the tweets downloaded are indeed the user’s tweets - sometimes Twitter has hiccups.
• Don’t broadcast edits to old posts. Note: Twitter Tools always included code to only broadcast a post once. However edits to posts created before Twitter Tools was installed would be sent to Twitter because there is no “only when a post is first published” hook (that I’m aware of) in WordPress. Now a timestamp is saved upon installation to try to work around this.
• Ability to send blog posts to Twitter on a per-post basis (checkbox added to post authoring screen).
• Option to use jQuery instead of Prototype - useful if you like to tweet from your sidebar. The jQuery library is a smaller download than Prototype.
• Added post author setting.
• Added post tags setting.
• Added an option to make digest posts display tweets in either chronological or reverse-chronological order.
• Make URLs clickable in blog posts created from tweets and digest posts.

Note: after you install this version of Twitter Tools, you’ll need to go in and update your settings to take advantage of these new features - until you do, things will not work properly.

As you can see, there are many changes in this version, so I’m releasing this as a beta instead of a stable version. I’ve done about 5-6 hours of testing on it and I’m using it here, so I obviously think it’s probably safe for production, but it has not been widely tested… if I had to bet, I’d say there are still a few things still to be discovered. You’ve been warned.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

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When life approximates xckd… brilliant!

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Folks, this is a real game changer.

Scalability has been the final frontier for web applications for far too long. For web developers like myself, the “building the app” part of offering a web service is the easy part. The challenge comes when you try to scale it.

FeedLounge is a great example. By all accounts, we built a fantastic web feed reading experience. Unfortunately, we didn’t succeed in scaling it. Sure, we learned a lot and I can think of a couple dozen things we would do differently if we could go back and do it again, but scaling would still be our number one issue.

Google App Engine changes that.

Sure, Big Table isn’t a drop-in replacement for a relational database like MySQL or PostgreSQL, but writing GQL isn’t any harder than writing SQL. Basically, you need to re-think how you do the data layer of your application, and the reward is scalability that would have cost you months to develop and significant hardware costs.

GAE not only offers a scalability solution, it also revolutionizes deployment. When you roll your own scalable infrastructure, you get rewarded with a variety of deployment challenges. You need to update code on a variety of machines, upgrade database schemas, etc.

At Crowd Favorite we are web developers, not system admins. We understand how to build something so it can scale, but actually doing the server config and managing them on a day to day basis is not our core competency. This service is designed for us.

The Campfire was a very well produced event. The speakers, as you can see in the video, did a very good job. Questions I had during the presentation were often answered within the next couple of minutes - always the sign of a well designed talk.

As an attendee of the Campfire, I got a chance to ask the GAE team some questions after the presentation. Most of the questions that I was asking had very good answers, and all had very reasonable answers.

A couple of things I asked about:

How do you bring the data from your live application back into your local development environment?

There isn’t a data export/import built-in yet, though it seems like something they’d be open to building. There is a feature to create an XML representation of any data object, so I expect a library that handles the production data export/local development data import situation to be one of the first tools that is built and well supported by the development community.

Is there a CRON equivalent?

No. The solution that seems best to me is to use another machine with CRON to send HTTP requests to your GAE application. If you want a pure “cloud” solution, you could use Amazon EC2 for this.

How long can a request live?

There is a 10 second execution limit for all requests. This includes requesting and submitting data to external services. If it takes 8.5 seconds to download a tweet stream from Twitter, you’ve only got 1.5 seconds to do something with it. This is very reasonable. In thinking through the things I normally do in a long executing script, they could pretty much all b broken out into more atomic events that could each be done in individual requests.

How much will it cost if you go over your quotas?

There wasn’t an answer for this yet, and it’s definitely something you’d want to know when you’re trying to evaluate GAE vs. alternative solutions. I’ll say this though, whatever they decide to charge, it will likely be a fraction of the hardware, bandwidth and human costs of scaling to that degree on your own. I believe they will take this on a case by case basis - they are building a platform they want people to use, and I think it’s in their best interest to do what they can to support successful apps built on GAE.

What the GAE team has already done in just ~2 years is very impressive, but they’ll also be the first ones to tell you they have a long list of things they’d like to improve and enhance. I’ve got no doubt they are going to do just that.

I’d obviously like to see PHP as a supported language as soon as possible, but I don’t know when it’s realistic to expect to see support for new languages. Balancing the building of platform features against support for other languages is a tough choice.

While I’m not going to run out and rewrite all of my PHP products in Python, I’ve already mentally re-architected a component of MyFreeBusy that we probably will rewrite in Python so that it can leverage GAE to scale.

Another idea that I’ve had for a service that has been backburnered for a while is probably going to be written in Python instead of PHP so that we can roll it out on GAE.

Once we complete these internal projects, I’m sure we’ll start building GAE apps for clients as well. I’m excited about the possibilities that this opens for us.

Besides my own intended usage, the general innovation that this is going to allow is going to be fascinating. ISVs have long been able to create great software that can be downloaded and installed on a per-user or small team basis, but Google App Engine promises to let us bring that craftsmanship to internet scale.

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I didn’t have time to read any blogs - ugh! I hope to catch up soon.

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