benrasmusen.com » Technology

FriendFeedback.com - Quickly get anonymous feedback from friends

Ben Rasmusen — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:44:51 +0000

I’m proud to announce the launch of FriendFeedback.com. A simple application that lets you quickly and easily get anonymous feedback from your friends. The idea is that if you want some feedback on something from your friends, they may not always be willing to give you an honest opinion to your face. This application lets them respond anonymously and hopefully truthfully.

It’s certainly not anything life changing, but it was a fun application to build and design (yikes! I said it! I design the site, so forgive me if it makes your eyes bleed). Let me know what you think and feel free to comment here or contact me if you have any bugs to report or any features to suggest.

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Top 10 Firefox Smart Keyword Bookmarks

Ben Rasmusen — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:00:50 +0000

Firefox Smart Keyword are keywords attached to bookmarks which you can then use to activate them. So for example instead of typing www.google.com in the address bar you could just type “g”. And you can go a step further you can add a variable to the url which can be handy for searches. So using the www.google.com example if you wanted to do a search the url would look something like this: www.google.com/search?q=search+term. To use the variable feature you would edit the bookmark and change the url to this: www.google.com/search?q=%s. Then (assuming your keyword is ‘g’) you could just type “g {search term}” into your address bar and it would execute the search.

There are a lot of applications for this and with the ever increasing amount of javascript bookmarklets the fun has just begun. Here are my top 10 smart keyword, obviously some of these would require you to sign up for the service being discussed. The bookmarklets are being display as links due to display issues, to snag them just right click and copy the link location or bookmark it.

1. Lorem Ipsum
url: http://www.lipsum.com/feed/html
keyword: lorem
Takes you to 5 paragraphs of dummy text, done.

2. Del.icio.us
url: http://del.icio.us/{username}/%s
keyword: dl {search term}
Allows you to search your delicious bookmarks.

3. Wikipedia.org
url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go
keyword: wp {search term}
Searching of wikipedia.org.

4. Amazon.com
url: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=%s&x=0&y=0
keyword: ama {search term}
Search amazon.com.

5. Twitter
url: http://twitter.com/%s
keyword: tw {username or blank for your home}
Look up a twitter users’ profile or leave blank to access your twitter home page.

6. PeqURL
url: PeqURL bookmarklet
keyword: purl
Shorten the url that you’re currently viewing, complete with a super slick thickbox-esque window.

7. Laterloop.com (save for later)
url: LaterLoop bookmarklet
keyword: later
Save the current page you’re on for later reading.

8. Add to Mixx.com
url: Mixx bookmarklet
keyword: mixx
Add the page you’re currently on to Mixx.com.

9. coComment tracking
url: coComment Bookmarklet
keyword: comment
After you’ve written your comment but before you submit it, trigger this keyword to track it on coComment.

10. Localhost
url: http://localhost:8888/%s
keyword: lh {site directory name}
I keep all my projects I’m working in my local htdocs folder, this allows me to access them quickly rather than typing out the entire url. Works well if you develop locally.

Leave a comment with the ones you use the most!

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CheckYesOrNo.info - Quick yes or no polls

Ben Rasmusen — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:20:33 +0000

Gordon Brander and I have launched another side project: CheckYesOrNo.info. It’s a super simple site that allows you to ask quick yes or no questions. It’s like those notes you used to get from girls back in Junior High. Jump right in and check it out by answering this question: http://checkyesorno.info/5.

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Townsquare.biz - the easiest way to get your business online

Ben Rasmusen — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:27:08 +0000

Gordon Brander and I are proud to announce the Beta launch of a new web application we’ve been working on for the last couple of months, Townsquare.biz. Townsquare allows businesses to create an online presence quickly and easily. The idea behind it is that there are a lot of small businesses that would like to have an online presence but don’t want to spend a lot of money or time having a website built. Townsquare gives them a clean semantic website with a very simple interface, so business owners can quickly get their business online as well as keep it up to date.

Here is a couple of the features currently available:

Complete control over the look and feel of the site via CSS
Add/Edit/Delete web pages
A blog, which can be used for project announcements or news
Embedded maps on the page
Clean, semantic, micro formatted code to aid in SEO.

Head on over and check it out and let me know what you think. All suggestions, questions and feedback are welcome. To view a sample page head to townsquare.biz/benrasmusen.

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Craigslist.org OPML Exporter

Ben Rasmusen — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:25:20 +0000

When I first started freelancing I was looking for a way to get an RSS feed of all the computer gigs on craigslist.org for every city in the USA. Since most of these postings were telecommunting position it didn’t matter what city they were posted in. But grabbing the feed manually from 300+ cities on craigslist was clearly not the best option. To solve this need I have written a quick script that loops through all the craigslist.org cities of your choosing and grabs the RSS feed for the query of your choice. This allows you to search for anything, not just computer gigs.

I hereby present: Craigslist.org OPML Exporter

Hopefully some of you will find this useful. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with questions or suggestions.

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Lorem Ipsum Bookmarklet

Ben Rasmusen — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:50:43 +0000

My thought was to create a bookmarklet that would insert a block of dummy filler text (Lorem Ipsum) in the input you currently have in focus. This would come in handy when testing form submission. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do this for quite some time now without any luck. This is in part due to my inexperience in javascript and the lack of support for this functionality in most browsers. After a day of failed attempts I decided to get some other (and greater) minds on it to see if it could be done. I tweeted the issue to see if anyone had any ideas.

A friend and colleague David LeMieux has made some significant progress on this bookmarklet and has released it for all to use. Unfortunately due to the aforementioned browser limitations this bookmarklet only works in Firefox 3 Beta 5. But if that’s what you use for testing then it’s a great tool to add to the arsenal.

If any readers have any ideas on how to make this more cross browser compatible your suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated. This doesn’t seem to be a difficult thing to achieve, but it does require a more skilled developer than myself.

I want to give a big thanks to all that spent any amount of time trying to get this working. A special shout out to David LeMieux and Ryan Cross for their help in thinking this through and for the time they spent making some great progress on it.

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Customer Service Done Right by Skitch

Ben Rasmusen — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:05:58 +0000

I’ve been using plasq’s beta product skitch for quite awhile now and I could write a whole post on how amazing this little application is and it would only be the half of it. But this post isn’t about the awesome product, it’s about the awesome customer service.

My experience is not unique, the most notable example is the Michael Arrington/Comcast incident, but it’s certainly new to me. I can completely understand an internet celebrity like Michael Arrington getting special attention from companies, but seeing as I am most certainly NOT an internet celebrity (except perhaps to my 5 readers, and a bit thanks to you all) I can only assume that this is standard operating procedure for Plasq.

So here is what happened. Yesterday morning I had a great opportunity to skitch something awesome. I invoked and snagged said awesomeness but when I went to upload the skitch to share it, the application froze and crashed. I assumed perhaps my mac was acting funny so I re-opened skitch and it tried again. Same story. So, twitter being the frustrations venting place of choice, I tweeted that skitch was crapping out on me and that I wasn’t super happy about it.

After the second time it crashed an update dialog popped up and after installing the updates skitch is back to working flawlessly. But before that happened Brian Caldwell over at Plasq happened upon my frustrated tweet and went through the trouble of looking me up and sending me an email via the contact form on my website asking if there was anything he could do to help resolve my skitch issues.

For those of you who don’t know, skitch is in beta and absolutely free. The fact that a company would spend the time to look up a nobody like me, dig through my website and email me asking if they could aid in resolving issues with a free product just blows me away.

It’s hard enough to get good customer service when you’re actively seeking it out, but when a company goes through the trouble of seeking you out when you indirectly voice an issue with their free product; now that’s excellent customer service.

Thanks again to Brian Caldwell and everyone else at Plasq for their commitment to their users and for creating awesome applications.

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Incoming Information Workflow

Ben Rasmusen — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:19:19 +0000

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the incoming information streams, whether it’s the latest news headlines or tech buzz. In the past couple of months I’ve been close to pulling the plug all together and disconnecting myself from the many information pipelines. Unfortunately I enjoy it too much and frankly I’m too addicted to it. So if I can’t eliminate it, there needs to be a way to handle it.

For me the best way to get a handle on the information overload is to determine the information that is really important to me and eliminate the rest. My chosen topic mix is:

Tech News (this is the majority of it, with a heavy internet technologies influence)
Personal Blogs (friends and family blogs)
Personal/Professional Productivity
Major News Headlines

On the surface this seems pretty broad. But the real cutting down happens in the specifics. I’m very judicious with what feeds I keep in my feed reader, if I find myself skipping multiple stories in a row I delete that feed right away. When you have 100+ stories coming in every day it’s important to eliminate the noise. I pick up new feeds once or twice a week and give them a trial run before deciding if they will stay in my regular mix or not (this is done via a separate folder in NewsFire).

When I sit down to read my feeds in the morning I plow through them in chronological order across all categories. I usually run through them quickly, clicking on the titles that stand out to me (if they don’t have full text) or reading them directly in NewsFire. If I don’t have time to read the article (or just don’t feel like it) I use Instapaper.com to save them for later reading. This service is extremely handy now that they have added the ‘text’ feature which strips everything but the text out of the article for easy reading on my phone.

Using this process I go through all the news items in my feed reader, reading the items right away or saving them to be read later. I only do this once a day to improve productivity. If I have down time throughout the day and need something to read I use my Instapaper.com list to fill the time.

The last step in this process is moving items into a more permanent bookmarked position. I use del.icio.us to do this. In the past I would use del.icio.us liberally resulting in thousands of bookmarks most of which I never looked at again, partly because it was such an overwhelming list. I now use Instapaper.com for all links that are temporary and only post to del.icio.us links I want to be sure to hang on to.

This process has worked really well for me. Being quick to cut ‘noise feeds’ makes the incoming information manageable to begin with. Reading my feeds once a day reduces the subconscious stress of thinking I’m missing stuff because I know that I’ll only be a day late if I read them the next morning and it allows me to focus on other things (like work) by removing the constant interruptions. And lastly using a temporary holding pen for links removes the distractions from my permanently stored links making it easier to locate items in the future.

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Find and Replace Regular Expression

Ben Rasmusen — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:33:04 +0000

I find myself creating a fair amount of forms for websites. I normally want to grab the $_POST variables and assign them to local variables. I found a relatively easy way to do this using the power of TextMates Regular Expression Search and Replace. Once the form is created I submit it, dump the $_POST array between some ‘pre’ tags and grab the output. Paste the output into your file and do the following search and replace. Don’t forget to check the ‘Regular Expressions’ box.

In the ‘Find’ Box:
\[(.?*)\] => (.?*)

In the ‘Replace’ Box:
\$$1 = $_POST['$1'];

Turn this:
[field_1] => asdfa [field_2] => sdfas [field_3] => dfasd [field_4] => fasdfasf

Into this:
$field_1 = $_POST['field_1']; $field_2 = $_POST['field_2']; $field_3 = $_POST['field_3']; $field_4 = $_POST['field_4'];

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Top 15 TextMate Shortcuts

Ben Rasmusen — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:55:33 +0000

TextMate by Macromates is by far the best code writing/development tool I’ve ever used. Not only is it awesome at face value, but the depth of features and extras make it the ultimate productivity booster when developing. What’s equally amazing is how it accomplishes this with no bloat. If you spend any amount of time editing code you need this application and the $62 will be well worth it.

So here is my list of top 15 most useful TextMate shortcuts that have saved me countless hours accomplishing simple tasks, and these just scratch the surface. Take some time to browse through the bundles to find ones that work for you. You can also create your own or edit the existing ones to suit your needs.

Shortcut	Description
1. projects	everyone should know about projects. create a new project and then drag files/folders into the sidebar or drag a folder into the textmate icon to create a new project. (thanks to Ben Lew for the tip on dragging a folder into the icon.)
2. regular expression search/search and replace	check the ‘regular expression’ box and put your regular expression in the find. regular expressions are hard for me, but once figured out they are a huge time saver. with textmate you can capture parts of the find and insert them into the replace. for full information go to their regular expressions page.
3. cmd+shift+f	find in project. useful for mass search and replace operations or just finding where a function is defined.
4. cmd+t	go to file. opens up a dialog box where you can type the name of the file as well as use up/down arrows to navigate to it (within the open project).
5. cmd+shift+t	go to symbol. this dialog box allows you to navigate to symbols within the open document. i use this a lot in php to navigate a large list of functions, or for css to navigate a long list of selectors.
6. option+selection	selection outside of line restriction. when you hold down option the mouse pointer turns to crosshairs so you can select a portion of multiple lines. this is helpful when eliminating a tag from the end of even lines, etc.
7. option+tab/option+shift+tab or cmd+}/cmd+{	indent/un-indent a selection of items. if you need to indent or un-indent a selection of items you can highlight them and then option+tab them. these two shortcuts seem to be the same, anyone know if there is a difference?
8. ctrl+shift+w	wrap selection in tags. select something and then invoke the shortcut to wrap it in open/closing tags. by default it’s a ‘ ’ but you can type any tag and it will add it to both sides.
9. cmd+shift+7	convert selection to entities. i used this one a lot in creating this list, just select something and invoke the shortcut which will bring up a dialog box with options on what type of entity you want to convert the selection to (i couldn’t get this to work properly via shortcut, but you can use the menu: Bundles > HTML > Entities > Convert Selection to Entities).
10. ctrl+return	insert a . i prefer to self close my tags, but by default it inserts a , you can change it in the bundle editor.
11. ctrl+shift+l	wrap selection in . hyperlink a selection. bonus: if you have the url already in the clipboard it will auto-insert it into the href.
12. cmd+shift+c	color picker. this is used within css files to select a color, once selected it dumps the hex or rgb code for that color into your document. you can also select an existing color code and toggle this window to have a starting point.
13. ctr+shift+t	to-do list. this feature scans your project for items labeled with ‘FIXME:’, ‘TODO:’, ‘CHANGED:’ and provides a list of them along with their comments and a link to that file and line. (thanks to Gordon Brander for this tip.)
14. kv ⇥	streamlined way of inserting key/value pairs for arrays. it has tab stops at the necessary spots. this goes well with ‘array ⇥’. create new tab trigger and add: '$1' => ${3:'$4'},$5
15. debugvar ⇥	dump php variables in ‘pre’ tags for easy reading. this is a custom tab trigger which out puts echo " "; print_r ($variable); die(" "); in your code. create new tab trigger in bundle editor and add: echo " "; print_r (${1:variable}); die(" "); (thanks to Ryan Waggoner for this tip.)

Post your most useful in the comments. Thanks!