Yesterday I launched new web application – Coco Tracker (www.thecocotracker.com), an application which tracks and aggregates all the various Conan O’Brien themed twitter accounts out there.
The idea was born when, as a Conan fan, started following all these new Conan themed twitter accounts (like @ConansSquirrel), which seemed to spawn to life whenever “The Big Red” tweeted about something (ConansSquirrel became live when Conan tweeted about him interviewing a squirrel). When I was following all these accounts, the became quickly clear that most of the interesting interactions these accounts have together, is lost into the jungle of non-related tweets, thus the Coco Tracker was born.
It’s still in it’s beta stage (as most web apps) but I’m hoping it’ll become better as I’ll keep working on it (release early, release often. Right?). Oh, and if I’m missing an account, or two, let me know.
Just to clarify, I mean Google Crome and here’s why: I was poking around in the Internets, clicked a link and was greeted with “Access Forbidden – You’ve been temporarily banned.. because you were hitting the site too quickly.” Now, I know Google Chrome is quite swift of a beast but to be so fast that sites mistake you as a bot and ban you? (even being very temporarily)
Ok. So, it’s fast. Now, if it only would work. Case in point: Can’t seem to be able to add the screenshot to this very post, of the “Access Forbidden” -page, in Wordpress, as the Add an Image -button is only giving me an empty frame. And it’s hardly the first time it fumbles and fails, as I would think other heavy Chrome users would know. Does all the speed justify the fact that it’s still a spork; awkward tool that kinda does many things but just fails. I guess it does since I’m still using it, it’s just too frustrating to find yourself in situations where the tool of your choice just doesn’t cut it. …nor even nibble.
Aaaaand, there we go. Fired up Firefox and successfully added the picture.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with several different themes, trying to find the perfect theme for the blog. No luck on that issue. At the moment I’ve settled to TLight with some quick customizations. The other themes that I’ve tested suffered problems with rendering with different browsers. The TLight seems to render correctly and quickly at least on major browsers, even though it lacks the option that the finer themes have. Oh, and it’s wide enough for the layout pictures, like on the Chrome Page Titles -post, so it’s going to serve the Mint Usability to the audiences for a while now.
I’ve also been building my own theme for the blog but that’s still in the pipeline, and prolly going to be still for a while since I also have other things to attend to. Like the concept that I’m working as my thesis: It’s going to be a concept design, instead of user interface design, that I originally planned to do.
Oh, and got the Lightbox issue resolved finally. Yey! Now it works like it should. Happy picture clicking!
I started a new photography project and since the result of that project would be flooding the front page with just photos I removed them from front page.
You can see them by going to the Photography category: http://www.mintusability.com/category/photography/
Also check out the post detailing 365 Photos
Lots of silencio lately and here come the explanations… I’ve been sick, broke my knee while snowboarding and just generally out of energy. I know, I know. I’ve been a bad blogger when not giving updates or such but I didn’t feel like writing anything pointless (like: sick, no posts today). I guess I should. I know I should.
Heads up; lots(!) of parties during next weeks (yeah, that’s plural) so depending of the hangovers, there might be some “down time” around.
Anyways, let’s get back to business.
Lots of new things happening. New theme, since the previous one was horrid in usability wise, and someone would say that it is a cardinal sin on usability site. And I would agree. Some minor fine tuning done to the theme, lots of still to do.
Things are happening under the hood also. New blog is AJAX driven (thanks to AJAXed WordPress), which should make the user experience better by reducing load times; for me this was huge leap from the days without no AJAX, since I’m still a prisoner of this dreaded choppy WLAN; load times improved 50-100%. Rather nice, I would say, makes using/updating the whole thing tad more bearable. Also, if the AJAX engine works as it is supposed to be (mainly just loading the content), it should also drop some bandwith usage, since the last surge to Top 10 Usability highs of Mac OS – Debunked dropped the whole site down; one link in mac site and there we are. Next up, SuperCache?
Also lots of general tinkering here and there.
Without content, however, there is nothing. No fear there, things happening around articles too; one “random thoughts/offtopic” article (Offtopic of the day: Viruses to permanently change social networking?) is out and currently I’m writing couple of new articles about certain user interface concept (concept and example). They are out when they are done, can’t really tell about specific time since I am currently writing when I feel like it and I have lots of other things to handle anyways. All I can say that the wait won’t be too long.
That’s it for now. Stay tuned.
Yesterday evening was a complete disaster. I’m currently residing at Austria and the internet connection I have at the moment in my flat is.. well, just not up for the task. It’s wireless and provided by one shady D-Link canister, for me and 8 other people, which makes the thing whimper and die every now and then. So you basically have to get up from your ass and do a hard reset for it, every time your internet connection dies. It’s good excercise though. For the body, not for the mind.
That itself is annoying but the actual problem yesterday was that for some reason the FTP (and every other port besides HTTP) is blocked somehow. Either that or the D-Link just collapses every time I try to upload anything bigger than 10 kB. Last evening I made some modifications to couple of files and when I started to upload them only the first 10 kB of every file were actually uploaded(!), leading to incomplete files and myriad of error messages. Tried to solve the issue till 1 AM with no luck.
So, today I spent uploading everything (upgrading the wordpress installation in the process) back to the server and now, finally, everything is again up and running. Finally.
