Auto woot! - Site and Chrome Extension for Woot! Off sales

I've not updated this blog in quite a long while as I've largely moved on to other development. Over the past several months a lot of code has been written and I've tried out a few different platforms. Recently, I've started working a lot with Github for source control and free html, css and javascript app hosting. This is one of my creations.

Auto woot! is a site and chrome extension developed to check Woot! for sales updates. This comes in especially handy during their Woot! Off sales where as an item sells out a new one takes it's place. All 8 sites in the Woot! network are monitored and their current status tracked both in the web app and the chrome extension. No need for page refreshes, it all loads for you as new data becomes available.

Although this isn't Blogger related, I thought I'd share it with my visitors. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Dwolla: An Online Payment System to Rule them All

I've had an ongoing love hate relationship with Paypal. I loved the convenience it offered me to accept money from just about anyone in whatever way the sender saw fit. I could transfer a few bucks to friends far away or send money to family if needed. Unfortunately, Paypal is leased to the life sucking credit card companies who siphon off significant money from each transaction. I hoped Google Checkout would be better, but alas both charge 2.9% + $0.30 for transactions. That isn't exactly cheap if your looking for small donations from people on the net.

Dwolla to the Rescue

Dwolla is here to completely change the game by bypassing the credit card companies and going straight to your bank. This allows them to operate a much leaner operation making transactions under $10 US completely free. That's right FREE! So, you can set up an account to accept donations from your visitors and on anything under $10 you get every penny.

Preview: Custom Twitter widgets with MiTwidget

Due to an Upcoming change by Twitter in their API, MiTwidget will cease to function sometime early by 2013 at the latest. Unfortunately, this cannot be fixed reasonably and no further support will be available. I hope everyone that's used my Twitter scripts over the past year and a half has enjoyed them, but regretfully Twitter is no longer friendly to this type of usage and I've ceased development for their service.

What I've been up to lately

The past few months I've spent a good deal of time experimenting with Google App Engine. It's been a learning process, sometimes a frustrating one, as I've dove head first into lots of new technology. I've had to start digging back into Java and JSP server pages, which I've not done since about 2005. Most of my work has been experimental while thinking about a handful of projects. Finally, I have something I'd like to share with you all.

Fully Interactive Twitter Widgets

MiTwidget is an attempt to take Twitter widgets to a new level by adding Lists and Saved Search capabilities into a fully interactive module suitable for any blog or website. There's no need for coding and including created widgets shall be a simple process(get code not yet live as this is a preview only). Even better, the widgets are saved to a database for easy modification and world wide sharing from Google servers. This should make MiTwidget very attractive for organizations and personal interests. Take a look at the widget below for an idea of what is possible.

My Blogger Portfolio Site

Journey to overhaul Blogger to produce something Unique

Since starting JS Blog Stop nearly a year ago I've spent a lot of time experimenting with Blogger and Google services. I wanted to see how much I could achieve using their free tools to complete projects for which they were not designed. Most of this time Blogger was the chosen test bed and I think I've learned quite a lot over the months and shared some interesting tools with everyone. Still, being a developer with a background in server side programming I've found the platform a bit restricting and difficult to work with. Most of this centers around the online templates and I've been searching for a better way to work.

Over the past few weeks I've done a lot of research and development with Dojo Toolkit and Less CSS with a Twitter Bootstrap foundation. I have to say Less CSS is fantastic and light years easier to work with as a developer than the template skin Blogger uses. I get the same kind of power with stored variables, but also get to mix in multi-browser support for CSS3 features through reusable single line commands. It's really phenomenal how much more quickly I can churn out CSS effects. Although this functionality comes at a price, no more template designer, I'm happy with the trade off.

Blogger: View Your Blog as Images

I've been hard at work on projects and contract work which has taken me away from this blog of late. It's been a really busy and my time working on Blogger tools isn't what it was. However, I did come up with a fun little not long ago I thought some readers might enjoy.

It all started one day while browsing Reddit.com when I stumbled upon a blog specializing in photo shopped celebrity pictures which for some strange reason removed their eyebrows. The pictures were a fun little time killer to break some tension, but wading through the near year old collection of 1 photo each day was taking a while. So, being as this blog was using Blogger I decided I'd use a script to pull their feed and spit out the pics so I could see them all in one big collage.

Google Docs Forms: Automatic Email Notifications

Forms with Google Docs

In June I wrote a tutorial detailing how I use Google Docs for my own Contact Me form. The form allows readers to submit questions to which I may reply privately in my own time. I think this adds to reader experience and I've answered several submitted questions already. I've even made posts as a result of one or two. The mentioned tutorial showed you how to be notified of a form submission by email, but this was just very basic stuff. I've since come up with a much better way that I'm ready to share.

Detailed Email Notifications 

Google Docs automatic notifications only include a very basic level of information simply telling you someone has submitted a form. You must then visit the document to see what information was sent and it's stored in a fairly unattractive spreadsheet. Although this works as a bare minimum measure it's hardly an ideal way to interact with readers. I actually had to build responses to include the submitted form manually. I knew there was a better way. So, I took some time to dig through Google Apps Script documentation and built a script to improve the process.

Blogger: Add Twitter and Facebook Comments

Due to an Upcoming change by Twitter in their API, Twitter comments will cease to function sometime early in 2013 at the latest. Unfortunately, this cannot be fixed reasonably and no further support will be available. I hope everyone that's used my script over the past year and a half has enjoyed it, but regretfully Twitter is no longer friendly to this type of usage and I've ceased development for their service.

Twitter and Facebook have come to dominate social media in the past few years. Although many other services exist, these two have grown to mammoth proportions dwarfing most others. As such there's a fair chance your blog readers have an account with one or both, though they may not have an account compatible with Blogger comments. In order to increase interactivity of your blog, wouldn't it be nice to broaden your reach by utilizing these two social titans?

In this post I detail how to implement both Twitter and Facebook comments into each blog post along side Bloggers own comment system. This tutorial results in comments which look and function exactly as those active on this blog at the time of publication. End result being a three tab paged comments section with active counts for the number of comments under each for the page.