There are a lot of blogs on the internet and most of them will have all of the social networking badges. As a webmaster wouldn’t it be nice to know what social networks your visitors frequent so that you could show only the appropriate badges?

Website developer Aza Raskin has come up with a simple JavaScript solution. It is a small javascript that will create a list of links in an iframe and then decide which site a visitor has been to based on the link color. When you visit sites on the web the links change colors to let you know that the link has been visited. This little javascript will return a list of sites that have been matched as visited. Now this is not a fool proof way but it is the best way currently. There are a few catches. The user has to have JavaScript enabled in their browser. It also only goes based on the browser history so if they clear their history often it won’t pick-up on this.

I am going to look into integrating this into my site maybe in a wordpress plug-in so that I can show only the relevant badges to my visitors. Obviously I would have a default list of badges to show just in case the script was not able to detect any of the sites. If you would like to get the script to use on your site be sure to visit this blog post.

Most of us can remember the days of the Nintendo first coming out on the market. The best game in the world back then was Super Mario Brothers. I remember playing this game when I was a kid. I played it so much that I was even able to beat the game using only one life and not using warp zones. I also did not just skip by everything and just run to the end. I took my time killed all the bad guys and got almost all of the secret stuff such as mushrooms that would make you big, stars, etc.

This morning I stumbled across something that I found to be really cool. A web based version of the game that was written completely in JavaScript. The uncompressed size is 35kb and the compressed version is only 14kb. Now this is not the complete game and a lot of stuff is missing however they created this as a challenge to see if it could be done solely in JavaScript and just how small they could make the file. Everything on this is done in JavaScript. They even embedded the music as base 64 encoded data into the file. All images etc are generated with JavaScript which is actually really cool. Personally I think the guys who developed this did a really good job. Be sure to try out the game. You can find it by going to their blog post.

I had no idea you could do things like this with JavaScript and it makes me want to start looking into the language. What else could you do if you can generate something like this? Do you know of other cool things like this done with JavaScript? Please feel free to share them in the comments.

This is an all new low in my opinion. LicketyShip sent out the following email.

Friends,

LicketyShip is looking to hire 2 amazing guys. If you can help us hire one of them, we’ll buy you a 37” Plasma TV (and we’ll deliver it in 4 hours :
If you know one of the people we’re describing below, please e-mail me at ******@licketyship.com.

Thanks, Paz

Guy #1: Web Developer Extraordinaire

Proven experience developing websites for highly trafficked consumer businesses
Ability to construct HTML/CSS/JavaScript (manually if necessary)
Expertise in cross-browser compatibility (Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera)
Expertise with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop or Macromedia equivalents
Experience in conducting usability with end users a plus
B.S. or M.S. in Design, Computer Science, or related experience Desired (but not required)
Exposure to leading edge JavaScript frameworks like Dojo and Prototype
Have built consumer tested Flash and Action Script applications
Some exposure to ASP.NET

Guy #2: Web Application Developer
2+ years developing .NET or J2EE Web Applications
3+ years developing business applications
Strong OOA/OOD experience
Strong communications skills
BS or MS in Computer Science Desired (but not required)
XML and REST Web Services
Software Development Kits

Now if you ask me this sounds a bit desperate. However it was a good experience working with these guys. They have a solid product that they can and probably will bring to market. Oh yea tell him Joe Crawford refered you hehe. If you have the capabilities above contact Robert and tell him I said to give you the TV

I started my new job last Thursday and they wanted me to look into implementing Google Maps into the site. They wanted to plot on a map the location of each person who attended a conference. They currently have the attendee information stored in a database so I could get at it easy enough. I had never looked into the Google Maps API nor have I done much with Java-Script. The last few days I have been reading and messing around with it. I finally have an implementation that is working great. There is one issue that I have run into though. Under the map they want to have 2 drop down boxes. One for an industry type and another for the company size. I have the forms posting the form on change so that it will post the selected values of both drop down boxes using ajax, however I cannot seem to get the map to update when the drop down boxes are changed.

It does call the same server.php that the map calls when you move around the map to load only the points that are currently in view on the map. However the drop down boxes do not seem to do anything. I checked the URL that the drop downs create and they show new data however the map does not seem to update. If you have ever created a Google Maps implementation that interacted with a form please leave some comments with any help you could provide. I am going to do some more digging in the morning but so far I have been unable to find anything.

Once I learn a bit more about the Google Maps API I plan to write a well explained tutorial on how to use it with PHP and AJAX and what I have learned by diving in. This will be published on the new site once I get that up and running. I am just waiting for the domain transfer to go through at the moment.