I was stunned when I first saw this open source version of extremely popular web based Instant Messenger service, Meebo. I was planning for a long time to develop such a clone and already collected necessary tools. But now, the wait is really over. These cool guys at soashable make a clone of Meebo where you can log into your favorite IM service (Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, AOL) and start chatting with your IM buddies from web. No installation – no hassle. Only for this instant get-set-go feature, meebo got this extreme popularity.
Now you can make your Meebo using the code of soashable. You can download the source code of soashable fom it’s project page on google code, by clicking here
As your forms grow in complexity, you’ll probably find a need to temporarily disable an input – either a button, a text box, or some other element. This is quite easy in HTML – the disabled attribute comes to the rescue. But just how do you style those fields, and convey that they are temporarily disabled?
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When developing a UI for your web application, it’s easy to lose a lot of time waiting for reloads, dealing with browser quirks, even just trying to identify a particular element in the DOM. Here are five handy bookmarklets that will help you finish your client-side web development faster and more effectively. (more…)
Ever setup a demo for a client, only to find you had a syntax error in one of the key files? Or maybe you’ve forgotten to setup the database on the staging server and your boss is staring at a screen of MySQL errors. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to put together a simple frontend-based test suite using Selenium, to help identify these issues sooner than later. (more…)
Fiddler is a request inspector, form tamperer and general debugging proxy for HTTP. Fiddler enables web developers to monitor HTTP requests to their web application, watch request and response headers, tamper with query strings and form values, collect statistics and even rebuild and send new requests. It has inbuilt HTTPS support using a middle-man approach, and can even decode encoded request bodies, as well as render images, and view HEX values and XML. (more…)
Some people look at graphs with blank faces. I happen to study them with a smile, like I did when I still had a cubicle job as a Quality Analyst. Ever since I discovered Google Analytics, I’ve used it religiously to increase traffic for a few niche blogs that I own with reasonable success. Google Analytics is a wonderful tool that gives you varied data to play with, and that you get all this sophistication free is just remarkable. However, data by itself won’t give you answers. Perhaps in a later evolution, GA will be able to generate action items in plain English, but that seems like a dream from a distant future. (more…)
The saga continues. It’s been over a week since Google and Yahoo announced their advertising partnership, and the news is still sending ripples everywhere. New York Times admonished Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang for choosing to “become a pawn of the most dominant company on the Internet”, while Tim O’Reilly defended Yahoo!’s move as a smart way to lose deadweight and focus on what they do best. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington warned about the dangers of a Google monopoly and continues to note the ever-increasing number of top Yahoo! executives jumping ship (114 execs as of last count). (more…)
Whether you’re a pro-blogger, developer, or marketer, keeping an ear to the ground is always important. Of course, there are many ways to do this, and looking at web stats is one of them. Alexa, Comscore, Hitwise, Google Trends – there’s a lot of choices out there, but the last one, due to the sheer volume of data Google has, is something that has great potential. Lately, Google has made some announcements regarding new features of Trends, and though it’s far from perfect, I’m glad to note the active development in this tool.
Do you have a MySpace account? No? Let me guess why.
MySpace has been quite popular for some time, and some people have actually used it to successfully promote their sites/businesses. I, however, could never bring myself to create an account with them. The reason? MySpace is a sight for sore eyes. The pages are crammed with widgets at every nook and cranny, they take forever to load, loud thumping music shocks you into a heart attack, navigation makes you run in circles, and the blogs look like they were stuck in the 90s. Clearly, it’s in dire need of a major makeover, and that’s exactly what they’re promising. So, better late than never? (more…)
For any web developer that’s ever had to build a signup routine, email is the necessary evil that takes pride of place among hated activities. Sure, a simple call to the language’s mail library will send a message through, but the moment the boss wants a HTML email, or users need attachments, everything starts to get tricky. To top things off, automating testing of an email routine can be near impossible with the usual tools. Today we’ll look at some of the options for testing email routines in web applications. (more…)
