Toluu : Wait till I come!

Wait till I come!

Chris Heilmann - Accessibility, Web Development and Pragmatism - can talk, will travel

Show the world your Twitter type (using PHP and Google Charts)November 23

I just had a bit of fun with Twitter and the Google charts API. You can now add an image to your blog, web site or wherever and show a picture of what kind of a twitter user you are. All you need to do is embed an image and give it the right source:

For example my user name is codepo8, which would be:

And the resulting image is:

?user=codepo8

For John Hicks for example it is:

And the resulting image is:

?user=hicksdesign

How it is done and how to “change stuff”

You can download the source code and have a play with this (I hope this will not spike my traffic :) so it might go offline if that is the case). There’s really not much magic to this:

First I get the user name and filter out nasties:

$user = $_GET['user']; $isjs = "/^[a-z|A-Z|_|-|\$|0-9|\.]+$/"; if(preg_match($isjs,$user)){

Then I set the content type to show the image and use cURL to get the information from the user’s twitter page.

hea

Paris Web - Working in the nowNovember 14

Yesterday I was one of the speakers at Paris Web and my talk was “Working in the now”:

Working In The Now - Paris Web

My presentation covering several ways how you can use nowaday's free web offers to save money and time for your company and thus securing your job.

Read "Working In The Now - Paris Web" with Easy SlideShare

Watch "Working In The Now - Paris Web" right here, right now

Originally I meant to talk about HTML5 goodies and how to simulate them with Flash and DHTML right now (writing a small abstraction library) but seeing the latest rounds of crashes a

Easy Flickr - just the photos pleaseJune 13

Following the accessibility hack of YouTube I thought the same could be done for Flickr, and here it is:

Easy Flickr is a very basic interface to look for photos and click through them 20 at a time. It works with and without JavaScript.

If you want to host the interface yourself, you need a server with PHP and cURL, but that’s it. Simply unpack the zip file and change the look and feel by changing the style sheet.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, flickr, interface, easy, simple

Making YouTube easier and more accessible (updated 12/06)June 12

Warning: The YouTube API is flaky at the moment, so there might be some outages!

At this year’s Accessibility2.0 conference in London Antonia Hyde from United Response asked the audience for technological solutions to make the social web easier accessible for people with learning disabilities.

Her presentation Rich Media and web apps for people with learning disabilities is available on slideshare.

Whilst not being able to tackle all the issues mentioned (probably the biggest one being captioning) I took some time to play with the YouTube API to create a much easier interface to watch videos. The following screenshot shows the Easy YouTube Player in action:

Using the player

You can use the player in several ways, the easiest is to just copy and paste a youtube url in the url field. However, there is also a sort of REST interface that allows you to do more:

http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/

Shows the player without any movie loaded, empty search

280North bring Keynote to the webJune 5

I’ve first seen a preview of this at the first JavaScript developer meetup in San Francisco earlier this year, but now the 280 North guys have released their very Keynote-esque presentation editor for the web.

Have a play with it and especially check the key-commands and drag and drop support. The shape designer is also pretty nifty. That said, I am on a hefty MacBook pro, so I’ll check the performance on the old work-horse Thinkpad at home later.

The most amazing thing about this is happening under the hood: the developer wrote a library that abstracts browser rendering engines using Canvas, SVG and Flash (on a per-need basis) into a unified language – Objective J which is – as the name suggests – a mapping from Objective C to JavaScript.

I tried to milk them for more information when we met briefly (yes, the guys involved did work at Apple before – obvious, isn’t it), and will try to cover this interesting concept in more detail soon on Ajaxian or YDN.

Technorati Tags: showcase, presentations, 280north, canvas, flash, svg, keyn