TagsTagsHere's a very handy Javascript bookmarklet I whipped up yesterday, when I realized I was often searching the LGF archives for phrases on other sites; for example, when I was writing the post about the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, I wanted to search LGF for my previous ...
Tech Note, Little Green Footballs, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, Search Engine, Bookmarklet
Tonight I'm happy to announce a new LGF web app that I think will prove incredibly useful to our LGF Pages authors: the LGF Pages Dashboard. With the LGF Pages Dashboard, you can browse and search all the Pages you've posted, sort by the various columns, edit your Pages in a ...
Little Green Footballs, Tech Note, LGF Pages, LGF Pages Dashboard
Here's a tech note that will, as all tech notes do, almost immediately turn into a Friday night open thread. I've gotten several complaints about the LGF front page crashing in the Opera browser, or taking forever to load if it doesn't crash. I traced the problem to a recent change in ...
Little Green Footballs, Tech Note, Javascript, Opera, Browsers, jQuery, Fat Lady
In the never-ending search for a faster loading web page, I'm pleased to announce that more than 440K has been trimmed out of LGF's front page today, and loading that bad boy should be much snappier now. I discovered that the Google +1 buttons on the front page were loading about ...
Tech Note, Javascript, Google +1, Opera, Asynchronous, LGF Blog Engine
I originally started writing this Tech Note just to test our new source code formatting feature (powered by jQuery.Syntax), but it turned into more of a tech article than a note. I'll be describing a technique for making pages load faster, that should be of interest to any web developer ...
Tech Note, jQuery, Linux, shell script, CSS, Programming, Compression
We have a very cool new feature in LGF Pages today; to help you easily pick appropriate tags for your Pages, we now have a magical "Suggest Tags" button that will analyze the text of your post and extract the relevant keywords, then show you a list of alphabetically sorted ...
LGF Pages, Analysis, Tags, Cool New Feature, Content Analysis Tools, Search Engines, Tech Note
Today we're unveiling a brand new tagging system for your LGF Pages, making it much easier to create new tags and reuse previously created tags with a personalized autocompletion feature. The LGF Pages posting bookmarklet now uses your personal "tag library" (all the tags you've ever used for your Pages) to ...
LGF Blog Engine, jQuery, Tech Note, Tags, Javascript, LGF Pages, Little Green Footballs
I'm glad to announce that the Internet Explorer 7 bug I described yesterday has been worked around, and IE7 no longer crashes when loading LGF. LGF reader "samgak" deserves the hat tip for finding the solution: IE7 has a serious bug in its CSS parser, that strikes when you use a ...
Tech Note, Little Green Footballs, LGF Blog Engine, jQuery, Javascript, Internet Explorer, IE7
jQuery 1.6 has been released, and after testing, it's now installed at LGF. Here's a thread to report any problems or anomalies. I've tested so far in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox in Mac OS, and Internet Explorer 8 in Windows, with no problems. There is a problem several people have reported with ...
Tech Note, Little Green Footballs, LGF Blog Engine, jQuery, Javascript, Internet Explorer, IE7
Since adding the Search Requests feature to our Referrers page, I began to notice that a large number of our hits from Google were coming from their "Image Search" results pages. So to make things a little more interesting, I added the code to pop up the images that people ...
Little Green Footballs, Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Referrers, Search Engine, jQuery
Long ago, in an LGF application that relied on a custom-made flat file database now lost in the mists of antiquity, we had a feature that showed the actual search queries that brought visitors to our humble abode. This feature was dropped when we switched over to a grown-up MySQL database, ...
Little Green Footballs, Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Referrers, Search Engine, MySQL
Tonight I'm pleased to announce that I've reinstalled jQuery 1.5, the latest version of the world's best Javascript framework. I did some debugging and discovered that the problem I experienced earlier this week was caused by a jQuery plugin I was using to fix the transparency in PNG images, for ...
Tech Note, Little Green Footballs, LGF Blog Engine, jQuery, Javascript
Woo hoo! jQuery 1.5 is out! The world's best Javascript framework just got better, with big performance boosts in some of the core jQuery functions used to traverse the Document Object Model. And you gotta love that, if you're a Javascript nerd. As I am. I've installed the new version, so here's ...
Tech Note, Little Green Footballs, LGF Blog Engine, jQuery, Javascript
Both YouTube and Vimeo recently switched their video embedding code to a new style that allows videos to play on all kinds of devices, including mobile devices that don't have Flash installed (like the iPhone). Today I added the new IFRAME code to the types of video embedding code supported by ...
Little Green Footballs, Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Video, LGF Pages
Twitter recently launched a new Tweet Button feature, and I'm trying it out today at LGF. As you can see, it includes a count of the number of times the link to the article has been posted at Twitter. I'm letting you know this because I need to test what happens ...
Tweet Button, Twitter, Statistics, LGF Blog Engine, Little Green Footballs, Tech Note
A couple of new features to announce today: First, there's a new option you can set in your 'My Account' page, called the "display name." This is the name that appears on your byline when you post something in LGF Pages; for example, I've set my "display name" to my full ...
Little Green Footballs, Tech Note, Front Page, LGF Pages, Ajax
So, without telling anybody, Twitter suddenly changed their remote login system to use OAuth instead of Basic Authentication, and my code to do Twitter updates automatically when I post to LGF stopped working. What? They did tell everyone, repeatedly, that they were going to change it? Oh. OK, my bad. Anyway, the ...
The new feature of the day is an option for registered users to subscribe to a thread of comments, but only receive replies to your own comments. At the bottom left of the comment posting form is a pop-up menu that displays these choices: Not subscribed is the default state. You won't ...
Comments, Email, Software, LGF Blog Engine, Little Green Footballs, Tech Note
Registered LGF readers have a new way to keep track of comments: you can now subscribe to an email list for any thread of comments (either a front page article or an LGF user's Page), simply by clicking a checkbox. Any thread that allows comments now has a checkbox to ...
Comments, Email, Software, LGF Blog Engine, Little Green Footballs, Tech Note
I have a coding project today: I'm adding an often-requested feature to the LGF Blog that will let registered users choose to receive any new comments posted in a thread via email. This will make it easier to keep track of comments for any threads you're interested in, or any ...
Comments, Email, Software, LGF Blog Engine, Little Green Footballs, Tech Note
Running a site like LGF with a custom-designed content management system is a constant process of finding and opening bottlenecks. If you’re lucky, the bottlenecks result from an easily addressed database design problem. Tonight I discovered a bandwidth bottleneck that negatively affected every page served by the hamsters in our web ...
Following up on yesterday’s post about our shocking (albeit unintentional) abuse of the bit.ly API, I emailed my contact at bit.ly and let him know about the changes in the LGF Blog code, and got this reply: Thanks! The number of /shorten requests from your account has fallen dramatically. You’re ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, Retweet, John Resig, jQuery, Programming, Ajax, Twitter
Here’s an email I recently received from the URL-shortening service bit.ly, a popular Twitter-related service that I use to automatically shorten URLs for LGF-related tweets. The nice thing about bit.ly (and j.mp, it’s the same service) is that it doesn’t just shorten URLs; if you register an account, it also ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, Retweet, John Resig, jQuery, Programming, Ajax, Twitter
So I have this Mac Pro desktop machine, that I got in April 2008: the 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Xeon model. When Amazon delivered it into my eager hands and I first powered it up, it was almost totally silent. It was excellent for recording, video-making, anything that required a quiet ...
We have a new feature in our commenting system, requested by several people. If you click the ‘Reply’ or ‘Quote’ buttons on the top line of a comment to post a reply to someone’s comment, you’ll see a new checkbox appear at the top left of the comment posting box, ...