ClintAndrewHall.com

Ok, this really bothered me.

I was directed to a CSSZenGarden design created by Outline2Design that is rather beautiful… I was really impressed, so I looked at their homepage.

Their designs are extremely artistic, and valid XHTML, so I was even more impressed; I wanted to know more about their work and where they manage an office, (mostly to determine if they were a small shop, a front for a larger shop or just “a person.”)  I noticed a copyright link to Zertle, LLC.  Clicking that, I saw that Zertle owns two shop fronts, Outline2Design and PSD2HTML.

That’s when I was absolutely disgusted by the pricing strategy at PSD2HTML.

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When Google introduced their online Calendar solution, I was pleasantly surprised when I received an email soon after containing an upcoming event, GMail offered to “Add it to my Calendar.”  Obviously there were parsing rules in place that recognized a date and/or time, even guessed correctly at the name of the event.

Unfortunately, as in all rules assumed in parsing, mistakes can be made:

My guess is that it was looking at “7.50 ea” and translated that into 7:50 Eastern, but I can’t be sure.  All I know is that it interpreted three items a friend of mine ordered into appointments.  No big deal, but it just reminded me that, even when some parsing rules seem simple and straightforward, someone is going to have a use case that breaks them.

I’ve coded and uploaded a new resume in HTML format.  There were some cool features I thought I’d mention:

Microformatted

I used the hResume microformat, which basically makes it readable by any microformat-parsing utility. Very slick. My microformat plugin for Firefox lit up as soon as I loaded it, telling the who, what, where and when of my resume.

Print / Screen stylesheets

Yes, it’s pretty. But if you’re printing it, you shouldn’t need a color printer, so I set up a print-only section of the sheet. Do a “print preview” to see what that looks like.

Portable

The HTML file is written to be portable, so you can save a copy locally, even from the web, without any external resources. Now I can send my resume in HTML format, instead of Word or Adobe PDF.

A few coworkers and I have traveled to Boston, MA for The Ajax Experience conference at the Westin Waterfront. It’s running today thru Wednesday and is covering the gamut of Ajax patterns, techniques, bells, whistles and hare-brained ideas in the industry.

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I decided to jump head-first into Google Gadgetry with a Color Harmonizer.

It’s currently an “alpha” release, so… basically it’s a pet project I plan on finishing when I’m not bogged down at work.  This also means the code isn’t exactly hardened, so I’m not too worried about someone copying the code!

It was really interesting “diving into” the Google Gadget Desktop API. I’m going to type a blog in the coming weeks regarding my impressions, but I haven’t really gotten deep enough to sound coherent.

In the meantime, you can try it out or check out the source if you like. Keep in mind the archive has a “.gg” extension, but it’s really just a renamed ZIP file.  Just right-click and Save As…

Download my alpha Google Gadget

Everyday you learn something new. MovableType has taught me something about HTML forms I didn’t know (but should have): you can have multiple submit buttons on a form.

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