powdahound.com

In order to learn a bit more about screen scraping with cURL, I coded up a script to generate an RSS feed of Safeway’s weekly specials. The number of frames and strange redirects on Safeway.com shows that they probably paid some lifeless company a ton of money to develop it for them (Vertis, in this case). I can only imagine the frustration their engineers must have while trying to debug this stuff.

Try it out, and let me know if it works for you! Safeway Weekly Specials RSS

Last night we released Plaxo 3.0, the product us HipCal guys have been working on at Plaxo for the past year. It feels great to have finally shipped a product and is nice to see all the positive press coverage. There’s nothing more motivating than positive feedback!

Plaxo 3.0’s front end is written primarily in JavaScript, a technology which very few others are using to create applications of this size. All of us have learned more than we ever thought we’d know about this little scripting language! Although JavaScript is fun to use, I’m really enjoying the switch back to PHP which we’re using for some of our future products.

My main contributions to Plaxo 3.0 were the calendar views, new WAP, and Pulse. Features like countdowns and a more interactive upcoming view were ideas we had for HipCal, and it’s great to see them make an appearance in 3.0. It’s also nice to see the new WAP, which I originally started as a small side project, make it to a shippable state within a few weeks, bringing us all one step closer to the “poor man PDA” (now we just need SMS alerts!). Pulse is just plain cool, and I’m very excited to watch it grow over the next few months.

Anyway, back to work!

For the past few weeks I’ve spent my spare time working working on a new version of Plaxo’s mobile access (WAP). It uses PHP, Smarty, and the new Plaxo 3.0 APIs so I’ve had to do very little work myself. The hardest part by far has been getting the layout to look good on all sorts of phones.

Some of the cool features:

• Data is always in sync with Outlook, Mac, Gmail, etc using thanks to 3.0’s sync setup.
• Main page shows my weather and calendar events for today and tomorrow — usually that’s all I want to see!
• Add and edit tasks and notes. The only reason for me to use a paper todo list or grocery list was that I could take it with me. Now I can just keep my tasks/notes in Outlook and access them from anywhere.
  (Outlook tasks and notes aren’t implemented in the most user-friendly way, so I often just use the mobile access through my browser. We’re hoping to get these features added to 3.0 soon!)

If you want to check it out just hit up http://labs.plaxo.com/mobile/ from your phone (should also work from your browser if you don’t have a data plan or want to play with it first.
Feedback welcome in our Google Group.

Had an idea to make a CSS preprocessor that would help solve many of the issues I have with CSS currently. Ideally it would:

Allow nesting of styles
Being able to nest styles ‘inside’ other styles would solve the problem of writing out tons of selector chains.

Automatically insert necessary attributes
For IE and other browsers. IE: automatically add ‘cursor:hand’ whenever ‘cursor:pointer’ is seen. Could also add the IE-specific opacity property

Allow use of variables
It’d be great to be able to reference a color by variable in multiple styles instead of having to update multiple styles when the color changes.

Looks like someone had a similar idea (but currently only does variables).