What if this were bold?

There was a fairly recent change to Gmail, where infrequently used labels could be hidden. It lets you keep your important labels in the left sidebar, and if you have 10 more hidden labels you click a little button that says “10 more” to show a menu with all of these labels. Chats, Sent Mail, Drafts, Starred, All Mail, Spam, and Trash also behave like normal labels for this purpose. This is a nice feature, in my opinion. I usually don’t care about how many spam messages I have, so I can tuck it away from my normal view. More importantly, I use a lot of filters (50 or 60) to organize incoming mail under labels (I have 32 at the moment), but  most of these only occasionally receive mail and it’s nice to have them hidden too.

When a label has unread messages in, it turns bold. For me, this used to mean that to see if I had any new mail, I looked both at the top of the inbox and scanned the labels for a bold one. Now, to see if any of my hidden labels have new messages, I have to click the button to show these labels. The fix, in my opinion, is to turn the “25 more” text bold when hidden labels have unread messages (see picture). I know it’s small, but this would save compulsive email checkers like myself a fair amount of annoyance. (Yes, I’m aware that I can just move all my labels out of this menu, but I like this feature too much to stop using it because of this.)

A small caveat here is that if you move the Spam label into this menu, you will always have unread messages (unless you don’t get spam, or mark it as read). Spam could be ignored for the purposes of bolding the button, but this might be considered unexpected behavior. Regardless, I’m sure the smart people on the Gmail team could figure something out.

I couldn’t find anyone else talking about this. This may be due to poor Googling on my part, or perhaps nobody else really cares. Hopefully other people have thought about it and we can get the attention of somebody at Google.

Edit: I found another person’s idea for a solution to this problem here.

Margin appearing in Chrome, but not FF 3.5 or IE 7.

It’s interesting to see how my brain has grown so accustomed to the Google search page that even a minor change like this stands out instantly.

I’m sure the answer is something simple that I’m missing, but I haven’t figured it out yet. It doesn’t seem dependant on whether I’m logged into Google or not, and is also independent of whether I search through the browser search bar or from google.com directly. I was going to browse the source and CSS to see where it’s coming from, but after glancing at this:

Hurk.

I quickly lost interest.

There is a slight improvement; http://www.ctrl-c.us/ now redirects to http://ctrl-c.us/ :-)

OK, it’s now way past my bedtime. I’m getting up in just a few hours to go on another epic hike. Pictures to follow.

So, to keep my blood pressure down, I put things into perspective for myself by making a list of seven document formats Scribd could have chosen to use, but didn’t.

1. Upon request, print the document out and mail it to the users, preferably from a distribution center somewhere in Africa.
2. Put each word from the document in a Web 2.0-esque cloud visualization where the size of each tag reflects the relative frequency of the word’s occurrence.
3. Save the document as a series of images. Upload these to Facebook. When a user requests the document, tag the user in all of those pictures so that he/she can view them.
4. Offer RealPlayer streaming videos of somebody slowly scrolling through the document.
5. Record someone reading the document, set it to soothing piano music with a psychedelic visualization, and submit it to YouTube in a series of 10-minute segments.
6. Ask the user for his/her phone number. Split the document into 140-byte chunks and send them sequentially as SMS messages.
7. Write out the document in 1:1000 scale on the ground using large rocks. Then provide links to the appropriate Google Map coordinates.

Unfortunately I was too lazy to rescue comments, so they’re all gone. We’ll have to see how commenting goes; right now I have to approve comments except by registered users, so at least the spam won’t be showing up on the site (just my inbox).

A couple of thoughts about Wordpress:

• My favorite part is definitely the admin experience. The admin pages have a beautiful layout with a very nice color scheme, rounded corners, and AJAX-y goodness. The admin panel is also very powerful and extremely intuitive; all in all, I love it.
• I think that the weakest part of Wordpress is actually the themes. I spent a ton of time trying to find one I liked and eventually settled for a moderately okay one. People who write Wordpress themes need to be introduced to two important concepts: (a) It is not an efficient use of space to only use the middle fifth of the monitor (see this crap-tacular example), and (b) An 10pt serif font is awful for a blog. People have big monitors these days, and readability is important.

Alright, I have to go to bed right now. I have been working on this instead of school work, which unfortunately leaves me with a register allocator to finish writing by the end of the day tomorrow :(

(As an interesting and only slightly related aside, the Facebook chat was implemented on an open-source framework called Thrift developed in-house by Facebook engineers, and is in part written in Erlang. The developers’ notes on this are an interesting read.)

Unfortunately, I have since found a handful of Facebook friends who like to communicate using the chat feature, but not using conventional chat. I don’t usually keep a Facebook window open, so I don’t usually get to talk with them this way.

I had a similar problem a long time ago when Google first added chat to GMail. I don’t like using my browser to chat (because, among other reasons, a dedicated client is a lot better at it). As soon as I was able to add Google chat to Pidgin, though, I started using it daily.

Today, though I found a similar solution for my Facebook dilemma: a Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin. It is supposed to be able to integrate my Facebook chat buddies and status, among other things. Sounds great!

…except that it makes Pidgin segfault for me. Oops. Maybe after a few patches?

Update: How about a Pidgin plugin for Twitter? I would totally use Twitter if I didn’t have to go to a website to use it (I don’t have SMS on my phone).

Update: Comments are back up with a captcha. I made it partially with this code. I also added some random lines that cross the image. I tried to make it fairly easy to read while still (in my mind) being moderately difficult to crack. Hopefully I won’t have to deal with more random links to porn, etc cropping up in the comments. I also added the nice property of preserving the information you type into the boxes, so that if you get the captcha wrong (for example) the text you’ve entered will be there when you go back to the page.

I’ve allowed some tags, and this introduces a problem: you can submit a comment that doesn’t have proper closing tags, such as

<del>I think I'm funny

As I was working on the form validation, I came across a tidbit of knowledge I hadn’t been aware of. Apparently, the official specification for a valid email address is in RFC 2822 and can be implemented with this monster of a regular expression. Lovely.

Update: I’d love it if you’d like to try to break the comments, but please do it in the testing area of my site at http://ctrl-c.us/testing/. Also, please don’t try anything too malicious. If you notice something, leave a comment to let me know. Thanks.

In other news, when I most recently checked this site has climbed to somewhere on the second page of Google search results for both my name and “ctrl-c”. Hopefully this is going up quickly. I still have several features I’m working on which I have yet to roll out. I’m almost done with the comments code, but I haven’t done the submission form (along with all the proper stripping to get rid of nasty injections…ugh). Also, I’m going to be adding nice syntax highlighting for code samples, which should both look cool and necessitate the writing of an actual article about code :) Finally, I’ve yet to add admin pages, but this is pretty low priority.

I started with big ambitions: I was going to make a website with blog articles, rants, and tutorials. I was going to have comments sections for each article, an RSS feed, and a nice admin interface for everything. It was going meet the latest XHTML and CSS standards; it was going to render exactly the same in every browser from Opera 1 to Firefox 3, including every version of Internet Explorer released during my lifetime. It was going to have a beautiful PHP backend (ok, now I’m having trouble keeping a straight face), with wrappers for every database function and abstractions for each reusable code tidbit.

Needless to say, my goals have not been met. I feel pretty proud of what I’ve accomplished in a day, though, so I decided to put it up and update it as soon as I get a chance.

The design is based on a very nice 3-column layout that I stole; so nice, in fact, that after I finished the CSS and layout it rendered perfectly in IE6 and 7, even though I had only been testing it in Firefox. Amazing. I haven’t checked to see if the finished product works with IE, but it should. It seems to work fine with Firefox 3 and Opera 9, so I’m happy.

I’m not done with the PHP, but at least it is reading the articles out of the database. I’d forgotten how annoying PHP is, but I quickly remembered as I hacked out some of the ugliest code I’ve seen. I also have an aversion to MySQL (I’m a Postgres fan), but it’s all my host has. The biggest thing I still need to add is an admin page to post new articles; right now my method involves copying and pasting into the database :P

Well, that’s about it for now. Keep posted for updates! I already have plans for some articles that I should put on paper (or phpMyAdmin, as the case may be) within the next week.

Update: Upon further inspection, I was pleased to find that this site passes XHTML and CSS validation. I was much more pleased to see that it renders well on a variety of OS/browser combinations, including Linux/FF3, Linux/Konqueror, Linux/Opera 9, Windows/FF3, and Internet Explorer from 5.5 to 7. There is a small bug in IE 8 beta 1; square bullets are rendered as huge open boxes instead of the little solid squares that every other browser uses. This little gem is apparently a result of the font I’m using and is a fine example of the utterly ridiculous browser behavior web designers have to put up with. Of course, this is a beta browser, so it may well be fixed by release. Little annoyances, though, are hallmarks of the IE experience for web developers—this may well be its own rant someday, but for now let me just say that Microsoft, after years of criticism on this front, has yet to introduce its IE team to many of the finer points of web standards.