Keyboard Face

From Google Labs:

Animation: The paper references this movie showing how the distribution of requests to google.com around the world changed through the day on August 14, 2003.

It’s long been on my mind to use the Google Maps API on some of my sites, but the last hurtle has always been getting the raw longitude and latitude to satisfy the Google Maps API. Google Maps allows you to insert their maps into any web page using javascript. The only catch is you have to give it the latitude and longitude. It doesn’t take street addresses. They recommend using a free geocoder (an application that takes a street address and returns a latitude and longitude.), but they don’t give any real recommendations.

Yahoo!, however does have a free geocoder! http://developer.yahoo.net/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html

Matthew Hazlett just wrote a great tutorial on using both of these APIs to create a map application that takes a street address and turns it into a Google Map!
Here’s the link.

http://www.codeproject.com/Ajax/GeoLocation.asp

If you need a good erudite excuse: http://www.red-gate.com/excusegenerator/Excuses.aspx

This is a brilliant idea. Take a look:

Logging Client Side JavaScript Errors to the Server - The Code Project - AJAX / Atlas

Took a little while, but I managed to reset my root password. I’m installing a new blog and forgot the root. Here’s the official documentation on how to do it:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/resetting-permissions.html

This is a little random for this blog, but I just ran across this site and it’s hilarious. You have to read the whole thing.

Panexa

As I mentioned in a previous post, WordPress installed on IIS can be somewhat aggravating because it doesn’t have permalink functionality out of the box. You have to jump through several hoops to get it to work. Mine works for the most part now, but it doesn’t work when you click the “next” link on pages that have large numbers of posts.

I’ve been thinking about a possible solution to this. Would it be possible to use a custom 404 page on IIS to act as a intermediary page that does what mod_rewrite would normally. Here’s how it would work:

1. Set IIS to redirect all 404 errors to a custom page that would handle all interpretation of the permalinks. In IIS, you have the option of specifying whether it i s a file, or a url. It must be set to “url” to work. Here’s a page that goes into this theory. http://evolvedcode.net/content/code_smart404/guide-rewrites.asp

2. All that would be left to do then would be to write a page that interpreted the rules that wordpress gives you and redirects accordingly.

Sorry if this was a little confusing, I’ll be trying this out in a week or so and I’ll let you know the results in a clearer format.

Related Threads from WordPress.org
IIS URL Rewrite Rules?
Enabling Search engine Friendly (Optimized ) URLs in IIS Without Mod_rewrite

This also looks to be promising: IIS Mod’s Free URL ReWrite

A while back I wrote a post on an inventory of existing javascript autocomplete controls. I was writing an application that required one and found most of them to be unsuitable for what I was doing. I ended up using WICK (Web Input Completion Kit) an creating my own ASP.NET user control around it.

An article just came out in CodeProject, however that claims to do everything I was looking for. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, but when I do, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here’s the article: http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/AddingGoogleSuggest.asp

Word tends to autocorrect and insert special characters that look good, but don’t work when put on a web page. They end up looking like this: ‘ “testâ€?.

If you write your blog posts in word and then paste them into your blog, you’ll often times get those funky characters. Here is an explanation as to why it does this and how to avoid it.

To avoid having to spend time searching and replacing numerous word documents I needed to add to the web, I wrote a tool that does it for me. Here it is: Clean Word’s Funky Characters.