Google Maps is proving to be the internet phenomenon of 2005. With the web APIs there are some really interesting ideas floating around out there. via Volker we have this tool called GVisit which shows you where in the world your last 20 website visitors have visited from. It’s free and very easy to register, well worth a look.
AJAX Screencast
Lance has created a screencast which demos some of the Domino AJAX samples which the blogging community is talking about at the moment. It’s a very good introduction to some ideas that you may not have come across yet and includes my own name picker amongst them.
Good job Lance.
House Move Off
I have officially called off the estate agents from selling my house now. The market seems to be dropping and although I had a few offers, one of which seems to have been fair in the current market, they simply weren’t good enough to make it worth my while. After all there is no actual reason for me to move, I was simply aiming to stop the commute, but I’ve been doing it for five years, another year won’t hurt.
What became clear is that you can’t rely on your estate agent to push for the best price for your house. I hadn’t really though about it in detail until I read the book Freakonomics recently. My agent was on a fee of 1.5% of the sale value of my house, obviously I want to get the best price for it. If I get an offer that is £7,000 under my asking price that’s quite a big gap from my point of view but from the agent’s side they get a sale and only lose £105. For every thousand it goes under the asking price they lose £15, hardly a good incentive to look for a better offer. Not sure what a better way to approach it would be, maybe a sliding percentage scale so that the closer to the asking price the sale goes the rewards increase.
Anyway, what it does mean is two things, I can continue to save for another 6 months or so to put me in a stronger position the next time I try and, more importantly (!) I can book my place at Lotusphere ’06.
How the Name Picker Works
The other day I described how to use my name picker page. Today I’ll go into a little detail about how it actually works.
The page is mainly javascript, when it loads up, at the simplest level these are the steps it goes through.
Vertigo 42
We went for a few drinkies at Vertigo 42 followed by a curry last night. A good turnout of people made a fun evening, excellent to catch up with everyone, especially the guys who have gone on to bigger and better things. I imagine everyone is feeling a little sore in the head this morning though.
How to use the name picker
I probably did this whole thing the wrong way round, but having posted my new name picker yesterday, I should probably tell you first of all how to use it and secondly how it works.
Name Picker
One of the things which has bugged me for a long time is getting a good name picker. We have been using a servlet on our Domino server for a long time which looks at views in the NAB and allows the user to select individual names to be added to a document in a web browser. Alas the servlet is showing its age and with the advent of AJAX it is about time that we came up with something better.
So the requirements:
A generic popup window which allows a user to select one or many values from a very large view (100,000 documents plus) It has to perform well It has to be cross browser compatable (at least IE and Firefox) It has to be easily re-usableI have put up a demo page which looks at a view in my sister site – 50WordReview.com, over the next few days I’ll put up an explanation of how it works and some of the tricks which I have used.
Update: I have added a couple of articles which will hopefull be useful. How to use the name picker and how the picker works.
I have just noticed that the IBM Lotusphere page has been updated to the 2006 placeholder…
Registration will open soon, check back here for continuing updates. The registration fee will be a special low price of $1395 especially for “friends of Lotusphere” who demonstrate their loyalty by registering early. On October 15, the early-bird rate of $1595 will be in effect, and then on December 3, 2005, the standard conference fee of $1795 will apply.Better warm up the company credit card then.
A Big Ad
Fighting FUD
You’ll notice a new icon on the left of the screen called
Fighting FUD. The big challenge which Notes & Domino faces today
(indeed has always faced) is the competition (normally but not
exclusively Microsoft) trying to increase their market share through
the use of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about the product.
We
often hear that Domino is going away after the next release or that
somehow it is not worth investing in because of some problem it will
introduce in the future. The claims are always baseless but when senior
management are hearing it from sources they (inexplicably) trust there
is a constant low level firefight going on by us to keep things alive.
What
has been lacking is a central resource which offers well structured
defence of the erroneous claims. Christopher Byrne over at the Business Controls Caddy has started just such an area. Hopefully it will make life just that little bit easier.
Matt White 