My blog has moved

I won’t be making any updates to this blog anymore. I finally setup my own domain for my blog and I will be updating my blog there.

The url is http://www.techy-talk.com

Now I can play around with plug-ins, change themes and all sorts of things. Yay!!.

Comparing Gmail Tasks and Remember the Milk Gmail Widget

Today I read Gmail added a Tasks module from TechCrunch, finally. It’s not part of standard Gmail yet, you have to turn it on in the Labs section of your Gmail account. Go to Settings -> Labs and find Tasks.

Before this was released I used the Remember the Milk Widget in Gmail for my tasks list, so I wanted to see which one is better and whether I should switch to Gmail Tasks.

After comparing them,  I think it depends on what you need from you task list on which one to use. For me I will keep using Remember the Milk, the main reason is it displays on the main Gmail page so it’s easy for me to see.

Remember the Milk is a website for tasks and reminders, and has existed for quite a while now, but I didn’t bother signing up to it before. I didn’t really want to use another website for my task list. Only recently I discovered that there is a Widget for it to integrate with Gmail. So I installed it on my Gmail straight away.

Here is a screen shot of the Gmail Task.

and Remember the Milk Widget

I compared them on a few things

Login

Remember the Milk

Requires a seperate login since it’s a seperate website, it does however have the remember me option so you don’t have to login again. This I think works on a cookie bases so if you access your Gmail at different locations you will have to login again.

Gmail Tasks
Intergrated with Gmail, so no login required.

I like: Gmail, cause I don’t have to login

Adding a task

Remember the Milk

Click on the add tasks button at the bottom, and a textbox will appear to add a task, only task title can be added, other details will  have to be added in later.

Gmail Tasks
Type into the empty list and a text box will appear.
I like: Gmail, cause I don’t have to click on a extra button

Viewing Tasks

Remember the Milk

The widget gets added to the left hand side column, below your contact lists and labels, it does make the page a bit long so I close my contacts lists panel to get the page shorter.

Gmail Tasks

You will have to click on a Tasks menu item on the left hand side, it’s a link and took me a few seconds to find where it is after I first enabled Tasks

I like: Remember the Milk, the widget is always displayed, so it really does remind me of my tasks to do, since I am on Gmail most of the time. Gmail tasks on the other hand, you kind of have to remember you’ve got tasks to do, to click on the Tasks link and check it.

Task Details

Remember the Milk
There is a lot of details you can add for each task, task name, details, which day it is due, priority, time estimation.

Gmail Tasks
I can add a title, due date, and then the details

I like:Remember the Milk, even though I only use the title, it’s got heaps more options if I ever needed to expand on my tasks list, I can.

Extras

There is a few things only Remember the Milk has

• Postpone a task, so you can do it the next day.
• Tasks are displayed in categories on date.
• Only show tasks with a due date or all tasks.

And there is a few thing that only Gmail Tasks has

• Grag and drop to re-order tasks.
• Tips section for newbies.
• You can add multiple lists.

At the end I am still using Remember the Milk, the main reason was because for the Gmail Tasks, I had to click on a Tasks link and pop up a window, and I know I will forget to click that link within a few days, and completely forget about the Tasks feature.

Maybe I am just a bit lazy.

Social Media and ROI

Social media seems to be getting a lot of attention lately, and today I came across an article from Social Media Today on the measurement of ROI.

The article is http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/57710

The article mentions how you would actually measure ROI based on various social networks like Linke-In, Twitter and others.

Create Public Accessible Function in JQuery Plug-in

Sometimes you need to access certain functions within a plug-in outside of the plugin. In my example, the JQuery Plug-in creates a list of items, and writes them out as li objects. But if the user selectes some other option in another drop down list, the items stored in the plug-in had to be cleared. This requires access to objects that were declared in the plug-in, as well as other setting variables.

To do this, here the plug-in name is listSelector, and in it is a public function called clearItems.

(function($) {
$.fn.listSelector= function(options) {

…..

$.fn.listSelector.clearItems=function(){

}

…..

declaring the function in the format of $.fn.pluginname.functionname=function(){} makes the function accessiable outside the plugin it self.

In the actual page where the plugin is created, you would have the following code to access the function.

$(“.list”).listSelector(options);

$(“.dropdown”).change($.fn.listSelector.clearItems());

On the change event of the drop down list with class of drop down, the function of the plug-in will be called.

To access public functions, in the plug-in it self, the same syntax will need to be followed. i.e $.fn.listSelector.clearItems()

This article here is a very good read at understanding the basics of creating a plug-in.

Browsers now knows where you are, through Mozilla Geode

Just read up on the news today and Mozilla released a Geode plugin in Firefox 3. Basically it’s a plugin that allows you to give your specific location to the browser, which is then passed on to the website and the website will give content specific to your location.

Here is the url http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/10/introducing-geode/

This would be greate in mobile devices so you could find things close to you, if you run out of petrol and you needed to find the nearest petrol station for example.This would also save you from keep selecting those country, region and city drop down lists.

I was very excited to try it out, but it doesn’t work for me, maybe because I am in New Zealand and the sample doesn’t contain information in my country yet. I get this error “Error getting your position. Mea Culpa!”

Here is the URL for the sample for all  you lucky people out there who can get it to work.
http://azarask.in/local/

Client and Serverside Button Click in ASP.Net

While I was going through the comments in this post here, someone asked a question around how button click function worked, so I thought I would write a post around this topic.

There are two types of click that can be associated with a button, one is a server side click function, i.e in a function in VB code that gets called, and there is a javascript click function, a function that gets called in javascript when a button is clicked on.

Javascript onclick function gets executed before the server side on click function.

Here are the methods of specifying both.

Javascript click function

1. in asp, specify the javascript to be called using the onclientclick attribute, what ever is specified in this attribute will be executed on the client side.

<asp:Button ID=”button” runat=”server” OnClientClick=”alert(‘me’)” />

2. In the code behind, specify the javascritp to be called using the onclick attribute.

button.Attributes.add(“onclick”,”alert(‘me’);”)

3. Using a library like JQuery, the onclick function can be specified like so

$(document).ready(function(){$(‘#button’).click(function() {alert(‘me’);});});

If you are doing some validation in the javascript and only want the server side click function to execute if the javascript validation is successful then you can return false in the javascript function called. If false is returned in the javascript function, the server side event is not executed.

Serverside Click Function

1. In the design view of the ASP, double click on a button, and a function similar to this should be generated

<asp:Button ID=”button” runat=”server”/>

Private Sub button_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles button.Click
End Sub

notice that the Handles button.click part, this tells that code that this function is used to handle the click event of the button

2. In the source view, there are 2 drop down lists at the top, the left one allows selecting of the different form elements on the page, the right hand side allows viewing of the the functions available for each element. In the left, select the button, and then on the right, select Click, a sub similar to above should be created.

3. You can also specify the click function in the ASP and not have the Handles button.click part in the code.

<asp:Button ID=”button” runat=”server”  OnClick=”button_Click”/>

Private Sub button_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs)

End Sub

This would only work if the parameters specified matches the ones required for the button click event.

How to open .EML file in Vista

.EML file is a email message file used by Outlook express. It doesn’t open in Microsoft Office Outlook. In Vista, Outlook Express is no longer part of the installation, instead it is replaced with Windows Mail.

To Open .EML file, go to the folder where the file is in, right click on the file, and then choose Open With, in this option, select the Windows Mail program, then you should be able to see the file opened in Windows Mail.

Issues with doing Email templates

Recently I’ve been working on writing email templates, it is a lot of pain checking it in the different email clients. Here are some of the problems I encountered and how to fix them.

• CSS is not fully supported by all email application and web clients. This article at Campaign Monitor is a good reference on what is supported and what is’nt. Always code in tables is a good idea.
• Gmail seems to render differently in Firefox and IE so check this on both to be sure
• Cellpadding is not supported in Gmail new version, instead of <table cellpadding=”10″ cellspacing=”10″>, use empty tds on the side and add padding to the first line of the td cell. Adding padding to the table it self doesn’t work in Gmail for some strange reason. So the above method is what I found the safeset.
• Calculate your pixels, remember to add padding and border on top of your cell width to get the full width. If you don’t specify width on your table cells, Outlook 07 do weird things to it.
• Always add px to the end of styles, as not adding this will cause different email clients to display different things
• Outlook 07 doesn’t display borders properly. If you had a table, with different cells and a border under each cell, sometimes in Outlook 07, the bottom border doesn’t gets displayed. Try moving the border style to the first item of the inline style, so instead of style=”padding:10px;border-bottom:solid 1px #000000″, change to style=”border-bottom:solid 1px #000000;padding:10px”. As strange as this may seem this have resolved my problems
• Outlook 07 if you have a border on the outside of table, sometimes the border on the side doesn’t get displayed.  This is because the width of the table is too big, so the entire table is pushed outside it’s area and the border on the side get’s cut off.
• New Gmail seems to have problems with table colspan and row span if they are used on the same cell. Instead of using colspan and row span together, alternatively use an inner table inside of the cell.
• Outlook 07 seems to play weird font wrapping, in other email clients, where one line would get displayed fine in a single cell, outlook 07 seems to wrap the text. So increase your cell width so it fits fine in 07.
• Border dotted is not supported in Outlook 07, it just doesn’t get displayed.

The Four Hundred Hour Workweek

An interesting and sarcastic article by Robert Bruce on the four hundred hour week. It does make us take a look at what is happening in the technology sphere, where outsourcing to other countries for development is becoming more and more common, despite the massive cultures difference and language barrier.

http://www.knifegunpen.com/the-four-hundred-hour-workweek/

The Google Song

We’ve all said this before when someone ask you a question, “Just google it”. Now this is a song about Google to go with that.