Posted on

Great Big Long Name

Firstly, before I get to the main course .. I fixed one more problem with Search Potato this evening. The Delicious search didn’t like any more than ONE search term. Ha ha. Wasn’t hard to fix, just a str_replace(" ", "+", $searchString);.

Now, the more exciting (at least to me) news.

The Archer Technology Services website has had a massive overhaul. I’ve got three (and more on the way) apps in beta, and they’ll be up soon. They are small pieces of software, with very simple functionality.

I may have said this before, but a great author gave some advice in regards to entering the world of writing. Write. Short stories, poems .. Something. Just write.

To me, this translates into software development. For myself, in particular. My vision for the immediate future is to release small apps, little functionality, but get content done. I will learn, make mistakes, get better.

It’s been a long few nights working, and I’d like to not be comatose for the kids on a saturday morning :). Ha ha.

Cheers,

Posted on

Mashed .. SearchPotato?

[Addendum: 11th January 2007]

Search Potato is now working much better. In both IE and Firefox. Got rid of the "const" declarations, but that didn’t solve the problem.

The main problem was with the structure of the ajax functionality. There was no waiting between calls, which was causing some problems. So I chained the search calls .. Google _then_ Flickr _then_ Delicious. There were a few more problems, mainly with the string literals, which are now hopefully all removed and replaced with constants (although not truly, because you just have to cross your fingers and hope they never get magically assigned elsewhere).

There may have been other issues, but I’m still without sleep. I have got about 2 hours in the last 48 .. which isn’t a big deal for some I’m sure .. but for this stupid black duck, it is. A big. Deal.

Night.

—

For about one and .. well, closer to two .. nights, I’ve been working on a test web app. Not so much what it does, but _how_. That and the structure.

(I can see daylight through the blinds, so this will be short and probably a little crazy).

Anyway.

Search Potato is a mashup search of Google, Flickr, and Del.icio.us, using PHP, Javascript .. and deepening (a word?) the simple js, Ajax.

And guess what! It’s NOT IE compliant! … Burg. I tells ya, perhaps I should have tested earlier in the evening on IE, as I was going along. But no, here I was thinking testing in Firefox was enough.

Perhaps I’ll get around to fixing the problem. Probably not.

Cheers, Good Health, and ‘Nuff Said