Jfoucher.com

This is the challenge I set myself for 2010 : Develop one webapp per month during the whole year. Read more about it on my portfolio

1. You need to have it open in your browser to appear online

2. Nobody is ever online for that exact reason.

3. All my contacts disappeared

For no apparent reason, none of my contacts are showing in wave right now… Kind of reduces the usability.

4. Too many ads in independently developped “gadgets”

5. Counter intuitive interface.

• “pinging” someone just opens a new wave with that contact : I could have done that myself… Do something more, like, I don’t know, send an email
• can’t search trough a list to add contacts that are on wave

And now (oh the irony) to the Wave invite giveaway.

Very easy : leave a comment on this post with your real email address, and on Monday at 12 GMT I’ll pick ten winners. (yes I have that many unused invites…)

Have a good weekend

You’ve probably seen that cafepress let’s you customize your sigg bottle, and you also no doubt know that water bottles are bad for the environment, as only a small proportion are recycled, and many end up scattered around natural areas, not least of which, due to their rather floating nature, our beaches. Sigg bottles are a durable, light and trendy alternative, and today we are going to design our own, but not using cafepress’ flash designer!

There is a better and cheaper way to get your custom sigg bottle.

No, because there is a better and cheaper way to get your custom sigg bottle. Don’t want to pay $28 for a bottle ? Don’t worry, this solution will get you a three dollars discount per bottle, which added to our 5 dollars cafepress coupon below, will get you a brand new, custom SIGG bottle for around 23 dollars! Of course, you’ll have to buy three, because the coupon is only valid for purchases above $50, but these bottles are such great, eco-friendly gifts, that three of them is not nearly enough!

Anyway, to get a cheaper custom sigg bottle, we need to open a cafepress account, and set up a shop. Don’t worry, it’s completely free. First, click on “sign in” at the top of the home page in cafepress, then click continue once you reach the screen below.

You arrive at the page shown below where you enter your registration information. Fill all the fields in and then click on “Join now”.

Fill in more info and then click “Open your shop!”

You are now given a choice to open a basic or a premium shop.  For our purposes, a free basic shop is sufficient, so click on “Open a basic shop”

Fill in some more details on the next page and click on “Submit”, then click on “Build your shop once you reach the page below

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to insert a product, preferably a Sigg botlle into the shop. Once you reach the screen below, you can keep going.

Draw your image using Gimp or Inkscape, or whatever software you are used to.

Great, you’ve added a Sigg bottle to your shop. The only slight problem is that it’s completely white. We really need to do something about that! So, is your image ready? No? Well let’s go then. Cafepress provides a template for the image on the Sigg bottles, and I suggest you follow it to get an image of the proper size. The only thing is that it’s at 200 dpi, which seems a bit low for printing, so I suggest you scale it up to at least 300 DPI, or a pixel size of 975×1800. Here is my template at 600 DPI

Draw your image using Gimp or Inkscape, or whatever software you are used to, or just choose a photograph from your collection. The thing to keep in mind is that the shape of the template is the maximum size of your image, but it can be smaller…

Ok, so now you have your image the way you like it, I suggest you give it a try on the flash designer. When you are entirely satisfied, click on “edit” below the image of the bottle to get to the page shown on the screenshot below.

On the right hand side, click on the “select image” button, then on “Upload image”, which brings you to a page where you can upload a number of images, choose and upload your image. It takes a few steps, which I’m not going to detail here.

Once you selected the image to apply to your bottle, you can tweak it’s size, but if you used the template, it should fill all the space available, see screenshot above.

Click next, and you can write a title, a description and choose a price for your item. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to buy it at the base price later, so set any markup you like. I didn’t touch anything, as it doesn’t matter for our purposes. But feel free to change things if you want to sell your custom bottle later.

Once you click “save and finish”, your custom Sigg bottle is created! You can now buy it at the base price by following these instructions : first, click on the “your shops” link at the top left of the page shown above, then on “buy” on the same line as your shop’s name, and then “Click to buy from your own shop”, after which you get to the product page for your custom bottle, which you can then buy following normal procedures.

When you get to the checkout form, fill in the following Cafepress coupon code: POPPYSNEEZE to get a further $5 discount, on purchases over $50.

Cafepress coupon code: a further $5 discount

And that’s it, your three brand new, custom, home made sigg bottles for $76.22 including shipping.

A further tip if you want a different design on each bottle : as the free version of cafepress doesn’t allow you to sell more than one product of each type in each shop, open several free shops with a different Sigg bottle in each!

I hope you enjoy this post. If you decide to follow this tutorial, send a pic of your bottle in the comments.

After some beta testing and subsequent bug squashing, WP-Feedly is ready for prime-time, and available for download.

I’ve been working on my profesionnal portfolio these days, and I’m thinking about releasing the theme. It’s a very clean and white design, with a jQuery carousel to present my past work. You can see a demo on Jonathan Foucher’s portfolio. So, should I release it? Do you like it?

UPDATE : A post sort plugin already exists, take a look at this one.

You’ve probably noticed that there is no option to sort posts any other way than by date in Wordpress. I’ve had several requests to be able to sort post from the oldest to the newest, which Wordpress cannot do with a simple one button option.

I think I can hear the critics already : “What, but that is sacrilegious! It’s not a blog anymore then!” but maybe these users do not want a blog per se, but only an easy to maintain, good looking and accessible website, for whatever purpose. If you had written a novel and wanted to publish it in installments, it would only be logical to start with the first chapter, right? And if you wanted a glossary, the only viable option is to have it sorted alphabetically.

So, what about a plugin that allows you to sort in date order, reverse date order, and alphabetically? Should it have the ability to sort posts on other criteria? Does something like this already exists?

I’ll await some feedback before starting work on this, so don’t hesitate to post a comment.

The Feedly-like theme for Wordpress has reached the beta stages. I would like to do a limited round of testing before releasing this theme. Feedly changes so quickly that I’m having trouble keeping up! Only today, I noticed they added the date in a little box on the left hand side, I must admit it’s quite useful to see at a glance when the posts were published. I implemented it straight away on WP-feedly, of course!

Below is a video showing how window size changes are handled, using adaptive CSS with Javascript. I  think this is quite useful for users with smaller screen, or for people who do not use their browser full screen. For mobile users, however, this might not be the best solution.

The official page for WP-Feedly: More information on WP-Feedly. To sign up for the limited private beta, go there, thanks!

I  really like feedly, which I use to read my feeds in Firefox. The appearance and the functionnality are great. It’s a pity it’s only available for Firefox, as I tend to use Chromium more often now.

Anyway, I decided I could make a Wordpress theme that would mimic the looks and functionality of Feedly.  I think I’m getting there, I’d say I’m at about 70% of what I want to achieve. Of course, not all the features of feedly will be available, as some, such as the ability to mark an item read, to not make sense for a blog. Others will come little by little in future release, as I don’t think they are that important to usability, such as the popup boxes when posting to Twitter or delicious, for example.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of what I have at the moment, so please tell me what you think !

EDIT: It’s ready ! Download it now

You’ve probably already tried this web site, that allows you to create a caricature of yourself, manga style. It’s pretty well done, and I don’t think there’s another equivalent. The only problem is that you only get a small, low quality image by email when you’re done editing your avatar. This image is 178×178 pixels, which is fine to use as an avatar on most sites, and even to display on the web.

But I have to admit I’m a high res addict, and just had to find a way to get a better resolution picture.

The solution is easy if you’re using Firefox as your browser. I made use of the zoom feature to zoom in on the flash where the avatar creation occurs, and as flash does not lose resoution as you zoom in on it, you just have to print your screen when you are at the size you want and voilà! your high(er) res mangatar!

Click on the image on the right to view the full resolution version of my avatar. Once you get your own high-res avatar, it is much easier to vectorize it properly, using for example Inkscape or Vector Magic.

You can also download my own avatar in svgz format

I just wrote a simple plugin to auto tag new posts. It sends the content to tagthe.net and yahoo and gets back related tags. I must say these
work quite well and can be left on auto pilot if you’re like me and not a big fan of tagging your posts…

I use it on Renewable Energies from the Web, and it seems to be doing quite well.

Download