Erik Lopez .net

I think the candidates on Lost are up for the Nobel Peace Prize. If Obama qualifies for nothing, then crash landing on an island works. - March 09, 2010 20:32:31

Jan 21, 2009 0

Pipes? I got your Pipes right here.

So I recently found myself using Yahoo! Pipes.  I wanted to aggregate all the RSS feeds from local newspapers, filter the articles for those that mentioned the Company (which is what I will henceforth call the place at which I hold a steady job), and consume it in the Company’s new web app I’m working on.  I’d heard of Pipes a few years back, but I never had the reason to use it.  It’s a great tool and dead simple to use.  We could probably use it to replace the (what I’m sure is expensive) news aggregator service that culls industry news and articles that mention the Company from publications across the country.  Well, maybe eventually.

Anyway, creating the pipe was easy and using the interface was actually quite fun.  I’m pulling from almost 40 different feeds, filtering for mentions of the Company’s name in both the title, and the articles themselves, and now have one single feed I can now use.  On the web app end I’m using the ever-powerful and omnipotent jQuery to consume the feed in the JSON format.  Now, I’m not going to go in-depth in how this is accomplished, but rather I want to throw out this “gotcha” moment I experienced and hopefully, help at least one of the two people who will ever see this post avoid my mistake.

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Jan 16, 2009 1

I <3 Twitter

I don’t remember what I was doing or where I was when I heard about Twitter, but I certainly remember the impressions I had. What is a “microblog” and how on earth could that ever be useful? As a web developer I certainly thought of myself as embracing new web technologies and platforms (I cringe to use the term “Web 2.0″ because of the buzz-wordy, hype status it has now obtained), but this Twitter… Why would I ever want to send the internet-at-large a sparse 140-character message on what I was up to. I mean, what the heck? I’m not even interested in what I’m doing at times. Now this web app comes along and expects me to remember to stop what I’m doing and compose a message devoid of most vowels like: “In bdrm thnkng abt wht 2 do on satrdy.” Pass.

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Jan 12, 2009 0

Parallax navigation

My first major web design conference experience was last August at An Event Apart 2008 in San Francisco.  It was an awesome conference and if travel restrictions are lifted at my day job anytime soon I’m hoping to go back in ‘09.  During the conference, or more specifically, during Dan Cederholm’s presentation, Implementing Design: Bulletproof A-Z, many of us were first introduced to Clearleft’s Silverback application’s website and it’s clever use of CSS to mimic an animation technique called “parallax scrolling”.  Paul Annett, Clearleft’s designer, gives a great explanation of the effect and the underlying CSS over at Vitamin.

When I first saw the technique in action, I was blown away by both the simplicity of the technique, as well as the cleverness of it all.  Sometimes at the ol’ 9 to 5, I don’t think I’ll ever have opportunity, let alone the time, to devise and implement such innovation.  While the artistry is not lost on me, I felt the parallax effect could be used somewhere more visible to the masses in order to give a page’s design some sense of motion.  In order to do that, I wouldn’t be able to rely on CSS alone, so I turned to the all-powerful jQuery.

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About me

Erik Lopez is a 29 year old Web Developer living in Phoenix, AZ.

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