Evan Sims

Introducing SmugURL

So, Jim convinced me to make the switch from Flickr to SmugMug last week; overall, I’ve been incredibly pleased with the service. I’ll go into the reasons I’m enjoying my time with SmugMug so much more than Flickr in a future post. That said, one aspect I didn’t like was their URL scheme. They have good reasons for doing it, and I can’t fault them for trying to maintain the privacy and security of their users. Heck, I applaud them for it. Still, I like my URLs pretty, and more importantly search engine friendly.

So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and build SmugURL. It takes a obfuscated SmugMug URL (be it a gallery, or a direct link to a photo or video) and makes a pretty version suitable for sharing on your site or with friends.

Take, for example, my Myst Online (God rest it’s soul) gallery on SmugMug.

Original URL: http://evansims.smugmug.com/gallery/4717671_Ywtjp#279209234_a2ALu
SmugURL: http://smugurl.com/evansims/myst_online

They take you to the same place, one just gives some indication of what we can expect to find there. What makes this different from the multitude of other shortening services out there? Not much, really. However, I liked the idea of enforcing the SmugMug username in the URL so there is some indication of ownership at a glance.

Give it a try, and let me know if you encounter any problems. It’s very much a work in progress.

“The Truth According To Wikipedia”

An incredibly thought provoking program on “Web 2.0″, and what it means to the world as well as ourselves as individuals. Fascinating stuff, even if it does feel somewhat biased in it’s representation.

jQuery: Autoscale Element to Parent Width

Recently I’ve been working on a proposed redesign of my school’s online course interface; one of the requirements for my prototype was to create a fairly scalable, fluid interface that will work in any browser. This isn’t difficult in and of itself, but it made another goal of mine somewhat complicated: to make embedded video look good and scale well.

Having already decided to use jQuery, the single greatest tool in my web development arsenal (second only to PHP itself, hehe), I did some searching to try and find some existing code that could scale my videos and images proportionally. I found a couple chunks of code, but neither of them were exactly what I needed, and one was completely busted.

So, I decided to combine a bit of what I’d saw and whip together my own take on it.

Continue Reading ‘jQuery: Autoscale Element to Parent Width’ …

FriendFeed Activity Widget Released

The FriendFeed Activity Widget is a simple WordPress widget plugin that pulls your FriendFeed stream, pretties it up a bit and shares it with visitors to your blog. It’s essentially a lifestream plugin that requires just a few steps to set up.

Give it a look.

My Review of the LG VX 8800 “Venus”

Pros:
* LG quality
* Touchscreen
* Nice, big slide-out keyboard
* Brilliant display
* Great camera

Cons:
* Laggy touchscreen response (probably an OS issue)
* The unlock mechanism is too easy to accidentally activate in your pocket