Category Archives: Programming

Craft the Backs of Fences

Posted on by Sean Redmond
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Gawker recently published (Oct 28, 2011) an article, “The Most Anal CEO Ever,” that’s a little bit myth-making, a little bit making fun of a man’s eccentricities,  but can’t quite decide if Jobs was brilliantly sweating the small stuff or tyrannically wasting people’s time. The gist is that Jobs cared a lot about things that nobody else would ever care about. His success is left on the table as some kind of argument, and the writer gives in to the temptation of letting his behavior seem pretty crazy (like tearing off his oxygen mask because he hated the design) but doesn’t dig into why this might be a good thing sometimes. On the one hand we see him taking forever to redesign the interior of his private jet with brushed-metal buttons; on the other he sends an excited engineer back to the drawing board to enable rectangles with rounded corners in the Mac interface.
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Open in a new Window with Google Event Tracking

Posted on by Sean Redmond
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Tracks by Steve Crane

Google Analytics event tracking doesn’t play nice when you’re trying to track clicks on links that open in a new window.  I recently ran into this problem on guggenheim.org and found that is a frequently asked, poorly answered question on forums, etc. Here’s how I solved it with a very little bit of jQuery

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Museumtweets Mashup

Posted on by Sean Redmond
8

On April 18 Jim Richardson (@sumojim) posted a Google Spreadsheet containing a list of over 1,500 museums that use Twitter, along with their followers, Klout score and other data:

This has attracted a lot of attention and become a large collaborative project (with major contributions from @museumnerd, @museumsukkel, and @mardixon) but the spreadsheet itself is somewhat hard to read. Google Docs is a great way to work together, but not such a great way to spread information.

Because I thought it would be fun to try (and might save some people a lot of work!), I hacked together a web page that uses the Google Docs API to get the list of Twitter names from the spreadsheet, then uses the Twitter and Klout APIs to fill in the rest (plus a little more). The result, Museums on Twitter, is good enough to go live.

I had to write my own Python library for Klout, AukPilot, so that took a little time and right now (3:00 Sunday afternoon) a cronjob is still filling in the Twitter data. Over the next few days it should stabilize into a good overview of the data SumoJim and other shave collected.

Update #2 (4/27, 11:30pm EDT): I’m starting to add Facebook data. Have it for 40% of entries so far. Not bad for the first pass.

Update #1 (4/25, 1:15pm EDT): Most of the twitter data is getting automatically filled in except for some of the troublesome entries (sorting out what data Klout does and doesn’t always have; blank lines in Jim’s spreadsheet are causing trouble with the Gdocs API, etc)

Planned additions/tweaks so far:

  • Add Facebook data
  • Adding the countries from Jim’s spreadsheet
  • Making the columns sortable (I want this to be a nice JavaScript thing but that’s hard because the list is so long)
  • Click an entry to view its data in more detail

What else? Tweet or comment below

Get Name of Parent Menu Item in Joomla

Posted on by Sean Redmond
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Tiny Tots' MenuHow to get the name of the current page’s parent from the menu (i.e., get the title of the page one level up) in Joomla 1.5:

$menu = JSite::getMenu();
$parent = $menu->getItem($menu->getActive()->parent)->name;

$menu->getActive()->parent returns the id of the parent, which is why you then have to pass that id to $menu->getItem([id])->name. It would be nice to have a parent() function so that you would only need $menu->getActive()->parent()->name, but I quibble.

Photo: University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections, via Flickr Commons