Tag Archives: Tool

Deadline tool – deadlinez.com

Over the weekend I had an idea and after day and a half (mostly spent in design) the final “product” is ready. It’s a tool for deadlines.

The idea: It came when I had tough conversation with a client of mine about some money which he owe. I wrote a short email notifing him that if he don’t pay within 2 weeks, we are stopping the supprt and cutting one of his main functionality (since he didn’t pay for it) of his app. And I was thinking: Woudn’t be nice to have a tool which could track the deadline like “You have 14 days, 23 Hours and 30 Minutes to pay is, otherwise – no support” – short and clear. Well this is what the Deadline tool is doing. Here it is:

deadlinez.com
deadlines.chankov.net

The main functionaliy: At the first screen you need to select date and time then the deadline is reached as well as the target name and the task (message) which need to be completed. When you submit the form it will create a short url which is the actual counter. This url can be send to the target.

deadlinez.com - Deadline tool

You can also set target’s e-mail as well as yours. If you did it you will receive a mail with a link when the deadline is reached. so both parties will be notified.

deadlinez.com - Deadline tool

Few ideas for deadlines:

  • Set deadline for business client (like me :))
  • Set deadline to your roommate to move out
  • Set your personal deadline to reach some level of income, or career growth
  • Set deadline to your govermnent…

Or whatever you imagine. Please use this for fun mostly!

Web based CakePHP Project generation tool

Yesterday I found a tool which could be handy for rookie CakePHP developers. Atlas is a web code generator based in CakePHP. As a glance it’s a web alternative of CakePHP bake console which is a nice idea indeed.

My first impression was that tool is like diamond in the mud and I was wondering how I didn’t hear about this tool till now, but after installing I realized that it’s not so good as it looked like.

Why?

The first problem occurs in the generation of my first project – I’ve got a error message in Spanish which I couldn’t understand. I had to use Google translate for it, but after the translation, the message still doesn’t say much – “Failed to generate project skeleton”.

After debugging the code figuring out why this error means, I found that the application uses backslash as directory separator (\) ?!? and of course this lead to directories and files with strange names like /var/www/ctest\app\controllers directories where ctest\app\controllers was the full name of the directory :). I am on Ubuntu Desktop machine where backslash is not a directory separator.

Pros and Cons about this tool:

Pros:

  • Very nice interface – really big point for Atlas
  • It should work properly on windows environment and based on the features list and screenshots it quite intuitive.
  • I like web based development everything is in your web browser, so another big plus.

Cons

  • Not working as expected – the backslash problem described above
  • If you are not Spanish speaking person – you are in the middle of nowhere when you see error like this: Error: no se ha podido generar el esqueleto del proyecto
  • No documentation at all. I had to look in the code in order to get idea why I cannot create a project – Not clear labels (or at least no hints). Probably a hint like: Directory (enter a full path to the empty directory under htdocs) or similar could help a lot.

The conclusion:
Atlas looking like promising tool, still it’s far from the final version, but it’s worth to try it in Windows environment. 🙂 I definitely will follow that project in the future, so hopefully I could use it one day 🙂

Ubiquity Plugin for Firefox

Yesterday I’ve seen the presentation of this new plug-in and I think it’s quite good! I’ve installed of course and indeed it’s very good! The part which I like is that it’s possible to be extended. Take a look of the video, it’s very good.

Here what the author of the original article say for Ubiquity features:

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

  • Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
  • Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
  • Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
  • Extend the browser functionality easily.

Link to the original article: Introducing Ubiquity


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Powered by WordPress 2.5

Finally WordPress 2.5 is out and I was encouraged from some blog authors that upgrading doesn’t make any damage to the content or the entire site and voilà – it’s true. I could say – easy like written with CakePHP /couldn’t resist/ :).

Now the admin area is quite different and it’s a little bit confusing at this moment, but I like the new design. The upgrade option is awesome – instead of downloading to user’s machine and then uploading to the server with one click you could upgrade your plug-in versions on the fly.

So far all plug-ins are working correctly so far. Here is the list which I am using at the moment:

  • All in One SEO Pack
  • CodeColorer
  • Counterize II
  • Cryptographp
  • DiggBadger
  • GöSPress
  • Google XML Sitemaps
  • Pagebar2
  • Twitter Tools
  • WP-Polls
  • WP-ContactForm
  • WordPress Code Editor
  • and few others which are not used very much

Toondoo.com – The comics builder

I always liked such sites. Probably there are a lot of them out there, but recently I found that one – toondoo.com and within 2 weeks I found that they upgrade the service and it become very advanced.

With few words – toondoo.com is a online service which give you ability to build comics by drag and drop elements from the gallery. The features which I like in it:

  • ability to create your own characters
  • ability to change character’s mimic and body position
  • ability to upload images
  • ability to draw your gestures
  • ability to edit previous created comics

There a lot more things.

This also inspire me to start my own comics blog. You can find my “art” at comics.chankov.net.

Hope you enjoy it.

ClickHeat – track user’s clicks on your web site

Today … is the first day after my trip in Greece. Well it’s hard to be in good mood after a holiday and I couldn’t code as fast as I want for these first days, but this is another story.

I would like to share here some information about a marketing tool which I just saw. It’s called ClickHeat.
What is the main purpose of that tool? People which using already Google Analytics could see many things which are the same, but in fact there are differences which I am going to mention.
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