Carsonified

By Elliot Jay Stocks

It’s a rare occurrence when so much excitement can be produced by the humble bookmarklet, but in the last two days not one but two of these little gems have caught my eye and stolen my heart.

XRAY

Web designers and developers the world over have long been fans of browser plugins that reveal information about the page and - more specifically - its document structure; I don’t think I need to mention Chris Pedrick’s ‘Web Developer’ extension for the main Gecko-based browsers.

But for pure simplicity’s sake and the advantage of some rather lovely UI design, XRAY gives you the power to view any page’s box model simply by clicking a bookmarklet and it has the advantage of working in Safari, for those of you who’ve felt left out of the Web Developer extension party. (Incidentally, Jon Hicks provided an excellent round-up of development plugins for Safari a while back.)

[ westciv.com/xray ]

Microformats

Mr. Hicks also vented his frustration at not having a Microformats plugin for the Apple browser, and once again it was the bookmarklet that came to the rescue, this time in the form of the aptly-named ‘Microformats’ by Remy Sharp. Again: elegance, simplicity and functionality all rolled into one tiny but tasty package.

As with XRAY, the Microformats bookmarklet allows you to view and download any microformatted information embedded in the page. Great from a user’s point of view, but also great for testing your microformatted markup!

[ leftlogic.com/lounge/articles/microformats_bookmarklet ]

Thanks to Twitter, I noticed that Thomas Hawk was messing around with a new Firefox add-on called Sparky.

It pops a cool little Alexa status bar in the bottom-right of the browser. It’s a nice way to get a quick feel for how popular a site is (if you trust Alexa, that is). I wonder if Compete is going to release a tool like this soon? (Their toolbar is the most annoying thing ever.)

Here’s a quick overview of Sparky (stolen from Alexa’s site):

Traffic Trend

Sparky’s trendline feature allows you to track a website’s popularity over time, plotting the traffic rank for the last 4 months on a handy little sparkline.

Reach Meter and Traffic Rank

Sparky’s reach and rank features give you a quick overview of a site’s popularity. The blue bar gives you an overall indicator - is this site popular or not? The rank number tells you exactly how this site ranks in comparison to all other sites on the Web.

Related Links

Sparky also comes with Alexa’s famous patented Related Links feature built right into the browser. Now, no matter what site you are on, Sparky can help you find similar sites.

Click Menu

With a click on Sparky you have immediate access to a wealth of additional information. Do a search for the site, find sites that link to it, see who owns it, where it is located, related links and much much more.

I absolutely love sitting down with a pen and pad - no computer. Just my thoughts, a nice gel-tipped pen and a ‘Black n’ Red’ notebook.

When I’m brainstorming with pen and paper, it’s easy to get distracted when I remember things I need to do. So I’ve figured out a handy way to deal with that: I just stick a little chunk of sticky notes inside the front cover. Whenever I remember I’ve got to do something, I write it down on the sticky note and get right back to brainstorming. Bam!

Then I detatch the note and put it somewhere where I’ll see it later. Distraction averted.

Hope you all can make it to FOWA in London in October. The lineup just keeps getting stronger and stronger!

We’ve just added:

• Matt Mullenweg - WordPress
• Om Malik - GigaOm
• Kevin Rose - Pownce, digg and diggnation
• Mike Arrington - TechCrunch

Om and Mike are going to have an on-stage debate about the future of web apps, Kevin is going to talk about the things they learned while launching Pownce and Matt is going to give some amazing pointers on creating community and growing your app.

It’s going to be a really fun two days.

FOWA Road Trip!

I’ll be hopping in the FOWA van and touring 11 cities across Europe, so come out and join me for a drink at the local bar. We thought it would be really fun to get everyone out from behind their laptops and out for a nice night on the town. It’ll be a fab opportunity to meet like-minded web app folks :)

We’re going to be throwing some money behind the bar, so please come out and say hi. The FOWA Road Trip site will be launching soon, but for now, you can see all the cities and dates at the holding page.

I’ve decided to get up one hour early every morning (6am).

The reason why is because life is so hectic that there’s very little time to reflect and think about what’s important. You can easily get wrapped up in working your ass off and quickly forget what’s really important.

These are some of the questions I like to reflect on:

• Am I happy? Why or why not?
• Am I making the world a better place, or just existing?
• What are my priorities? Why?
• Am I being a good husband?

I’m amazed at the difference this ‘Quiet Time’ has had on my well being. It’s helped me see some problem areas in my priorities and has given me a lot of peace. I’d highly recommend it!

I came across this vitriolic thread about me this morning. Wow, what a great way to start the day :)

So I’d like to give everyone an update on my original post titled Why you need to get rid of your freelance developer ASAP.

We couldn’t be happier

Since we decided to stop using freelance developers and invest in building a development team in Russia, things have gone really well. We’ve made huge improvements to DropSend and the backend to our events system.

In case you never read my first post, our setup is fairly simple. We have one manager who works 20 hours a week for us and he speaks fluent English. His name is Alex and he manages our full time LAMP developer (who is named Marat). Alex is super friendly, happy to help, very professional, and overall, a joy to work with. I’ve never actually emailed Marat directly, but I’m sure he’s a nice guy as well ;)

Whenever we need a new task done, I put it on a list in Basecamp. The higher up the to-do list, the higher priority it is. It works great. Occasionally, I’ll wireframe something if it needs detailed explanation.

The challenges

The hard part about having a team off-site is that you have to specify things in detail. You can’t just lean over your shoulder and say, “How’s it going? Oh, that’s not quite what I meant … Let me draw a sketch for you.” etc etc.

I find that when I’m asking for a brand new module to be built, I have to thoroughly think through the details and do a lot of sketches. Ironically though, this has helped us to avoid some snags that we would’ve encountered if we hadn’t specified things carefully.

Overall, it’s rocking and I’m so glad we’ve got Alex and Marat on the team! We might even be adding another developer and increasing Alex’s (the Manager) time to 80 hours a month.