[d]online

God bless the kind people at American Express. Each week, sometimes 2-3 times a week, they send me a nice letter to let me know that they approve of me. They’re probably the friendliest pen pals I’ve ever had…

…Lately, AmEx has lovingly redoubled their interest in my self-happiness by sending me little gifts with their thoughtful messages of approval. You may be familiar with the magnetic credit cards they mail out with the ominous “Your Name Here” message that cast you a daunting leer every time you get more cream for your coffee.

>> Read more and Make Your Own Photo Magnets!

I was getting tired of upload scripts timing out in Flash and talked with Mike a little about creating an AJAX uploader. Unfortunately, AJAX has a difficult time updating a progress meter while an upload is running and it still cannot prevent browser requests from timing out on some servers. Granted, you still can use AJAX to do this and I’d recommend reading up on a number of online tutorials that offer solutions. However, up until the advent of Flash’s FileReference Object, programmers had to rely on server-side Perl scripts to manage these uploads and as Zeh so eloquently put it, “I love Flash’s upload. It’s so much better than the extremely crap HTML upload.”

>> Flash File Uploader

The following is a neat little script that I found to remind people to save their changes when navigating away from a page (onBeforeUnload was developed originally by Microsoft for Internet Explorer, but then added to the new version of Mozilla Firefox). You’ve probably seen something similar to this when using GMail if you decide to close the window (or refresh or click the back or forward buttons) after starting to compose an email.

I researched this for a new Lyrek script that Mike and the Lyrek Developers are building to enables users to supervise the import of records and decide if they’re to be overwritten, discarded, merged, added as a new record or kicked off to the duplicate manager. It works in IE and FF. Sorry, no Safari support. Read more…

The other day, I mentioned that in order to greatly increase your chances of getting a book published and have it become an immediate and longstanding success, you have to have a prepositional phrase in your title. All my stories (The Change, The Complex, The Guardian…) don’t have them, so naturally, that’s the (only) reason that I’m not a world-famous author by now.

Seriously, though, think about it. There are a ton of books, plays, and songs out there (with real merit) that have great titles that include prepositional phrases. And they’re much better titles for it, too. Would you read/listen to the following works?

Read more…

My list of NT Bloggers has grown quite a bit. There’s some insightful, funny, creative/inspiring and time-killing stuff on these badboys. If you have a few hours to kill, take a look at the list and browse through some of them.

>> See the list so far.

When Adam Goldstein approached era//404 about designing labels for his new wine company, Brooklyn Wine Company, I have to admit I was pretty excited. If given a chance, I’d drink a beer over wine anyday, but I do really enjoy red wine. I, as with most uncultured palates, nearly always select a wine for its label rather than what I should’ve read in a Wine Connoisseur periodical. Even after having gone on a tour of Taittinger’s operation in Reims, France, a few years back, I just haven’t learned (or cared to learn) how to select a wine based on varietal, region or manufacturer. I think my stubbornness comes from the misconception that a cultured palate comes with an expensive taste…and I’m just not willing to part with money that easily.

Adam, as with all great thinkers, has a pretty great view of how a wine label should be designed. When we started putting together his wine shop (Red White and Bubbly) site, we gave him the design for a wine shop. He absolutely loved and hated it. “What you’ve given me is a wine shop site,” he said. “And while it’s perfect, it’s not what I’m looking for.” “But it is a wine shop,” I replied. “Yes and no. I’m not selling wine, exclusively,” he said. “I’m promoting the idea, the spirit and vibe of Brooklyn.”

Read more…