Forcing a break on big words / multiple characters

Visiting Digg today I notice this:
big words - digg example

This is really common problem on user generated sites. HTML does not force a break when the word or multiple characters are longer then the provided space.

I normally solve this in PHP with something like this:

function mywrap($string, $max_length)
{
$separate_words = explode(" ", $string);
for($i = 0; $i < count($separate_words); $i++)
{
if( strlen($separate_words[$i]) > $max_length )
{
$separate_words[$i] = wordwrap($separate_words[$i], $max_length,"<br />", true);
}
}
$string = implode(" ", $separate_words);
return $string;
}

Where $string is the text to verify and $max_length is the max number of characters in the space provided.

Hope it helps someone

Why I don’t use Gmail Priority Inbox

priority inbox

This week Gmail has been rooling out a new feature called Priority Inbox.
After turning it on for 24 hours, I ended up turning it off. Why? Because I believe it clutters my inbox more than it helps.

Priority Inbox sections

The sections in wish Gmail divides Priority Inbox don’t seem to make a lot of sense.
For me:
Important and Unread = Unread
Starred = Read
Everything Else = Spam/Garbage

What is Everything Else!?

The one section I really dont like and also the one that you cannot remove (all others you can change or remove) is Everything Else.

All the emails that go to the Everything Else section can only be of 2 types:
-Spam and should be on the spam folder
-Important and should be out of this section

If I receive an email it must be important for me or else is spam/garbage.

Read Unread

All I need in my inbox are my unread messages so I can read them or the ones that I already read and need to come back.

All other messages should go to the archive, spam or trash. Isn’t that simpler than having some blue bars and emails changing place?

I simply love, adore and absolutely need Gmail

I don’t like this feature but Gmail is the only email client I can imagine myself using today. I love it, it’s my only suggestion to anyone in need of an email account and whenever my computer is on gmail is running on my browser.

BTW – making the Mark read, unread, starred, unstarred options go to a combox, not that smart also. Prettier but annoying.

Analysis of long tail keywords for SEO with Google Analytics

After the recent Mayday update to Google SERP I decided to have a look into how much was the long tail keywords influenced by this.

Long tail keywords are normally keywords with 3 or more words. To track it down I used the following regular expression: [^\s\+]+(\s|\+)+[^\s\+]+(\s|\+)+[^\s\+]+

Steps inside Google Analytics. Traffic Sources->Search Engines->Google->Non paid

On the filter keyword [containing] I input the regular expression: [^\s\+]+(\s|\+)+[^\s\+]+(\s|\+)+[^\s\+]+

After I just tracked down the last 3 month number of visits with and without filtering the long tail and calculated the % value of the longtail.

long tail keywords/total organic = % of the value for the long tail

5 minutes and I realised that mayday update did *not* influence my sites long tail keywords.

Hope that helps and if someone knows of a simpler or more effective way to do this I would love to know.

Google Chrome View Source

IMHO view source from Google Chrome acts really odd.

When you click view source a new tab opens and the page is loaded all over again.

Maybe there is a very valid reason for this. But I cant find one. To me this can even be problem.

Examples:

  • If you pass values via POST you cant get the results as Chrome does not re-POST it just issues a new request using GET and a new session. (I found a couple “Notice: Undefined variable” on some of my code, but this was my problem as I wasnt doing proper verifications) But anyway you never get the POST values and see the source for your page.
  • If you have a counter or random dinamic content you will never get to see exactly what you get on the rendered html you have on the initial tab.

A work around is to use “inspect element” but its not the same. Its great for some things but its not the same.

If someone finds a valid reason for this “view source” behaviour I would love to know.

User Experience Professionals

I just order two tickets to http://www.ux-lx.com/

I am really happy that this kind of events happen in Portugal as it gives us (Portuguese developers) a chance to learn and share experiences and knowledge.

UPDATE: minutes after I emailed about this I received a friendly response and the issue bellow was solved. Great job.

I am not one to normally nag and complain about stuff, but for a user experience professionals conference this menu issue made me laugh:

Anyway, and as I started complaining having http://www.ux-lx.com/index.html and http://www.ux-lx.com/ both working is not a very good thing for SEO.

P.S. – Sorry about this guys at http://www.ideias-imagens.com/ but just couldnt resist.

Pesquisa em tempo real em Português

minutu pesquisa em tempo real

minutu pesquisa em tempo real

Acabamos de lançar o minutu um site que estamos a testar para funcionar como um motor de pesquisa em tempo real.

Neste momento encontra-se apenas em teste e por isso todas as opiniões, sugestões ou bugs são bem vindos.

Penso que este site é uma ferramenta interessante para pesquisar informações sobre noticias/informações muito recentes.

Ex: Nas primeiras horas após um grande acidente ou de um evento importante os motores de pesquisa regulares não apresentam resultados relevantes e poderá no minutu encontra-los e/ou acompanhar a evolução do caso.

minutu resultados da pesquisa

minutu resultados da pesquisa