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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

During 3 days of payng around with it and we came up with twitmybrand

Just a simple app to get that returns a set of results based on the brand and specific queries like “brandX rocks” or “brandX sucks”.

Screenshot of iPhone result on twitmybrand

This gave me an ideia for something completely different that I am working now.

No big secret but it will only be for the Portuguese speaking.

Feel free to send your opinion, comments or suggestions.

Estas ultimas semanas andei fora da minha rotina habitual.

Desde o final de Março de 2009 que fundei a  ten to ten.

Este é o culminar de muitos anos a trabalhar nas novas tecnologias em especial em desenvolvimento para internet.

A principal actividade será o desenvolvimento de plataformas para o publico em geral e a continuidade dos projectos que tenho entre mãos em especial a rua direita.

Neste momento estão abertas candidaturas para estágio profissional de primeiro emprego.

Este é um sonho tornado realidade.

Obrigado a todos (voces sabem quem são)

Não sendo eu um designer muitas vezes fico na duvida que font usar e como a formatar para melhores resultados.

No TYPECHART podemos encontrar as familias de fonts mais comuns e diferentes formas de as formatar.

Muito util.

Flash based cropping tool released (LGPL)

I tried to get it to work and saving the crop server side.

I manage to get to work pretty easy on my local server but after uploading it the php was giving me trouble.

So I stripped it down and now its working great: flash resize and crop

If you want the source: download

I found a very cool script using JavaScript that does almost the same as this one: Prototype JavaScript Image Cropper UI

About flash client side resize, no luck.

I found several Java ones and also I know that is possible to do it in flash but the methods I found were to explode the image pixel by pixel and then pass it like that into php. From what I could understand quality problems and flash player frozes on large images were the problems using that option.

Anyway. I think this was a great step foward.