We start off with a mathematical function that describes, what we will call, our hill. This function represents the ‘height’ of our hill, h if you will, at the different points in x and y.

So, in our MATLAB script we first of all generate a grid of points using x values from -1.5 to 3.5 and y values from -2 to 2. The follow code achieves this.

x = linspace(-1.5,3.5,50); % 50 values of x
y = linspace(-2,2,25); % 25 values of x
[xg yg] = meshgrid(x,y); % generate points

And next we generate the height values of our hill, using the grid we have just created with x -> xg and y ->yg.

h = exp(-(xg.^2)-(yg.^2)) + 0.5.*exp(-((xg-2).^2)-(yg.^2)); % calculate height values

With our hight values in the array h, all we need to do now is plot them. Firstly, to create the 3D plot we just plot x,y and h using the surf() function.

figure(1); % create new figure window
surf(x,y,h); % surface plot
title('3D Hill Plot'); % title and axis labels
xlabel('x');
ylabel('y');
zlabel('height');

Now, to look at several slices through the hill at different values of y, we need to select the different values of y from its array and plot them on the same graph.

figure(2);
plot(x,h([1,10,20],:)); % plot 1st, 10th and 20th values of y
title('2D Hill Plot'); % title and axis labels
xlabel('x');
ylabel('height');
legend('y = -1.5','y = -0.4','y = 1.2',0); % legend not overlapping any of the plot

Putting it all together you get a 3D plot of the function and the cross sections in two windows. Job done.

In my spare time I ported a PHP script my friend created to MATLAB which enables the creation of beautiful fractals from the Mandlebrot set. The maximum image size you can create depends on the amount of memory available in your system and the script isn’t something I’ve spent a lot of time on so feel free to improve on it.

On my laptop, a 10,000 x 10,000 pixel image took about an hour to create, using 20 iterations. You may find this differs on other machines.

Download the MATLAB Fractal Generator Code.

]]> http://blog.eop.org.uk/457-create-fractals-with-matlab/feed/ 1 http://blog.eop.org.uk/354-microsoft-silverlight-wpfe/ http://blog.eop.org.uk/354-microsoft-silverlight-wpfe/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2007 21:25:31 +0000 Sunny Man http://blog.eop.org.uk/354-microsoft-silverlight-wpfe/ I saw in the news yesterday that Microsoft released its competitor to Adobe’s (formerly Macromedia’s) hugely successful and widely-used Flash presentation software and ActionScript scripting language. Microsoft hopes that its Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere, now Silverlight, will claw some market share from Flash’s monopolistic grip on the web. Employing already established JavaScript and Microsoft’s proprietary XAML language, Silverlight would seem to be something to watch, even at this early stage. Today I decided to take a go at it and see if even I could use it. I’ve had limited experience with ActionScript and XML so I wanted to to compare it to my previous experiences. Here’s how I got on.

Before you read on, to view the things I’ve made, go to the download page and download the cross-browser plugin.

Silverlight Basics

I’m not going to turn this into a tutorial on how to setup everything – it can all be found in the official SDK, also available on the download page – but I will show the XAML and relevant JavaScript files that accompany each of the things I am to show.

The SDK’s quickstart guide was a really simple and easy explanation of the process of creating very simple shapes at first. I was a little confused at first because the XAML files I create utilise the canvas tag and initially I got it mixed up with the HTML tag of the same name. Firstly you create the canvas you’re going to ‘draw’ in. [Nearly] everything else goes inside this. The layers on the canvas, or z-index, are defined by the order the objects are created – those created later on in the script are on the top layers.

My first foray into it was a simple monochrome target which just created several ellipses in each other with the smallest one having a border instead of a fill. Here’s the .xaml file:

You can view the example’s finished product if you have the plugin installed.

Using Images

Next I did a bit of playing around with images. There are several ways you can use images on your canvas which include using them as a filling for an object or importing them on their own. In this example, I’ve created a rectangle and used an image of a pound coin and then overlayed it with 4 rectangles of differing colours with an opacity set. Along side it, I’ve added a gradient overlay to the image.

You can view the example’s finished product if you have the plugin installed.

Adding Multimedia

Adding media like music and video is incredibly easy for beginners to grasp. A single deceleration is used for both music as well as video which is rather handy. Controlling the media object is also incredibly easy and my quick look over the documentation for the MediaElement object showed a lot of options are available for controlling it. Firstly I tried just simply embedding a sound:

Next, I added the parameter to stop it automatically playing when loaded and added the controls for stop, pause and play the file. These controls also work with video media, as shown in the quick start guide provided in the SDK. The code involved this XAML code and the following JavaScript.

  
    
      
        
          
          
        
      
    
    stop
  

  
  
    
      
        
          
          
        
      
    
    pause
  

  
  
    
      
        
          
          
        
      
    
    play
  

And this JavaScript, inserted either in the head of the page or an external JavaScript file:

You can view the example’s finished product if you have the plugin installed. Click the play, pause and stop buttons to test it out.

Lighting up the web?

Obviously I have to take into account the infancy in terms of development of Silverlight but it’s wide array of features is quite appealing. It took me a quarter of the time to stream a video in Silverlight than it did to do it manually in Flash via ActionScript. At the moment, Silverlight isn’t anywhere near Flash in terms of functionality but even at this early stage it does have some advantages over Flash in terms of the time saving it allows.

I’ve quite enjoyed doing some stuff in it and I’m sure that the abilities of Silverlight go far beyond drawing circles and streaming media. One nice example of the capabilities is this page turning program and this interactive WYSIWYG editor. For me it still feels like it’s a glorified version of the HTML canvas element with some JavaScript added. It doesn’t feel smooth like Flash and currently feels slightly buggy and laggy but I hope this will change in future revisions.

I’ve enjoyed using HTML, XAML and JavaScript and I think that it will eventually catch on – if it doesn’t then Microsoft will probably force it on us in some way. At the moment the plugin is available for both Windows and OSX but I hope Microsoft don’t make the mistake Adobe made by not keeping the Linux community up to date. Try it out.

Yesterday we did a simple lesson on $_GET and how to get values from a URL. Today another simple lesson on $_POST and the confusion that comes with it. I introduced you to $_POST in last Friday’s big special and today we are going into much more detail.

Lesson 8: $_POST and Forms

As I showed in Friday’s round up, we use $_POST to collect the values of submitted form data. Some confusion that I had for a while was whether or not to use the name or id attribute in the form fields to let $_POST work. I’ll settle this now – for $_POST to collect the data from the form fields, you need to assign a name attribute to them. The id can be used for labels, CSS classes and other things. Here’s a sample form form.php:

<form action="process.php" method="post">
First Name: <input type="text" name="fname" size="25" />
Last Name: <input type="text" name="lname" size="25" />
Over 16? <input type="radio" name="age" value="1" /> Yes <input type="radio" name="age" value="0" /> No
<input type="submit" value="submit form" />
</form>

In the above form we would get 3 values returned through $_POST. These would be the first name, last name and over 16 values. Here’s how we’d capture these values. This file would be process.php, as determined in the form’s first line:

<?php
$fname = $_POST['fname'];
$lname = $_POST['lname'];
$age = $_POST['age']; //either 1 or 0

$name = $fname." ".$lname; //stitch the first and last names together
?>

Pretty simple to get the form fields’ values. On Friday we are going to combine everything and a lot of form fields to create a signup form which will include this, arrays and a bit of validation.

In the previous lesson we went into detail about IF and WHILE statements and in Friday’s big round up I introduced you to $_POST and $_GET. Today we’re going to look further at $_GET and what it’s used for.

Lesson 7: $_GET and URLs

When we have a URL that includes the values of certain variables, we can use this to get the values. Say we had a URL like this:

http://www.eop.org.uk/index.php?name=sunny%20man&cool=yes

We use $_GET to grab the values of the name and cool variables. Obviously this isn’t a secure way to transport variables around your site – we’ll look at a more secure way later on into the tutorials – this is the most simple way.

<?php
$name = $_GET['name']; //$name = "sunny man"
$cool = $_GET['cool']; //$cool = "yes"
?>

Tomorrow I’ll be talking about $_POST and how it can be confusing when to use the name and id attributes on form field inputs.

As always we will find a useful example we can apply everything to at the end of the week as well as introducing some things we are going to look at in the following week. I hope you’ve learnt something in the previous week but don’t worry we will get more advanced as time goes on.

Lesson 6: IF and WHILE

In last week’s final day lesson I introduced you to an IF statement. I’m going to go over them in more detail today as well as introducing you to a WHILE loop. Here’s the IF statement I used in Friday’s example:

if ($username == "username" && $password == "password") {
     ...
}

This says: if $username’s value is “username” and if $password’s value is “password” then do this… If the statement in the ( ) brackets are true then it executes the instructions within the { } brackets.

There are a variety of comparison operators that you can use. The one used in the example is == which means equal to. There is also != – not equal to, === – exactly equal and of the same type, !== not exactly equal and not of the same type, > – is bigger than, < – is smaller than, >= – is bigger than or equal to, <= – is smaller than or equal to.

If you want to check more than one thing in an IF statement then you need to use logical operators, such as in the example I’ve used && to indicate that the statement should be true if the username and the password are both correct. Here are some examples:

if ($username || $password) { ... } // OR
if (!$username) { ... } // NOT
if ($username XOR $password) { ... } // XOR (exclusive OR)

Now we have got the hard bit out of the way we can now look at WHILE statements. WHILE statements are a little different to IF statements because they perform the instructions inside the { } brackets while a comparison remains true.

<?php
$a = 1;
$b = 5;

while ($a < $b) { //while $a is less than $b
     echo $a;
     $a++; //increment $a by 1
}
?>

WHILE loops come in very handy sometimes – for example when we look at arrays we will use a WHILE loop to good effect. A famous example of using ‘the loop’ is the WordPress blogging system. This is the basic form of IF and WHILE loops. Remember them!

In today’s lesson we’re going to create a login script in PHP and you’ll see all you’ve learnt in it as well as some new things that we are going to cover in next week’s lessons – 6 to 9. Enjoy and try it out yourself on your own server. We will take another look at this script later on and implement a mySQL connection into the script – but don’t worry about this until later.

Lesson 5: Simple Login Script

First of all we will take the simple username and password form from lesson 4 and use this. This will be our login.php file. Here it is again:

<form action="process.php" method="post">
Username: <input type="text" name="username" size="25" />
Password: <input type="password" name="password" size="25" />
<input type="submit" value="submit form" />
</form>

Now we’ll extend this with some extra PHP code which will be used to display any error messages if the user inputs an invalid username or password. This will be added above the form code.

<?php
if($_GET['e']) {
$error = "Wrong username or password. Please try again.";
}

if($error) {
?>
<p style="padding:10px;border:red;color:black;">
<?php echo $error; ?>
</p>
<?php
}
?>

Okay so now we can create the process.php file which will digest the submitted form data. Take a look at the file and go over the previous four lessons to see what you can remember how to do.

<?php
$username = $_POST['username'];
$password = $_POST['password'];

if(!$username || !$password) {
       header("Location:login.php?e=1");
}
else {
       if ($username == "username" && $password == "password") {
              header("Location:members.php");
       }
       else {
              header("Location:login.php?e=1");
       }
}
?>

There may be things in there you don’t understand just yet but I assure you we’ll get to them. IF statements, $_GET global and some other things are what we’re going to visit in next week’s tutorials. When we’ve learnt functions and mySQL connections we will revisit this form and make it more dynamic. Hope you enjoyed these extremely simple and basic tutorials. See you next week.

In this lesson, the final one before a big project, we’re going to take a look at how to capture inputs from form fields. Also I’m going to talk about the secure and insecure ways to transfer the data.

Lesson 4: Form Field Input

Getting the input from a form is pretty simple and in this lesson we are going to keep it that way by using two files: form.php and process.php. The first will contain the form we are going to create which a user will fill in. The latter file will take the input, process it and output it.

Here’s the sample form we’re going to use. In this case it’s just a simple username and password form. This form does not validate and is in no way conforming to accessibility either.

<form action="process.php" method="post">
Username: <input type="text" name="username" size="25" />
Password: <input type="password" name="password" size="25" />
<input type="submit" value="submit form" />
</form>

Once the user submits the information by the button they’ll be taken to process.php along with the values of the form fields. We use the $_POST global to take the form values. For example if we wanted to take the value of the username field and assign it to $username:

$username = $_POST['username'];
//getting the value of the form field with the name of 'username'

The variable in between the square brackets refers to the name=”" part of the inputs in the form. So now we can create the process.php file from what we’ve learned.

<?php
$username = $_POST['username'];
$password = $_POST['password'];

echo "You're username is ".$username." and your password is ".$password.".";
?>

So there is the simple way to collect and assign form variables sent over pages. The next lesson, lesson 5, is where we are going to put all we’ve learnt from lessons 1 to 4 into practise. You’ll use what you’ve learnt and some new stuff that will introduce you to lessons 6 to 9. Learn it!

If you wish to take a look at the functions it offers then head on over to the PHP Manual, specifically the string functions.

Lesson 3: String Functions

Last week we touched on how to find the length of a string using the strlen() function. Today we’re going to look at a few more functions and put them into a practical example. To find the length of a string all we have to do is employ this function as is shown here:

<?php
$five = strlen("mouse"); //$five's value is 5
$word = "mousemat";
$eight = strlen($word); //$eight's value is 8
?>

Now we’re going to look at replacing characters or phrases within a string with something else. To do this in the simplest way we are going to use the str_replace() function. There’s several parameters to this function. This means that we have to provide more information within the functions. In this case the format is str_replace(string to search for, string to replace it with, string to search within).

$string = "Sunny Man’s Blog";
$string = str_replace("Man","Boy",$string); //replace 'Man' with 'Boy'
echo $string; //displays Sunny Boy's Blog

Later on when we get to talking about SQL and databases you’ll need to be able to encrypt strings. There are several different types of encryption available in PHP. All of them are simple enough to use but, as we will will discuss later on, knowing when to use the correct one is vital. First let’s take a look at the different types.

$password = md5("password");
echo $password; //5F4DCC3B5AA765D61D8327DEB882CF99

$password = sha1("password");
echo $password; //5BAA61E4C9B93F3F0682250B6CF8331B7EE68FD8

Both md5 and sha1 have their advantages and disadvantages but they’re both quick to generate and once stored in a variable, easy to remember. Say we wanted to take a raw password that was given to us by a form (we’ll cover this soon), replace the letter ‘i’ with ‘z’ and encrypt it for storage in a database, this is how we would do it:

<?php
$password = "birmingham";
$password = str_replace("i","z",$password);
$password = md5($password);
?>

This is the end of lesson 3. In the next lesson we’ll talk about taking variables from a form, collecting them and manipulating them in a real life situation. After than we’re going to put all we’ve learnt into a logging in script in lesson 5 which will introduce you to salts, database queries and some other stuff we will cover in lessons 6 to 10.

Lesson 2: Variables

Unlike programming languages such as C++, in PHP you don’t have to state what type of variable you’re creating when you create one. A variable such as $myvar could just as well be a number as it could be a word. It’s as easy as pie to create different variables:

<?php
$age = 15;
$name = "John";
?>

Here we created 2 variables: $age and $name which values’ are 15 and ‘John’ respectively. It’s that easy to create variables. Now that we have created variables we can manipulate them. Say for example we wanted to increase the $age variable and assign the new value to $age again, this is what we would add before the end of the script:

$age = $age+1;

If we now output the $age variable we would find that it displays 16 and not 15.

echo $age; //this would display '15'

We can also attach strings together. Take the $name variable we created earlier. We can take that and also create a last name in a different variable and then string them together to make the $name variable include the first and last name. Here we go:

$lastname = "Smith";
$fullname = $name.$lastname; //this would create "JohnSmith"
$fullname = $name." ".$lastname; //this would create "John Smith"

So, let’s try and put this all together and make a useful program out of it. Here we manipulate the age by turning it into dog years. We also here string the first and last names together and then as a step towards the next lesson we’ll count the number of characters in the names.

<?php
$age = 15;
$firstname = "John";
$lastname = "Smith";
$i = 0; //used later on as a counter

$dog = $age*7;
echo "You're ".$age." human years old and ".$dog." dog years!";
echo "<br />"; //create a new line; just regular html

$name = $firstname." ".$lastname;
$i = $i + strlen($firstname); //0 + 4
$i = $i + strlen($lastname); //4 + 5
echo $name.", you have ".$i." letters in your name!";
?>

Try it out and play around with it! Next lesson we’re going to look at some of the functions we can apply to strings such as getting the length of the string and searching for a specific item within a variable.

My History

I first started to learn PHP 3 years ago and have since then done some things I’m quite proud of in the language. I’ve built a system for a hospital in Reading, my own blogging software (although quite simple, it does the job) and also a file directory viewer with AJAX technology. But, my PHP knowledge is quite limited and I have not used the language now for some times as I have been concentrating on the design aspect of the web.

Lesson 1: Hello World!

Every programmer starts off with the ‘Hello World!’ program. Here we are going to get PHP to output the text ‘Hello World!’ to the screen. From this point out I’ll assume you’ve installed PHP and have it running on Apache or the like.

So, as with any PHP script we have to tell the server it’s going to be dealing with PHP. So we start it off with the opening and closing tags. All code goes between these tags:

<?php
?>

Now, as I said all PHP code goes in between these tags. So, now we have to make it do what we want it to do. So, in between those tags we know insert this line of code which tells it to output the text to the screen:

echo "Hello World!";

Once we’ve put this all together we should be able to achieve the result we wanted. Try it yourself on your own server! Just save the following code as a .php file and run it!

<?php
echo "Hello World!";
?>

It’s going to get a bit more complicated than this, I can assure you. I’ll post a lesson every weekday – every Friday we’ll do a roundup of everything we’ve learnt!

Planning

Usually when I’m planning a design I would start with a piece of paper, a pencil and a rubber. But, I’ve found that when designing a WordPress theme, I prefer to start in my favourite image editor, Fireworks. I find being able to visualise the layout and make changes at my whim, and on-the-go, makes the process much faster and, apparently much more fun. I start with a blank canvas 1024 pixels wide by 2000 pixels high and I set to work. In the past I’ve used a colour scheme generator to give me a palette of colours that I can work with but this time I just went in with a choice of all the colours you could wish for.

I chose 3 colours I would make the design around – light black (#333), white (#fff) and my iconic ‘Wii’ blue (#0cf). I then set to work with the ideas in my head. I always seem to prefer to create fixed width layouts possibly because it is a reflection on my personality. I like things to be structured and things to be the same from all angles; by this I mean I like it to look similar on all platforms, in all browsers and all resolutions. I’ve only ever done a few fluid layouts because of browser CSS support back when IE6 was the latest version of IE but now that IE7 has been released I hope to design a few more, even if just for fun. I’m digressing here, back to colours. As I said I gave myself a limited palette to work with and the idea of a fixed width design and the inspiration from the world wide web.

I set the background colour of the canvas to my light black and then layed down my content area, defined by a white box. My main points of detail for this design were to reduce the header size, place the search function in the header, advertise my acceptance into 9rules and to sort out display issues with my bookmarks in IE6. As I designed it from the top down I was asking myself is the possible? and if it was I was asking how would I do this? The design for the homepage was complete but I wanted to add another stage to planning as I’d faced problems in the past when I hadn’t done it. I previously hadn’t designed the comments and respond section for any WordPress themes and I always hadn’t been happy with the final result because I’d been unprepared.

I’d finished both plans (homepage and single page) now in my image editor, it was late at night and I realised I’d spent a good five or six hours doing both plans in Fireworks. I wondered whether I was sad or just committed. Next stage is creating a HTML template of the design.

Mocking Up

The next stage in my development process was to turn my graphical plans into poetry, or in my case code. I decided to deviate from my usual header, content, footer div code layout but not too far. I start off with a XHTML Transitional template – because I like to use the strike through tag – and work from there. I have two Notepad2 windows open: one for the template and one for the cascading style sheet and deviate between the two. I tend to write the template code to the next milestone then turn to the CSS, write that and then view it in my native browser. If anything needs changing I do so. Once I’ve reached a major milestone such as I’ve finished the header I will get out my pack of browsers: Opera, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6 and of course Firefox. When it’s not being spammed I’ll also require the services of Dan Vine‘s service iCapture which will allow me to view it in Safari on a Mac – a very handy tool for me, a Windows user.

It usually takes me around two days (accounting for procrastination) to finalise the design in HTML, find any rendering errors and sort them out but this time it took less than a day. I actively used the W3C validation tools and although I don’t actually understand the thinking behind some of it, I use section 508 and WCAG validation tools. Thanks the kindness of a few friends I received some suggestions and opinions on the design. I like to ask a select group of their opinions as they know their stuff and I respect their opinions. I tweaked a couple visual options and then the day was over again. Time to start turning the template into a theme.

Theme Building

Turning the template into a WordPress theme is the easy part in my opinion. I don’t like to overcomplicate things and so I only use the minimum of files required to make the theme work. I like the process of cutting up the code and placing the parts into their respective files. As I do so, I keep checking to see how the template integrates with the content over the template-to-theme period.

Because I hadn’t transformed my plan for the comments into HTML for my template, I had to create this from scratch now. I love turning an image into code and seeing it displayed on the screen – code is poetry, as WordPress says. When I was doing this I came across a bookmark I had made sometime back that linked to a set of over 1000 free icons made by Mark James, called ‘Silk‘. I decided to try and implement them into my design some how and thought that to fill some space, the comments section would be perfect. I think they work well and go with the overall ‘feel’ of the design. The transformation from template to WordPress theme took a day and I have to say I’m proud.

Final Theme Thoughts

This is my sixth design in the Sunny Man’s/Boy’s Blog series and I think it’s my best design yet in terms of aesthetics, accessibility and semantics. I don’t think I’ve reached the limit of my talents just yet either. I’m was so honoured that I was accepted into 9rules, I think it propelled me to just show that they didn’t make a wrong decision. I’m not the most precise or concise writer and I tend to deviate from the point I want to make but I hope that some of my points and thoughts get through on the topics I’m now going to concentrate on.

The new theme I think is very elegant although I’m not sure whether it is better centred as it is now or aligned to the left, as I planned it. Hopefully people will like it, but it’s more to please me and to boost my ego I suppose! So, that was the development of this theme from start to finish. Not very detailed, I’m sorry, but I keep forgetting to take screen shots of the development process and making an animated gif out of them as some in the past have. It’s 00:27 and Celebrity Big Brother is rather tedious. Goodnight.

Mice Behaviour

There is a lot of statistic services out there that track your visitors, where they come from, where they enter from and how long they stay on your site – some even go as far as to provide a heat map of ‘hot spots’ on your site that are clicked more. But what ClickTale does is unique in that it tracks the mouse movements of the visitor around your site, whether they right or left click and also what text they enter into fields such as searches. It records these movements and allows you to see what the visitor is checking out when and where – where do they go as soon as the page loads?

This is useful to site owners because in order to optimise your site or service you first need to understand the habits of your users. ClickTale bridges the gap between eye tracking and statistics for websites. I’ve found that when I’m browsing a website, especially a text heavy site, I follow my mouse with my eyes as a reading aid. Watching how a user navigates around the site, how a user responds to links or images can be vital information for any site owner not only in designing the user interface but other style decisions.

Data Analysis

Having all the data being made into the movies of the users’ movements and actions is very nice but what ClickTale also does is provide a statistical analysis of the data it collects. Much like Google Analytics (although at time of writing much less advanced) it provides data grouped by country, language, browser, operating system, screen sizes and window sizes. Although the statistical analysis is not as comprehensive as Google Analytics or say AWStats, I think that the main feature of seeing what your visitors do could potentially be more useful and important. At the moment the analysis is limited to what I’ve mentioned above but I feel that a lot more could be done with the data.

The data could be transformed into a ‘heat map’ of mouse movement and actions – which parts of the page does the mouse move over most, which links are most clicked and which parts of the page are seen the most. Services such as Crazy Egg already offer a service that creates ‘heat maps’ based on where users are clicking. This is useful as it shows which links are used the most but tracking mouse movement could potentially be more useful. Mouse movement usually signals interest on the visitor’s side. In my own experience, if I’m weary of a link I hover over it first and see what it points to. If I’m not, I go straight to it. The behaviour of the user’s cursor can say a lot about how visitors perceive your site and provide suggestions on how you can make the user feel safer browsing your site.

Privacy Issues

Obviously, with the fact that visitors’ mouse movements, text input and mouse actions are all recorded, the issue of privacy arises. ClickTale battles some of the arguments about privacy by not recording password inputs, not recording any activity outside the web page, not tracking visitors between websites, not tracking any personal files, internet history or interacting with any local files or software. Also, only authorised people (people with the username and password) can actually view the recorded data.

Although the creators have good intentions for their product, it could be used in the wrong manner. Passwords could be captured via a normal text field, some crafty JavaScript and ClickTale. If the users are properly screened though, this could be avoided.

Final Thoughts

I love the idea of ClickTale and since trying it out on my own blog, it’s been interesting to watch the visitors’ movements, where they click, and how much of my posts they really do read! Although it’s been in closed development and testing since the early part of this year, it seems the wait will be worth it. In my case as a small blog owner, it has been interesting to see how the users interact with my bookmarks, seeing whether or not that use the lower part of the sidebar and also seeing whether or not they find searching intuitive.

Also, the fact that adding the service to your site is done by just two pieces of JavaScript means that site operators will find it incredibly easy to use. Once the user interface has been polished, I think that it would be a vital service for any serious website owner.

Oh, and a special thanks to Arik for giving me permission to write this review and including shots of the current user interface.

It’s a simple and quick alarm/reminder script that is used by typing /reminder <minutes> in any conversation window. That’s all it is. It displays a notice when the time is up and also if your settings allow it, a pretty annoying sound is played (the phone sound distributed with Messenger). Hopefully in version 2.0 I’ll be adding custom reminder messages but I gotta learn that first!

http://www.msgpluslive.net/scripts/view/168-Quick-Alarm/Reminder-Script/

Sorry but this week’s News Roundup/Where’s Herbert?/Cluedo will be postponed a week. Had a lot of other things to do besides that like reminder script 2.0 and school work.

Oh, and I’ve won a 30GB Video iPod courtesy of Derby University. Check out their site and watch out for the television add that has been on your screen for a few weeks! Wow. Apparantly I’m going to be featured on their website and in their internal publication! Many thanks to them.