atom thoughts

I just released another version of the Gift Hat. You can read all about it on the Gift Hat blog. Stop by and check it out.

This should free up some time for me to start blogging a bit more. I have a bit of a backlog of topics I want to discuss. You should start seeing some more posts starting next week.

I moved the main GiftHat discussion over to the shiny new Gift Hat Blog. So, if you’d like to stay up to date, please stop by.

I just snuck out another GiftHat.com release which includes two great new features:

• You can publish your wishlist right on your website or blog. See My Wishlist on the right as an example.
• I added a new feature to make it easy to select an image for your gift. Just type in a website for your gift and I will fetch all the images from that page and let you select one to go with your gift:

  

Also, pretty soon I will be adding a blog to the Gift Hat so I can move the majority of these types of announcements over there.

I am going to try to keep this blog more focused on web development using RubyOnRails and javascript, but I will include lots of examples from my projects. If you would like to know how I did any of the features in the GiftHat.com, just drop me a note and I will add it to my list of topics to discuss here.

I just released a new version of the GiftHat.com.

This release includes a ton of new things including:

• A total redesign of the look and feel
• An all new friends feature for linking up with your friends at the GiftHat.com
• Improved gift browsing including popular and recent gifts
• Improved tagging support including tag lists and tag clouds
• Support for username based Gift Hat URLs, such as:
  http://gifthat.com/atomgiant
• An improved bookmarklet to pave the way for better Gift Hat bookmarks in the future.
• Locally stored gift thumbnails.

Stop by and check it out if you have a few minutes.

I am just putting on the finishing touches of the next generation of the GiftHat.com. Thanks to a lot of good feedback this new version of the Gift Hat will include some great new features. Here is a quick list of the most notable ones:

• Support for username-based urls in the form of:
  http://gifthat.com/<your username>
• Group support so you can keep your friends and family conveniently linked to your Gift Hat page. This includes pretty group urls in the form of:
  http://gifthat.com/group/<your groupname>
• Simplified data entry. All forms within the Gift Hat only require the bare minimum to get the job done. For instance, to add a Gift to your Gift Hat all you need is a name for the gift.
• Improved tagging support.
• An all new look and feel, including a new Hat logo and new icons. Here is a sneak peak:

After publishing the Gift Hat Tour, some of the initial feedback I received was that the tour was a bit too long. Looking through the stats for the tour, I could see that a majority of the people never made it to the end. So, I searched for a more elegant solution for presenting the tour content.

My first tour implementation consisted of 8 pages, and that not all of the features of the Gift Hat that I intend to put into the tour. Each page linked to one another through a series of Next and Previous links. So, there was a very linear path through the tour.

After searching around for some alternative inspiration, I ended up completely rewriting the tour navigation to include links to the individual tour pages like so:

I think the end result is a major improvement to the tour with just a simple navigation change. Now, instead of a linear path through the tour, people can choose their own path and exit whenever they like. It also gives me plenty of room to add some of those additional features into the tour as the Gift Hat grows.

The Gift Hat tour is complete. This provides a nice summary of the major features available within the Gift Hat. Please check it out.

Feedback is welcome in the comments for this post.

I am in the process of creating a demo for the GiftHat.com and I must say it is much more difficult than I would have expected. I thought I could just take some high resolution screen shots using Windows Print Screen and then shrink them down.

However, I quickly found that any text you have on your screen will be garbled to the point of ugliness when you shrink it even a small amount. I noticed that Ian over at UserScape has some great looking shots in his tour and he was kind enough to share his technique with me. He uses SnapZ Pro for the Mac and said it is very easy to use. Unfortunately, I don’t own a Mac so I ventured out to find an equivalent for Windows.

Thankfully, I found it in a great tool called SnagIt. SnagIt makes it easy to grab screen shots from just about anywhere on Windows and provides utilities for adding effects such as drop shadows and custom borders. It also flawlessly handles the scaling of text so that it looks pretty decent even at much smaller sizes than the original.

So, thanks to SnagIt you should be seeing a great demo for the GiftHat.com in the very near future.

All good things must start somewhere, and this is as good a place as any. My name is Tom Davies and I am starting this blog to share with you my thoughts on things ranging from software development to current projects that I am working on.

The first thing I would like to share is a website I developed called the GiftHat.com.

The Gift Hat is a site for storing and sharing your wishlists with your friends and family. I am currently seeking beta testers so if you have a few moments and would like to participate, please sign up.

The Gift Hat was developed using RubyOnRails. In future posts, I will expand on some of the technologies and techniques I used to develop the Gift Hat.