\\ Protect your email address online

From time to time clients of mine get scared when they either know or think their email address will be publically viewed.  Others, don’t care, but I always reassure the client that I use a safe and secure way of displaying their email address.

You, as a guest on this site, see an email address of someone@tripleginteractive.com, but the spam bots that search websites for email addresses see a bunch of characters that look like this ractive.co

Spam bots can’t read that (well neither can I), but a web browser can read these characters and will display your email address just like you want.

I have created a small form for you to type in your email address and in return, get the unicode characters to display.

Check out my unicode converter and feel just a little bit safer on the world wide web.

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\\ Firefox 3 sets a world record

Firefox has no doubt been breathe of fresh air.  With all its add-ons and plugins you really have to love it.  Well, I do know there are some people who hate it and thats the people who made other web browsers and the people who designed their website for IE6 or higher (whew, sorry to take you back to the late 90’s).

To this date, Firefox 3 has been downloaded over 28 million times and in the process they set a Guinness World Record for the software with the most downloads in 24 hours.

You can see Mozilla’s dedication to the record here.  If you were like myself, then you helped them achieve that record.  You can create your own certificate for helping Mozilla reach the record.

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\\ We like this: Rechargable USB AA Batteries

USB Cell has come up with a really awesome product. Rechargable batteries are nothing new, but charging them by simply plugging them into your computer or any USB port, now thats awesome!

I bought a new tablet PC from HP.com and found these batteries as an optional accessory when checking out.  I had to buy some and check out this company.  They are pretty innovative and definitely something I will be recommending to all my friends.

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\\ Facebook to go Open Source

Facebook’s current application is about 1 year old and its set to go open source sometime soon.
It opens a large door for application developers who have developed for the facebook application, because it lets any social network become Facebook Platform compatible.

I have yet to develop anything for facebook, but I think it could rapidly increase the amount of widgets, plugins add-ons, etc that you will see on facebook and sites that start using their platform. (as if there were not a lot)

Source: Tech Crunch

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\\ new reporthawk.com website

Thursday May 8th www.reporthawk.com went live with their new website. Their new website was designed and developed by triple G interactive. This was the first time that we developed a site to run on PHP specifically for Windows and IIS. Reporthawk.com is database driven and interacts with a Microsoft SQL database. This was a fun learning experience for both triple G interactive and the application development team of Report Hawk. Things went well for the most part during development. I will talk about that in another post later, but the website is up and running flawlessly. Have a look for yourself at the new reporthawk.com

About Report Hawk

At Report Hawk, our corporate roots can be traced back to 2001. We started with a very simple goal: to streamline the creation and distribution of weekly status reports for construction company owners. These weekly status reports are typically sent on Friday or Monday mornings to an owner, advising them of the status of their projects.

Weekly status reports require the general contractor’s project manager or administrator to collect daily job reports from the project’s field supervisor and consolidate the daily job reports into a weekly report. Report Hawk was developed to create an online daily job report that automates the weekly status reports.

Over the past seven years, Report Hawk has grown and evolved into a construction management software developer for general contractors, owners, architects, and construction management firms.

Posted in Web Design, Web Development | No Comments »

\\ The Cubicle is 40 and dead.

Well its obviously not dead, dead, but According to this Time (blog) article, the cubicle was originally designed 40 years ago. You know, the cubicles that suck the life of whoever is ‘lucky’ enough to inhabit such a vessel.

IDEO, a design company, teamed up with Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, to create the ideal cubicle. Its pretty interested to see where creativity will take you, but I still don’t ever want to be in a cubicle.

Take a look at the Time blog article Happy 40th Birthday Cubicle! Now die!

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\\ Panerathon \\ Fighting Hunger 5K Run

I recently helped develop a mini site for the Central Ohio Panera’s. Its called panerathon and the proceeds help fight hunger. Check it out!

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\\ New image for the Columbus Symphony

2008 marks a new year, a new image and a new website for the Columbus Symphony Orchestra.  For the past few months I had been working on their new website.  Their new image reflects bright, vibrant and energetic colors.  The website needed to reflect this as well.  I also built a custom administration area for them.  This includes a way for different departments to contribute to the website with newsletters, press releases, events, news, etc.

 So, check out the new look for the Columbus Symphony and if you’re in town check out a show

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\\ IE6 image toolbar removal

You might recognize that little toolbar in the upper left corner of the image below. Maybe you recognize the character too…

Anyway, As a developer you hate that toolbar, it gets in the way of your pretty website. Well there are a couple ways to remove it. Its only occurs in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), but according to the W3C’s Browser Statistics, IE6 is still accounting for just over 33% of the market. If you are not, you should be testing your sites for every major browser whenever possible so your website is cross browser friendly.

Ok, lets get down to business.

The first way to remove the toolbar removes it from the site entirely. (My personal favorite.) In involves a simple meta tag.

<meta http-equiv=”imagetoolbar” content=”no”>

The second way is to put a tag on specific images (untested, but sure to work )

<img src=”image.jpg” galleryimg=”no” />

Now your site won’t look so silly in IE6, well atleast you can remove the IE6 image toolbar.

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\\ DEV: Report Hawk - draggable dhtml windows

One of my great clients, ReportHawk, has been redesigning their website. They have been working on restructuring how their clients utilize their system. RepotHawk specializes in the design and development of construction software solutions that result in real project savings. They had a need for a draggable window that could allow their clients to shuffle through a calendar and be able to still use their website easily.

What I came up with was this -> draggable html window.

Its a absolutely positioned div that you can move via some smart javascript.

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