Sitting on a third floor table of Allen Hall (the journalism and communication school) at the University of Oregon my my colleagues pass by asking "mapping?" I sight and respond with a smile "nothing but." The reason for this sigh has revealed itself as a disappointing yet without persuasion truth. FireFox is indeed not the browsers best friend. For several weeks I could not figure out why only Firefox would plot addresses from an XML file on a Google map in the same order each time. Safari and IE would plot points in an order arbitrary to the order of the XML file. Well the reason that FireFox was the only one that worked properly was because it is in fact the ...

My app is taking a life of its own. I am working on picking the perfect domain for this, and when I do you can see it in action.

Here's what it is: A mashup of Google Maps and USPS (UPS and FEDEX are the first slated improvements). It is 100% AJAXified and really quite cool. It does a number of different calculations for users, from the distance between two stops on a package's route to the average speed between each point.

I am being held back by a problem that I am making no progress with though. In FireFox it works perfect. But IE and Safari behave the same but different from Firefox. They decide to plot the ...

As I promised I am working on my latest web app for release hopefully before the holidays. Not going into it too much it is a mashup of USPS and Google Maps. This has been my first true mashup and it is like learning a whole new language, or several. For this I have had to learn the USPS API, Google Maps API and how to setup and use a proxy. This required the PEAR HTTP_Request to be installed on my server, actually easier than I thought. If you have cpanel you can just go to the php config and hit the button there and poof. All this is good, I love learning these new things but I am also disappointed ...

In an ideal world I would have found a Wordpress image captions plugin that just worked the way I wanted - not a perfect world I guess. Last night I struggled with Javascript and edited wp-lightbox2 so it would display any image with a link having a title attribute as a caption. This is lightweight and works great for me. here is an example: Here is how I did it: After downloading and activating wp-lightbox open plugins/wp-lightbox/js/lightbox.js near line 350 after: if(anchor.getAttribute('href') && (relAttribute.toLowerCase().match('lightbox'))){ anchor.onclick = function () {myLightbox.start(this); return false;} Add: //set the id attreibute anchor.setAttribute('id', 'caption'+i); //get the caption attribute captionDiv = ...