My apologies for not updating the last few days. I have been really busy with some stuff…

Roddy (my partner) and I just finalized and registered Media Next, Inc, which is now the parent company of PriceAdvance. We got this sweet embosser as well! PriceAdvance is the project we have been working on the past few months that is going to slap price comparison in the face! It was never intended to be a stealth startup, but it seems a lot of people started taking interest in what we were doing, so we decided to keep things under wraps until we launch. If things continue to go smoothly thats going to be really soon! One of the main purposes of this blog was to log my experience with building PriceAdvance from the ground up. After we launch I will backtrack a little and keep a real log of whats going on moving forward.

I also started hacking together the newest version of Prototype into the XUL library I have recently been maintaining. It was a little annoying that I released 1.6 RC1 only hours before they released 1.6 final. But I should have something up in the next day or two.

CollegeHumor is looking to fill two development positions…

Flash / Action Script Developer

PHP /MySQL Developer

Connected Ventures is cool, but what could better then working with me?

The CollegeHumor Power Rankings are an anual index of the top colleges in the U.S. for having the maximum amount of fun while putting forth the least amount of effort. Scoring is done on only the most competitive and important categories.

Percent Female
Average SAT
# pics uploaded to CH
Percent Greek
Bar Closing Time
Freshman Retention Rate
Percent Commuters
Stadium Capacity
Average Temperature in February
Closest Taco Bell
Billboard Peak
Cute College Girls on CH

For the past week I have been working on this custom JavaScript rich text editor for the CollegeHumor article writer. Our current editor is using FCKeditor, which has been decent but has only recently become compatible with all browsers. For the re-write we messed around with the ever so popular TinyMCE, which in my opinion I liked better then FCK. I found the problem with both of them to be customization and overhead. There’s a handful of other editors out there that we messed around with, but I found these two to be the most popular, have the best documentation and supporting community.

If you are going to use all of the features the full package offers, writing one from scratch is going to be a daunting task. Why re-invent the wheel? TinyMCE has a pretty sweet setup that lets you easily create themes and plugins. They even give you access to override some of the core functionality without touching the core files. In the CollegeHumor situation we are looking to customize almost every action and eliminate the overhead of the features we don’t plan to use. The CH article writer is clearly not one of the most visited pages on the site, but I cant imagine how it would perform if it was. These out of box editors are thousands of lines of JavaScript, tons of includes, graphics and html files. If you used something like this as the primary editor for say a large social site, it would be a waste of bandwidth and suffer from slow page loads on the client side.

So if you decide you want to code your own, Microsoft and Mozilla both have interfaces that ease creating custom rich text editors. For the basic features; bold, italic, justify, font size, etc. there is a single line commands that deal with the actual placement and HTML. Basically all it takes to get a super basic editor is an IFrame set to “design mode” and a few command buttons.

Microsoft execCommand docs
Mozilla execCommand docs
Browser Compatibility chart

If you end up dynamically generating the IFrame, beware of a quirk in Mozilla that requires the IFrame to be completely loaded before it can be set to design mode. The way I dealt with this was to put an event handler on window/load that triggers the design mode once I know everything has been downloaded. I have seen a few examples use short timers to set design mode after the IFrame was appended. I found this to work most of the time, but sometimes if the browser hiccuped an extra second it would try and add it before the IFrame was loaded, which threw an error.

Since Fox will not be airing a new season of “24″ due to the writers’ strike, they plan to air a season that was originally filmed in 1994. CollegeHumor obtained this exclusive clip.

* There should be no excuse next year for “24″ sucking as much as it did this past season. If the strike ever ends, they will have an entire year to rewrite and re-shoot the season. I hope everyone is ready for a shit load of reality TV!

Patrick was on the subway the other day and saw the girl of his dreams, but she got away. Heres his story…

Patrick discusses the girl of his dreams from Jakob Lodwick on Vimeo.

Detailed Drawing

(click image to enlarge)

If you have any information that could lead to Patrick finding his girl, please visit nygirlofmydreams.com.

A few days ago I posted about a FireFox bug that affected Function.prototype in the Chrome environment. The two modified prototype libraries that I posted were starting to get a little outdated. I spent the night modifying the most recent version of Prototype 1.6.0_rc1 framework to work in Chrome. I have also removed as many references as I could find to browsers other then Mozilla/Gecko. If you find any bugs or make any changes, please let me know so I can update the posted code.

WARNING: I have not fully tested this library!

Disclaimer: This modified version of the Prototye JavaScript framework is in no way affiliated, distributed or supported by Sam Stephenson or the Prototype library project. This library has been modified from its original intended version/use and I take no responsibility for any bugs, damages or problems this library may cause.

A new version of script.aculo.us was released today. The biggest change is the upgrade to prototype 1.6 final, which I have been running since its release. There were a few other minor updates, you can read the full change log.

One of the projects that I have been working on is a FireFox extension. I’m pretty new to the XUL/Extension space, but have a lot of JavaScript experience. My framework of choice has long standing been Prototype. I figured why not make life easy and utilize that functionality in the extension. I soon realized that almost none of the functionality worked in the Chrome environment. I spent a lot of time reinventing the wheel, re-writing many of the general prototype features. When I started writing my own bind function I realized that it was throwing erroneous errors. I know the code was perfect and successfully tested it in a front end environment. I started doing some research and found out theres a long standing bug in the FireFox Chrome environment that prevents extending Function.prototype. Some more research and I found that the reason most of the prototype functionality didn’t work was because the methods require use of the bind function. I found a hacked version of prototype 1.4 that has been re-written to work in Chrome and a bind patch for prototype 1.5.

Update: I modified the most recent version of Prototype (1.6.0 RC1) to work in Chrome. You can download the code here.

For the last three weeks at Connected Ventures, a few guys from the CollegeHumor team and myself have been working on a new site called TodaysBIGThing.com. The site is pretty simple, Every day, we find the best thing on the Internet and put it on the site. Just one thing, each day.

Yep, that’s it.