I will now claim that I almost invented Twitter.

Back in 2003, AIM was the hot shit with people living in the dorms. I really liked how much effort people put into their away messages. I remember a peticular away message of mine declaring how awesome last nights party must of been because I woke up and there was a beer bottle in my fish tank.* My idea was to write a script that logged the away messages of everyone I knew and stored them in a DB. I got really tangled up in implementation details. I tried using perl and some module that could connect to AIM. For some reason I thought I needed to use threading in perl. This became a giant nightmare as I knew very little of perl or threading at the time. Needless to say, the script never made it into a cron, and the rest was not history. I can’t help but wonder what kind of website I would have thrown together once I started gathering data…

These days I notice that people still put a lot into their status messages on gchat, AIM, etc. And facebook has fully embraced status updates as well. It took me a while to warm up to Twitter, but I’m really liking it now. How else am I supposed to get updates on what my friends are doing from a hut in some tiny village in Uganda that has no electricity or running water?

* I thought it would be a good addition to the tank so I drunkenly boiled it and placed the sterile bottle in the tank. It was a clear Corona bottle, and actually did work pretty well in a fish tank.

Of course, an hour before an important meeting is when we discover it doesn’t work on any mac browser. The flash debug output shows our site initialization code is just throwing a fit. No DB access settings can be found. Doesn’t make any sense why an HTTP request from flash on a mac would break our app.

Here’s the basics of how our our setup switches dev/production settings:

if ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == 'example.mydesktop') {
    // LOCAL DEV SETTINGS
} else if ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == 'example.com') {
    // PRODUCTION SITE SETTINGS
}

It makes considerations for www. etc. The problem in this case is that flash is adding :80 to the HTTP Host header. Instead of

GET /path/to/file HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

Flash for mac likes to add

GET /path/to/file HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com:80

This will cause ‘example.com:80′ to show up in the php $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] variable. You can see how this would break simple host detection.

And yes, there are words that end in q.

I present my first greasemonkey script: twitter omg.

To be honest, I’ve never actually installed greasemonkey before. Writing the script was quite fun. I’ll be looking for opportunities to make a script that is actually useful…

I’ve been defaulting any new domains I setup to remove the www. Remember, www. is deprecated.

Here’s a quick survey of some popular sites:

The Original Belchin’ Waffles Zine: http://belchinwaffles.com/

Friend message board (the original twitter, lol): http://friends.belchinwaffles.com/

Douchey party pictures, etc: http://friends.belchinwaffles.com/gallery/

IE 8 beta is out. Looks like they’re making great strides to improve their support for standards. I love that you can install the beta with out the need to uninstall it when it breaks sites. I’m hoping they keep the Emulate IE7 button for the final release. Or somehow tuck it away in a menu so the option is still there. An amazing feature for web developers would be an additional Emulate IE6 feature. Testing sites in Internet Explorer would be a breeze if that was the case. I haven’t played with the developer tools much, but I like how much easier they’re making JS debugging for IE. Here’s a post from the IE Blog about the new developer tools