Over at FlowingData is a Visualize This challenge to visualize Tax Freedom Day (the number of days that your taxes take out of your yearly income). The national average is 103 days out of the 365, or April 13th. The average varies from state to state and the task is to represent these state statistics.
My first inclination was to incorporate a map, with possibly a topographic-type extrusion of each state for the length of time. But in order to do that really well, it would take some interactive 3D navigation…and I haven’t touched Processing in a long time. Or Flash for that matter.
Next I thought about some kind of chart, so I played around with YUI charts. Nothing I came up with was very compelling though, so I decided to approach it from the calendar view. I ended up with this HTML/JS visualization: Tax Freedom Dates & States.
It seems to me that people will want to browse by state or browse chronologically, so here you can get the states from hovering over a (green) date in the calendar view or get the date by hovering over a state. The national average (April 13th) is represented by a brighter green date. I thought about incorporating color gradations, but I like the simplicity of one color for tax days. Also, I made it from scratch with the goal just to make it work, so it could probably be more efficient.
Man, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. Anyways, I’ve been playing around with changing one of my Wordpress sites’ themes using the Theme Test Drive plugin and I like one of the most popular themes I found, iNove. I currently have ratings on this particular site (I use the WP-PostRatings plugin). I think the plugin already uses FamFamFam icons for the stars, but I want to use blue ones to match the comment icons in the iNove PostInfo section. Here’s a screenshot of how the ratings stars will look with the text and comment icon:
Here’s how to use these blue ratings stars in your blog:
1. Install the WP-PostRatings plugin and set it up in your blog (activate it, put the php in your posts, etc).
2. Download this zip file, extract it, and place the stars_blue folder in your blog’s wp-content/plugins/postratings/images directory.
3. Go to the Ratings tab and select the Ratings Options page. Then select the stars_blue radio button. Double-check how it will look by hitting “Update ‘Individual Rating Text/Value’ Display” and then hit Update Options to save.
The yellow is the color that will appear when a user is rating a post while the blue indicates the current cumulative rating of the post.
I remember Apple doing this on Yahoo! before, but this ad campaign today on Yahoo! Tech tickled me. Even without the sound on, you still get the gist of the ad.
Some great designers at Yahoo! have publicly released a Stencil Kit! It was released internally a few weeks ago and has made it much easier for me to wireframe. The designs are very clean and crisp. Go ahead and check it out - it’s available for OmniGraffle, Visio, Illustrator, and Photoshop!
Yahoo! has launched Glue Beta in India, a new contextual module search result page. It’s exciting to see it in action! I did some searches (artists, actors, cities, political leaders, companies, etc.) and here are some modules that appeared. Along with Yahoo! modules, there are third-party integrations such as Youtube, Wikipedia, and howstuffworks. Pretty cool stuff - check it out at in.yahoo.com.
Also - first time using the gallery and I didn’t upload in the right order…here’s a whole page overview.
Ooh, ahh…Wordpress 2.5 has a new gallery feature! Too bad that doesn’t really help us folks who could care less about it and just want an easy way to upload one image. IT TAKES TOO MANY STEPS! Maybe it’s just my setup, but this is how it works for me in both Safari and Firefox…
Click Add an Image button
Upload Image
Fill out Title, Caption, Description
Click on “None” button for Link URL; realize the button doesn’t work. Delete the URL from the Link URL input box to manually make it “None”. Then remember that it won’t get saved anyways!
Press “Save All Changes”…or don’t. It does nothing for you.
Go to the Gallery tab.
Click “Show” on your picture.
Change the Link URL field AGAIN (thank goodness the “None” button works now!)
Change Size to “Full size” (I went into Photoshop already to make this image the size I want…please don’t try to change it for me kthanks)
Click “Insert into Post”. Finally.
Are you kidding me? TEN steps to upload an image and add it to your post? Why don’t you just give me all the posting options in the upload tab once I’ve uploaded the picture?
So, I’m not good enough to totally rework this disaster of a feature but I can at least change some of the default values so it’s a little less of a pain. For me, I almost always want the image to link to “none” and the image to be full size. So I changed these defaults in wp-admin/includes/media.php:
Change the defaults from ‘medium’ to ‘full’ (for good measure)
line 51: function get_image_send_to_editor($id, $alt, $title, $align, $url='', $rel = false, $size='full') {
line 512: $size = 'full';
Change the Link URL default value from the file URL to none
line 552: <input type='text' name='attachments[$post->ID][url]' value='' /><br />
I really wish I didn’t have to go to the Gallery tab at all. Maybe the option to add the image to your post (without going to the Gallery tab) is supposed to work, but it doesn’t. So at least these fixes cut down a couple of those steps for me. Wordpress, please fix this soon!
UPDATE: It looks like if I do upload 2+ images at once, the full options (including the “Insert into Post” button) show up right after uploading without having to go into the gallery tab. I also see the “Crunching…” along with the progress bar, which I don’t usually see with a single upload. Too bad I usually just want to upload one image.
Also, my Firefox 3 (beta 5) shuts down whenever I try to use the upload media tool.
One of the biggest things keeping me from trying out Firefox 3 Beta was the lack of support by my addons…but I bit the bullet and did it anyways. I heard about this LifeHacker article today and this Nightly Tester Tools addon that lets you make (most of) your extensions compatible with Firefox 3. Basically it adds a “Make all compatible” button to your addons window:
Look at all those sad exclamation points! :( Just click on “Make all compatible” and say OK to this message:
Then restart Firefox and it’ll bring you back to the Addons window where you can see your updated extensions:
Oh snap! Look at all those happy extensions! So of course, do this at your own risk, it could mess up Firefox, etc. etc. I’ve found it to be well worth it though! A word to the wise though: you should probably wait to make your old Themes compatible…trust me, it’s not pretty.
So, what extensions do I use, you ask? Let me list a few of my favorites…
Adblock Plus - if you haven’t heard of this before, ouch.
BugMeNot - puts a BugMeNot option in the menu when you right-click on a username/password field which populates them with any available u/p combinations
del.icio.us - puts a button in the browser menu so you can quickly add a page to del.icio.us
One of my biggest Firefox pet peeves over the years has been how it handles dragging a boomark to the Bookmarks Toolbar on a Mac (apparently this doesn’t happen on Windows). Here’s a screenshot of how it’s been up through FF2.0:
This tooltip that shows up when you drag the favicon down to the toolbar could be helpful I guess…the first time. But the problem is that tooltip blocks all the space under it on the toolbar, so you can’t actually add the bookmark to any folders you have underneath it. Unless you’re super quick and get to it before the tooltip comes up. There are ways around it (put the bookmark somewhere else and move it afterwards), but it’s still really annoying. I looked into how to fix it a while ago and found this work-around, but it removes ALL tooltips in your browser.
Anyways, it’s something I’ve begrudgingly learned to live with. Until now! The beta version of Firefox 3 (3.0b5) finally lets you add a bookmark to the middle of your Bookmarks Toolbar! So instead of instructing people how to add a bookmark, it has a new tooltip about the current webpage’s identity information, but you can still add a bookmark under it:
After a second of hovering over the tooltip, the folder the favicon is over will expand so you can drop the favicon into the folder. And after 6 or 7 seconds the tooltip disappears altogether. AND sometimes when you drag it doesn’t even show the tooltip at all. Thank goodness!
So what’s that identity information message? A webpage’s favicon is more separate from the web address as a button (in FF2 it’s in the URL box)…and if you click on the favicon it will open a box telling more about the “identity information”:
If you’re on a secure website (starting with “https”), that’s where it will give the identity information:
The “More Information” takes you to the Security tab of the Page Info box. I guess that’s a nice feature, but I doubt I’ll use it.
So color me excited about this in Firefox 3. Yeah, it’s probably the least exciting new feature about FF3 but this has been too annoying for too long. Any other FF3ers out there? What’s your favorite part about it?
