Firedoodle Update

Well, it’s been an entire week since I announced Firedoodle on Emily Chang’s eHub, and the response has been AMAZING. I remember googling Firedoodle that day and getting about 65 results. Today, Firedoodle returns 233,000 results. WOW!

The feedback has been amazing. The first post that day was a very hurtful, personal comment not even related to the tool, which really got me down. However, the following day I had so many positive emails I felt like the king of the world!

The best response has definitely been from educators and students wanting to use this tool. I hadn’t thought of that application, but I am really honored that something I created will be used in education. That is super amazing!

So what’s new? Well, I’ve taken the most requested feature, and the coolest suggestion, and have started working on them. The most requested is the sticky note system. This is almost done and it’s looking real good. The really cool feature, well, I’m going to save that as a surprise. I think you’ll really like it.

There’s also bugs that need to be worked out. I’m working hard on those, and hopefully can have a bunch of issues resolved in the next release. I’m shooting to rollout the two new features and bug fixes in about 2 more weeks.

Following that release, I’ll be working on the second most requested feature which is sharing. Sharing has always been planned from the start and is going to rock. It’s going to make Firedoodle so much more useful. I think you’ll be really excited to see what I have planned.

Also, I want everyone to know that I read all the emails you send me. I do have a day job, a 14 month old son, and my girlfriend and I just had our offer on a house accepted, and Firedoodle on the side. I’m really busy, so if I don’t respond, don’t think I didn’t read it!

Thanks everyone!

Firedoodle Server Problems

Hello everyone. First I want to thank everyone out there that has installed Firedoodle and especially those of you that sent in comments. Firedoodle has become really popular, really fast, and due to that, the current hosting provider can not keep up with the requests from the server and has disabled certain parts of the extension, namely, the ability to pull up saved doodles and placemarks.

To fix this, I am currently looking for a new host and have capped the accounts. There are a few more slots left for people to register (so you can save your data), but not many. Once I get things more stable, I will remove the cap.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Please watch this blog for more updates. Thank you all!!!!

Update – Saturday 1:18 am EST

The new server is up and the data has been switched from the old host to the new. Now all we have to do is wait for the DNS changes to propagate… anywhere from 24 to 48 hours (hopefully sooner!). If you see the note about server errors on the homepage at firedoodle.com, then you are still hitting the old site (and so is the extension in your browser)…. just hang tight!

Update – Saturday 11:37 am EST

It looks like the DNS propagation is spreading, I’ve noticed that the new server is picking up a majority of the load. For me, however, I still see the old site. Hopefully the propagation will be complete throughout the web later today.

Update – Saturday 8:53 pm EST

I’m getting the new hosted site now, so hopefully the DNS propagation is close to complete. If you are still seeing the note on the homepage about server problems, you are still hitting the old site. Thanks for everyone’s patience!

Firedoodle Bug Reports

Update: 4/1/07 – Please use the forums at Firedoodle for future bug reports. Thanks.

If you are using the Firedoodle Beta and run into problems, please note them in the comments here. Thanks! If you are interested in installing Firedoodle for the Firefox browser, visit Firedoodle.com. Additionally, I’ve create a demo video of using the add-on, which can be found here.

Firedoodle Web Highlighter Beta Release

I’m proud to announce my latest project is now available as a beta release. Firedoodle is a Firefox Add-On that allows you to mark up any page as if it was projected onto a white board. You can download the plugin at Firedoodle.com and if you register an account, any highlights you created can be saved (and later shared).

I hope you like what I’ve created. Since this is a beta release, there may be bugs. If you run across any problems, please post a response here about them.

Thanks!

Get Table Cell Height’s with Javascript

Before I begin, I’ve only tested this using Firefox on a Mac, but it should work in any browser…

I’ve seen a lot of people trying to find out the height of a table cell, and I have on many occasions have tried myself only to give up. You can get the height of a cell, but it’s always going to be the height you set it to, not the height it becomes after data has been placed into it and it expands. What a pain, right? Well, I’ve found a solution to this problem, though it involves a few DIVs and javascript.

So, say you have this:

<td> a really long string of text that takes up multiple lines and you have no way of knowing how tall this TD is. </td>

Instead of that, change it to:

<td> <div id="content_top"></div> <div id="content"> a really long string... </div> <div id="content_bottom"></div> </td>

See where I’m going? We have pretty much created two points to measure by… the content_top DIV and the content_bottom DIV. Now, how do we measure them?

Whenever we need the height, we call a function, say getTDHeight(). getTDHeight looks something like this:

function getTDHeight(){ contentTopDiv = document.getElementById("content_top") contentBotDiv = document.getElementById("content_bottom") contentTop = getPixelsFromTop(contentTopDiv); contentBottom = getPixelsFromTop(contentBotDiv); contentHeight = contentBottom - contentHeight; alert("The cell height is " + contentHeight); }

So basically we are asking a function called getPixelsFromTop to give us the number of pixels the element “content_top” is from the top of the browser window. The same for the element “content_bottom”. With this, we’ll have something like content_top = 100 and content_bottom = 350. So we take the top value away from the bottom and that leaves us with the height of the cell… 250px

The getPixelsFromTop function is no biggie either:

function getPixelsFromTop(obj){ objFromTop = obj.offsetTop; while(obj.offsetParent!=null) { objParent = obj.offsetParent; objFromTop += objParent.offsetTop; obj = objParent; } return objFromTop; }

All it does is constantly adds the objects location from the top of it’s parent container, then loops up to that parent and repeats until it hits the top of the DOM, then returns the value.

Here is the code working.

Hope this helps. I’ve seen a lot of frustration over this on many forums. I know it’s a pain, but at least it is possible.