j. paul arterburn

Right now most of the daily deal sites require you to put in your email before you can even view the deals for any particular city. This is so they can send you daily reminders of what the deal of the day is; this isn’t exactly the best user experience in my eyes. It’s certainly best for the daily deal companies, I understand, as it’s putting their content in front of you without you having to do anything different from your normal daily online behavior. You’re going to check email, twitter, facebook, and a few news sites likely every time you connect. If a company can put their content in one of these mediums (or all of them) they have a higher chance of clicking with you, pun intended.

What I didn’t want to do with preVU was what I hated with the other sites and force-require an email address for this sole purpose (I would, however, like to at least provide that option in the future if a user desires the daily emails). I set out to come up with a creative solution that is both effortless but not aggressive and landed on this: gadgets - or widgets, whatever you want to call them. Starting with iGoogle & Gmail as well as the iframe solution that website owners can install on their own sites if serving a local crowd.

It’s a simple 1-click install to add the gadget to your iGoogle home page: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=ig.pre.vu/prevu.xml

It takes a few more steps to get it working in Gmail, but it’s well worth it: How to add gadgets to Gmail

This is what shows when you click on the title of the gadget (“preVU »”)

I launched a new project this week that acts as an aggregator for the plethora of daily deal sites on the Internet. If you were one of the 111 million viewers of the Super Bowl last Sunday you were exposed to two of the major players in the arena: Groupon & LivingSocial.

Visit the new site here: preVU

Part of the idea for the site is to make it easier for people to get this information without having to subscribe to a dozen different emails. But making them visit another website not normally in their daily routine (ie. email, facebook, twitter, news, rss reader, etc…) is not exactly conscious as well. So I’ve developed a widget that will allow sites such as local ISP’s/newspapers/tv stations and the like to drop on their sites and give their readership an added bonus they’re likely interested in - everything likes 50% off, right? If you find the widget useful, please request your local news site to get in touch with me and I can custom-make one to fit their requirements.

Steal this widget for your own site (change attributes as desired):

<iframe src=”http://w.pre.vu/denver” frameborder=”0” width=”300” height=”300” style=”border:2px solid #222;”></iframe>

Some of the important pieces of preVU came from the following sites:

• PHP Geo-Targeting Script: this makes it so when you simply visit http://pre.vu it will auto-direct you to the nearest city you live by. I put a little added touch to the script that Eric describes as I have an array with the latitude & longitude of each city that has it’s own preVU page; it then grabs the lat/long of the city you live in and does a distance calculation between the preVU cities & your city to determine which one to send you on to.
  
  
• Quick & Dirty PHP Caching: preVU’s code is designed to go out to each of these sites, grab the content and bring it back to you. The bottleneck in this process is the connections between my server & the daily deal servers. It’s only slightly faster than if you were to go out and load a dozen websites. It’s roughly only about 30 seconds to do this, but in today’s environment would you really stick around if it took a website 30 seconds to load? Heck no! That’s where caching comes in handy…I’ve setup a cron job to do this ‘capture process’ every 3 hours and basically save a copy of what it found in a static file. So rather than you having to take the 30 seconds to load the site every time and pull fresh content yourself, what you see is a copy of the data that’s at most 3 hours old. Because the majority of these sites don’t change content for the entire day (hence the name, *daily* deals) this process works wonders for site speed.
  
  
• I spent quite a bit of time deciding how I wanted the hovers to look when you moused-over a link. I eventually settled on qTip2 - a jquery plugin that is extremely customizable.
  
  
• Mobile Browser Detector: if you visit http://pre.vu on a mobile phone, you’ll be presented with a much more simplified version of the site. This two-line script made it a breeze for me to determine a mobile-user and give them the mobile-friendly version of the site.

I’ve been using a lot more of Index & Match functions together instead of Vlookup because it’s a faster calculation for Excel, faster for me to put in and copy across (especially multiple columns of lookups), and can go pull back values both right & left of the lookup column (as well as a matrix lookup).

I ran into a sang recently, though. By default, Index/Match doesn’t play nicely with sorts. It almost hard-codes the formula into the cell so your values get completely mixed up after a sort and is now looking up the original value that is likely on a different row.

Google found me the solution. Simply remove the sheet reference (bolded) of the lookup value right after the match: =index(sheet2!B:B,match(sheet1!A2, sheet2!A:A, 0). It will put all sheet references in by default, so type the formula, hit enter, and then correct it…and then copy it down.

Go USB; the results speak for themselves…

iPhone 4 (AT&T) over bluetooth:


iPhone 4 (AT&T) using USB:


I also have a Blackberry 8330 (Sprint) that I use for work, so I tested the same theory…

Blackberry 8330 (Sprint) over bluetooth:
(dial-up modem, no user/pass, dialing #777)


Blackberry 8330 (Sprint) using USB/Sprint Smartview:

One of the nice-to-haves with an iPhone 4 I soon realized was being able to use the flash on the back for the camera as a light. It doesn’t take very many steps to click on camera and turn the flash on, so I wasn’t too disappointed when I found out Apple wasn’t allowing flashlight apps that utilized the flash (because they are using “hardware not for its designed purpose”).

I did my research and found a developer, Jason Ting, who let me be a beta tester for his app - LED Light for iPhone 4 - I figure this was my workaround for not being to able to get it off the App Store. But I just got an email from Jason with good news…sounds like Apple is now letting these sort of apps in, so I’m obviously going to plug his.

It’s pretty simple - you load the app and the flash turns on. The bottom button is for dance-club-strobe effect. But seriously, it’s FREE (or $0.99 for the non-iAd version), so quit reading and just install it.

Yes, it’s brighter than just using a bright white screen.

I wasn’t able to find this anywhere, and it was fairly simple. I had a problem with my iPhone recently that forced me to do a complete restore and only the greatest & latest firmware (3.1.3) would actually work during the restore process. Everything I was finding said that jailbreaking & unlocking were not supported if you did this upgrade, but I’ve managed to make it work.

1. Download 3.1.2 firmware from Apple
2. Run RedSn0w (0.9.4) to jailbreak & choose the 3.1.2 firmware file that you just downloaded.
3. Open Cydia, run all initial updates
4. Cydia: install Fuzzyband (4.0-b4) to downgrade baseband & allow for unlock
5. Run Fuzzyband - you should see the following information:
   Bootloader: 05.08 [G2M3S2]
   Baseband: ICE2-05.12.01
   OS 3.1.3
6. Cydia: install Carrier Logo Fix - this will add back the AT&T logo in the status bar
7. Cydia: add source repo666.ultrasn0w.com ; install ultrasn0w to unlock

Google announced on May 5, 2010 that they started rolling out their new search results layout to everybody. You’ll notice it immediately because it adds a new left column to the results:

If you were like me, you might of noticed right away that the “Definition” link was gone. Even before they switched the layout, they changed it from Answers.com to their own internal version which I wasn’t a fan of.

So I did what any coder would do and made Google the way I wanted it. I brought back the Answers.com (as well as added a link in the left column for Dictionary.com) definition link to Google search results via a userscript that can be used as an extension on Chrome or Firefox (using Greasemonkey).

Find the extension here: Add definition link to the new Google search results layout

EDIT: Google has beefed up their dictionary results in the OneBox, making it a bit closer to what this script provides. Now if you type a query with “en:en” before it, you’ll force the definition to popup with links to popular sites.

A movement has started to bring Google into Topeka as an Internet Service Provider and I can think of only a few that are against it (I’m looking at you, Cox Communications). It wouldn’t be the first time Topeka was officially renamed to fulfill corporate fantasies of having a city named after them.

Supporters with some high energy leaders have done quite the job to get:

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