Another day, another feature. Too bad this one took longer than expected for something so miniscule. Guess that answers the popular question, what is taking so long with this damn site of yours, c'mon already. Well, despite the demand for me to actually release something on the www hostname, I'm still remaining patient, so bear with me.

So what's new, well, take a look at the screenshot above. The other day I released a small tweak to the site that would update the 'Recent Tracks' list in real-time. This required some ajax calls and despite the coolness factor, I became frustrated because there was no way to specify whether you wanted it enabled or disabled. Heck, even I would like to have an opt-out policy that lets me turn that feature off. Wish granted!

Just click on the options link on the menu and it will fade some options that allow you to toggle the feature on and off. I almost forgot to mention that this feature is remembered across sessions via cookies. So once you set it, it will stay that way until you either 1) change it again or 2) clear your cookies. Man, that would of been annoying if I didn't include that, ey?

If you find any bugs, well, I guess post some comments here.

As many of you may already know, I am a Digg.com junkie. In fact, many of the articles and other information I read on the regular basis originate from articles posted on Digg. One of the cool features that Digg has is something known as Digg Spy. When you navigate your browser of choice to that page, it provides a real-time view into activity on Digg.com, such as stories being submitted or 'dugg'.

Well, I thought that was a pretty nifty idea so I spent about 8 hours applying that same idea to the Music section of this website. The music section of this site contains a 'Recent Tracks' menu on the left hand side of the page. Using some RJS and the periodically_call_remote() helper method in RoR, I managed to slap something together that works. Really, it does work, at least in Safari, Firefox, and my favorite...Internet Explorer.

Now, let me explain how this works. Let's say you find yourself somewhere in the Music section of this site. If a song is played while you are on a page, that menu will automatically flash yellow and fade away. It automatically checks every 60 seconds.

I actually stayed up until 6am this morning trying to work out the kinks. For the most part, I had it all working around 2am last night. Between 2-6am, I was in the rubyonrails IRC channel trying to track down a bug with the Effect.Highlight function. You see, the menu would be updated and flash yellow just like I wanted it to, but then I would lose the :hover functionality where the element changes to a white background when hovered over.

Long story short, I ditched the Effect.Highlight function and went with Effect.Appear with some other RJS'ish stuff that gets the same thing done. Alright, that's all the new features I can code up this weekend, if there are any bugs, please lemme know.

It's one thing to be able to create a blog, but what about deleting them? Yeah, I didn't forget about that, just hadn't gotten around to that particular feature until tonight. Since I try my best to put my HCI classes from college to good use, I decided to include a confirmation message that asked the user if he/she really wanted to delete the blog.

So thinking about the problem for a while, I came up with a few solutions. We'll split the solution into 'input' and 'confirmation'. Input is defined as the way the user initially interacts to delete a blog. The 'confirmation' is defined as how the user is provided confirmation that the blog should be deleted.