ShaneLabs

EasyDbs.com is a website that allows you to purchase common databases at reasonable prices. What sets them apart from the rest is that they are EASY!

All of their databases are packaged with something called the EZDB system. I’m not sure what that is, but I can vouch that it made my database installation super simple. After you download the database, just find the file for your database (at the moment the support mysql, microsoft sql server, microsoft access, oracle, excel and CSV – comma separated values). That file will be ready to use as is or it will be the only file you need to set up your database (ie, sql insert statements that you just need to upload to your server).

Anyway, super simple. I got a US census demographics by zip code and it has been great!

Hope that helps anyone looking for marketing or research databases by zip!

Clicktale’s free plan only allows you to see 2 page views per recording session. And that’s simply not enough to see if Clicktale is worth paying for. How are you supposed to decide whether to upgrade to a paid plan if you haven’t been able to gauge the power of the tool?

So, while you’re trying clicktale out, use this javascript bookmarklet to reveal the hidden page views. It simply hides the box that covers the screen after 2 pages have been seen. Drag the link below up to your browser bar, then you’ll have a button that you can press at the beginning of every playback which will prevent the box!

Unhide Clicktale

I DO NOT CONDONE USING THIS TO GET CLICKTALE FOR FREE. Please only use it as a tool to help you decide whether you want to purchase a real plan.

Note: I’ve only tested this in Google Chrome. If it works/doesn’t work in other browsers please let me know.

Part of the new geolocation api provides a method to get a user’s current position. In theory that’s awesome, but in practice it was returning inconsistent results. Sometimes it was accurate, other times it was off by miles. If I tried it multiple times in a row it would get more accurate, but only some of the time. The app I was working on needed better accuracy, so I tried a few things.

First I tried specifying the precision parameter (by default it is set to low precision):

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(centerMap, centerMap, {enableHighAccuracy:true, maximumAge:0, timeout:30000});

This was MUCH more accurate, but it took about 45 seconds on my iphone to respond. Not okay. I looked to another solution: watchPosition(). It basically calls getCurrentPosition() multiple times so it can narrow in on where you are if you’re moving.

navigator.geolocation.watchPosition(centerMap);

Boom. Much better results. BUT it’s being called a lot, and I don’t want my map jumping around, I just want 1 accurate reading. I came up with the following solution:

var watchCount = 0;

var watchId = navigator.geolocation.watchPosition(centerMap); 

function centerMap(location)
{
var myLatlng = new google.maps.LatLng(location.coords.latitude,location.coords.longitude);
map.setCenter(myLatlng);
map.setZoom(17);
watchCount++;

//do it 2 times
if(watchCount>=2)
{

//show current location on map
var marker = new google.maps.Marker({
position: myLatlng,
map: map,
icon: ‘http://www.google.com/gmm/images/blue_dot_circle.png‘,
clickable: false,
zIndex:1
});
//don’t need to watch anymore
navigator.geolocation.clearWatch(watchId);
}
}

Basically it starts watchPosition until 2 positions are returned (I mentioned earlier how the 2nd result is always more accurate than the first), then it stops following the user. I set the threshold to 2 because the success callback is only called when there is a change in location, so if I had set it higher and the user wasn’t moving I wouldn’t get what I want.

Check out the spec for more info!

While attending the JavaScript conference FluentConf last week in San Francisco, I heard a few people talking about a tool called Errorception. They said it offered an easy way to track all the client-side errors your users are experiencing. Since I’m a fan of an error-free website, I decided to give it a try.

Signup was super simple – you don’t need a credit card to try it out and you can be up and running within minutes. I’ve only been using it for about a week so far, but here’s my list of pros and cons:

PROS

• Reasonably priced. Their cheap plan is $5/month. Their 30 day free trial allows you to test it out without committing to anything.
• Extremely high performance. After installing the code I profiled the load time of the script and it was about 5ms. I don’t think I’ve ever put anything on my pages that loads that quickly, not even static css on my own server.
• Great interface. It groups duplicate errors to avoid muddying the reports. Everything is consolidated in an easy to read fashion and you can even get periodic emails letting you know of new errors.
• Real-time. Errors started pouring in within minutes. I reached my daily cap (for my trial account) within about an hour.
• It’s run by entrepreneur/developer Rakesh Pai. I emailed Rakesh a few questions and he went above and beyond helping me out. Rakesh is an extremely intelligent and thoughtful human being who wants everyone to succeed. He claims he’s no rock star, but what he’s been able to accomplish puts him in the class of Jimi Hendrix.

CONS

• I’m having a hard time trying to replicate some of the errors. It provides you with the user’s browser and user agent and line number of the offending script, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. IE line numbers are reportedly innaccurate, and with so much JS minimized it’s hard to really trace the problem. Stack traces are not available. The website explains the reasoning for this and I agree with the choices that were made, so I’m not sure what to suggest. Since the goal of using this service is to eliminate errors I’m not sure how successful I’ll be if I can’t replicate them first.

SUMMARY

Great service run by great talent. The only shortcoming is perhaps a domain-problem that can’t be solved or a shortfall of my own programming intellect. I’d highly recommend anyone give it a shot by at least trying it out now.

I was curious if javascript was still executed by the browser even if it was within an element that is hidden in the DOM. A quick search yielded no conclusive evidence, so I decided to test myself.

Quick answer: Yes, it does still execute – for both inline and included javascript regardless of how it’s hidden (display:none or visibility:hidden).

I made a simple test script to see if scripts still run if hidden. Then I tested it on: Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and all work the same way.

Here’s the test script I used. Within each browser, I got 7 popup windows. In case you’re wondering. I wanted to test to see if including a javascript made any difference, so the ‘testjs.js’ script just makes a simple alert call.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
                <script>
                alert('head');
                </script>
</head>
<body>
                <div>
                                visible div
                                <script>alert('visible div');</script>
                </div>
                <div style="display:none">
                                display:none
                                <script>alert('displaynone div');</script>
                </div>
                <div style="visibility:hidden">
                                visibility:hidden
                                <script>alert('invisible div');</script>
                </div>
               
               
                <div>
                                visible div
                                <script src="testjs.js"></script>
                </div>
                <div style="display:none">
                                display:none
                                <script src="testjs.js"></script>
                </div>
                <div style="visibility:hidden">
                                visibility:hidden
                                <script src="testjs.js"></script>
                </div>
 
</body>
</html>