Hi, I’m Simon Madine and I make digital toys and write guides on web development.
I'm a senior web dev on Nokia Maps in Berlin.
All too often, I have ideas which might make a cool website or iPhone app or whatever and I know I just don't have the time to build them. I'm going to post them here in the hope that someone else might find a use for them. These ideas might already be in existence, of course. I'm not claiming they are unique in any way (although some might be).
You are free to take these ideas and do whatever you like with them. Of course, if they become amazingly successful, I could do with a bigger TV...
If you wake up every morning and think, "My t-shirts are so dull, I wish I had interesting clothes...", you need to have a look at my online shop.
I think my latest little project is pretty much done. It still doesn't work absolutely perfectly in Internet Explorer 6 but I figure I'll fix that if enough people ask me to.
So, here it is: Noodle.
"Okay, what is it?", I hear you ask (I don't but play along). Noodle is a variation on a good old-fashioned forum except that every page on the internet has its own thread. Any time you're looking at something, you just press a button and you get to see the discussion for that page. Sometimes a page won't have any comments on it for months (or ever, even), sometimes a page will be extremely busy.
The pages that are currently the most popular will appear on the Noodle homepage (it's set to show the top 10 at the moment but I might change that) along with the most recent comments.
"So, where's this magic button?" you ask (you're full of questions today, aren't you?). It's here:
If you're using Firefox with the bookmarks bar switched on or Opera with the status bar switched on, you can just grab the button, yank it off the page and drag it to your bar. If you're using Internet Explorer 6 or 7, right-click and 'Add to Favourites'. Bear in mind that IE6 is...flaky at times.
Known issues
At the moment, the 'Most popular now' section looks a bit daft, seeing as it only has 1 site in it.
The google account login screen is cut off at the top.
The google logout screen gives a nastly looking error. This is a problem at google's end. Apparently, you don't get this error in the USA but you do in the UK and Japan.
Nicknames are cut short. After my earlier musings, I decided the safest way to display nicknames (until google fix it) is just to trim bits out. If anyone has a better RegEx for doing this than the one I'm using, let me know.
I'm sure I'll post more about this soon, I'm now off to bang my head against IE for a while.
Yes, I do need better hobbies.
