The next great Twitter app will detect when you have a new follower and if they only have one tweet and zero followers it will block them automatically.

Does someone want to make that for me? I’d use it even if it were a paid service.

I used this in a project that I just finished and I thought that I’d share.

    $('#badge-code').focus(function(){
        $(this).select();
    });

If the <textarea> element on your page is #badge-code then, using jQuery, the text in that textarea will be highlight when they click on the box.

This is great if you have a lot of code for your badge but not a lot of page real estate.

Remember, everyone hates scrolling page elements.

“Above the fold,” isn’t as relevant to web design as it used to be. Today, screen sizes can be all over the board and even if they were uniform, browser windows can be resized to any dimensions. Additionally, all of the majors browsers (including, most importantly the iPhone version of Safari) support zooming instead of text resize. So, all those variables together make it near impossible to guarantee that any portion of a webpage is immediately visible in the viewport before the user scrolls.

–Timmy Christensen

The first guy (or girl) to come up with a system that prevents or fixes linkrot without killing the simplicity of writing an anchor tag and without obfuscating the link target will fix one of the biggest problems I see on the web.

–Timmy Christensen

This morning I was watching the local news to catch the weather before I head off for work and I saw a spot about how (local?) couples are making weddings more memorable. Of course they go directly to funny dances and of course they show a clip from the JK Wedding Entrance Dance. After the news piece, one of the reporters comments how that video “went viral.”

And that brings me to my point …

Excuse me! No, you’re video is not viral if it gets you on The Today Show! That’s just plain ol’ popular. And that goes for every video on the Internet. If it’s popular and it can be found on YouTube does not mean it’s a “viral video.”

It’s viral because of how it’s popularity spread through e-mail or instant messaging. This kind of one-to-one transmission is what makes the circulation of a meme so interesting and thus viral. But let’s face it, once a meme makes it to any of the social news sites (digg, reddit et al.) it’s proliferation is no longer one-to-one. And if it makes it to the front page of a social news site or major blog then really we should consider it to be popular and we should remove the “viral” label.

In Adobe Photoshop when you’re designing a site and you need to draw a 1px solid line, I recommend using the rectangle tool (U) rather than the line tool. The reason is that the line tool will leave a blurry edge at the beginning and end of your line even when it’s drawn at 100% zoom. When using the rectangle tool, you’ll have to pay attention to the height of the line but you will get a cleaner result.

–Timmy Christensen

I don’t know where I’ve heard this recently but I know that the only way to get better is by doing. I can read enough articles about SEO to fill a book but the only way I’m going to get my page (timmychristensen.com) to rank for any search term worth-a-damn is by opening up TextMate and optimizing.

That said, I want to get better at writing. Specifically writing for the web. I feel that if I’m going to reach my goal of web celebrity I’m going to have to do it through producing the content that people want to read. And audiences aren’t going to fall in love with the first thing I write. In fact, I realize that most of the posts, articles and stories I write in the beginning are going to be total garbage. Like most of my first webpages, they looked like poop but now I’d like to think that some of my work is respectable, if not, at least better than what the client had before.

All right, with that … I’m going to get back to work.

Look for more posts about just “getting things done” in the future.