A Simple Stack Overflow-Style Badge Framework for PHP

badgesI'm pretty infatuated with Stack Overflow's badge system, so I decided to cook up a generic framework for adding one to my crossword site. Herein I will present my work in progress for the consumption of my dear readers.

The storage of these badge-awarding rules seemed interesting to me. It'd have to be flexible enough to take data from any part of the site related to a user, and not be a hassle to add new badges or check a user's list of acquired badges. I haven't put the caching in yet, which would form the basis for making awarded badges permanent, instead of calculated on the fly, but it's still pretty fun to work with.

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On Writing a Simple Google Wave TODO List

Screen shotGoogle Wave has been accused of being a way to make people feel like how older people feel when they use the internet. I definitely found this to be true during my first couple of weeks using the platform. The volume of stimuli received even in a three-person wave can be pretty overwhelming.

I figured that I'd need to write a little Wave gadget before I actually grokked the platform. I figured that a to-do list would be somewhat useful and fairly simple to code up. I built this thing up one day on my lunch break.

Here's a link to the gadget for your consumption.  I've started a public wave for feature requests and discussion and such.
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Sensing Magnetic Fields in Android in Very Few Lines!

Overcome with gadget lust, I picked up a HTC Dream from rogers. I had fully expected to need to unlock, root, resolder or otherwise hack this thing to pieces before it could do anything interesting. I was wrong. So wrong.

I'll gush more over the particulars of the phone dreaminess in another post, I hope. It can pretty much do anything I do on my laptop, except with exponentially higher rates of thumb cramping. But I digress. There are magnetic fields to sense.
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An Interesting CSS Hover Effect

I cooked up what I believe is an interesting little CSS effect which you can see on my home page.  After having a delightful time playing with text-shadows in an unconstrained environment, I wanted to see how far CSS selectors would go.

The effect reveals some descriptive text when a link is hovered, all purely CSSey.

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