Sean Walther’s Blog

Help: IE7 won’t load my JSON but IE8 will – Using a JSON Validator

I just ran into this issue, and found surprisingly little documentation.  My JSON request wasn’t returning.  I was using the jQuery “getJSON” method to send the request out.  Nothing was coming back.

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Tags: Chrome, Firefox, getJSON, IE7, IE8, Internet Explorer, jQuery, JSON, JSON Validator, JSONLint, Safari

Google Chrome 4.0: Extensions and Bookmark Sync

Today Google officially announced the release of Chrome 4.0.  The update features two major pieces of functionality, Extensions and Bookmark Syncing.  If you already have Google Chrome, just click on the “tool” -> About Google Chrome, and click on “Update” in the lower right corner next to the OK window.  Otherwise, download it from Google. › Continue reading

Tags: adblock, bookmarks, Chrome, Firebug, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, IE, IE Tab, IE7, IE8, iPhone, Xmarks

OpenDNS – Free powerful DNS service

You may have noticed the Entrecard advertisement on the side of this blog, it’s a site that links bloggers together.  

Entrecard helps you get the word out about your blog, and hopefully find more people that you want to follow, as well as readers for your own blog.  

One of the habits Entrecard creates is looking through a lot of blogs in the beginning of the day.  You can see a list of blogs that are members of Entrecard and have looked at your site.  It’s nice to see a list of people who are interested in your subject matter.  Unfortunately, that list of blogs can reach into the hundreds on a daily basis.

I found myself queuing up about 40-50 tabs in Chrome (still using and loving it) and looking through everyones blogs.  

This brings me to OpenDNS.  

Before using OpenDNS servers, I would normally be able to only load up a page or two before pages started to fail.  I know I have a fast computer, and that the links were valid, the hosts were not going down, it was merely a problem with my internet connection.  Seeing as the problem was mostly binary — either pages loaded or had DNS issues, I figured the problem was DNS related.

OpenDNS has a great tutorial on how to setup OpenDNS on your network. 

It was quick, easy, and drastically improved some browsing experiences (normal browsing is a bit faster, but not as noticable as when I load dozens of pages at a time).

One bonus is that you have a dashboard that can be used to control your networks usage.  You can easily filter sites, monitor usage, and create shortcuts for any machine in your network (home points to www.google.com, mail could point to mail.google.com/a/domain.com, etc).

Below are some recent articles about OpenDNS:

• Lose your Time Warner internet connection (again)? You could try Open DNS
• 20,000 K-12 Schools Adopt Free Web Security Tool
• OpenDNS – a blogger writes about DNS security issues, and why OpenDNS helps 

Tags: Blog, browsing, Chrome, DNS, entrecard, internet connection, OpenDNS, security

Chrome – Holding Steady

I had posted earlier that I had setup Google’s new Chrome browser.

Now it’s been at least a week that I’ve been using it and I wanted to post some comments.

First of all, I don’t consider a “beta” browser.  I know whenever I test out a new browser it feels like it’s almost unusable for a period of time.  It’s been getting much better since the IE4 days, but there’s still always a sense of “this isn’t ready yet”.

Being a web developer, I dread new browsers because … thats just one more environment you have to test in.  

With this browser, I feel like it is already a final product.  Already I’m excited about the integration of “Gears”, the slim application like interface when you “Create application shortcut”, how fast it seems to run, and the possibilities it introduces for Javascript and AJAX online.

Some minor issues I would, however, like to raise are:

• I had a tab freeze, and the other tab froze as well — I had thought each tab was supposed to be entirely independent from one another in processor space and prevent this.  Maybe I’m misunderstood?
• It seems the great “V8” team that Google had put together is in competition with SquirrelFish Extreme in terms of pure performance.  Needless to say, I’m no expert in this, and it’s probably one of those benchmarks that highly favors a browser, or isn’t indicative of the complete functionality of an engine.
•  This is entirely a subjective point, but I don’t like the way the Taskbar icons look.  I know I’m tuned into Firefox and IE’s icons for the web, but I always get confused with the 3 colors in the Chrome taskbar icons.  
• Whos’ taking advantage of the new functionality the most?  I remember years ago seeing links to who was taking advantage to IE4’s new capabilities, does anyone have a list of site’s that are built to embrace Chrome?  (maybe an idea for a future project)

Tags: AJAX, Arstechnica, Browsers, Chrome, Firefox, Gears, HTML, IE, Javascript, SquirrelFish Extreme, V8

Google Chrome!

Along with all the geek’s around the world, today I got a hands on impression of Google Chrome. 

First off — the rationale behind the browser is exactly what it should be.  Clean, quick, and flexible.

Using it quickly, I already want to start creating a web application to take advantage of it’s multi threading, javascript sandboxing, simple “OS” like interface.

When I click on a tab, it finally creates a new window! 

The best part, any advances made in development on Chrome, are open source and can be integrated with Firefox down the line.

Highly recommended.

Update – Great article over at wired on the story behind Chrome
Update #2 – Arsetechnica has just published an article reviewing Chrome
Update #3 – Security flaws in Google Chrome found, based on old webkit flaw.

Tags: Browsers, Chrome, Google