My iMeetzu app has been sluggishly working it’s way through the approval process of what seems to be 1/2 of an employee at Apple approving these things. Just Joshin’ ya Jobs, but it honestly was under approval for about 8 weeks before we got a response telling us to make some changes before it can be accepted.  Making changes to an app means getting to the back of the line to be approved again.  The required adjustments have been made and we’re sitting in line again waiting for this thing to get pushed public.  Since I’ve had all this time to think about the app, I cleaned it up a ton and made a short video demo attached here at the bottom of this post.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

I changed the layout quite a bit. The colors match the new iMeetzu site and I did away with the iPhone style chat bubbles. I thought the bubbles were going to be great, but I realized the only thing awesome about them was how hard they were to build in CSS. They made the app look cheap, and its not! So I had to get rid of those and simplify the chat box with a white background and a single line between messages. Plus I like having it say “You” and “Stranger” in the all too infamous red and blue colors.

My final thought on the app is to add in some of the advanced features from the site such as smilies and images. I haven’t decided on this yet, but I imagine some of these cool features from the full version of iMeetzu will find their way to the iPhone app. Luckily most of the changes to the app can be done via some files hosted on one of my servers, so we won’t always have to wait 2 months in between versions!

I made this new site Scrabble Word Machine, which is a Scrabble Word Builder. This handy tool will help all of you Scrabble players build words when you get stumped. The tool goes as far as to match your tiles with letters on the board if you’d like to find out which words you could use in a certain spot.

Have fun all my cheaters out there! I know I’ll be using it!

I wrote an AJAX function awhile back that I use in a lot of my website projects. I use it because I prefer it to using an entire javascript library just to get the AJAX functions out of it. This is incredibly simple and is great for just the basic AJAX applications. Just about anyone with basic web building skills should be able to implement this into their site for some extra jazz.

I put together a simple demo here: Ajax Demo. Check it out for basic usage and to get the javascript source code. You can download the entire demo here: Ajax Demo Source Files. Upload these file to your server and you’ll be able to figure out how this works in no time.

A couple of weeks ago I built this site iMeetzu. Basically you just go to the website and click the button to meet a stranger. There is not much else to it. You have a few options once you are actually engaged in a conversation with a stranger. The options are very basic and are as follows:

• Turns sounds on and off
• Change Your Name
• Input your Gender
• Choose a Gender to Chat With

These are just basic options to change the visitors experience. Nothing too complex. I didn’t want to complicate the site and ruin the entire point of it.

This idea came about from a similar site. I saw it and was pretty amazed at the simplicity of the idea, but I knew it was not a simple project to build. I saw some obvious room for new features to make the site better, so I decided to build my own. It didn’t take as long as I thought. I build the site from scratch in about a day.

More features will be coming out to make the site even more entertaining. If you have any ideas please leave them as a comment here and submit them in the feedback form on the iMeetzu website.

Ah man do I hate trying to design a website.  My brain does not function that way.  I swear I can use the Photoshop tools as good as most professional web designers. But I can’t put colors and shapes together to form something aesthetically pleasing to save my life. I guess that is what I get for being a programmer by nature, or left brained if you want to call it that? Luckily being a left brained person gives me the skills to make due with the resources out there to put a design together without starting from scratch.

If you are in my position you might want to check out these sites: Open Source Web Design and Free CSS Templates.  I personally don’t like using the templates as is. I prefer to use something open source as a base, and modify it into something somewhat unique.

Look no further, ya found me.  My name is Josh Marthaller and I’m a professional web developer. I’ve been building websites for at least 10 years now.  I put this blog up here to ramble about random topics mostly related to web development, but don’t be suprised to see some other topics pop up.  My skills are mostly related to programming so you’ll see a lot of topics about that as well. I’m also very interested in the business and marketing end of websites, so I’d say I am a pretty well rounded web developer.

This blog is hosted at: Hostamina Which is the web hosting company that my friend Aaron and I started in the summer of 2008.  Between the two of us we own too many websites, or projects as I like to call them because they are not complete, yet.

Right now I’m in my senior year of college at the University of Oregon. I’m currently an accounting major and CIT minor, but who knows I may change it.