Google Docs: Forms
This isn’t exactly breaking news, but I only just heard about it so I thought I’d share. The free service Google Docs allows you to build web forms from within it. It has a pretty limited feature set. Basically you just provide the question, answer type, help text, and whether it’s required or not. Add as many questions as you’d like and save it and you get the ability to embed the form as an iFrame. The form then turns into a Spreadsheet in your Google Docs, and submitted answers are appended to the spreadsheet. Kinda neat, but like I said, very limited feature set compared to something like Wufoo. The big advantage here is you can build as many and as big of forms as you want for free.
DevSnippets
Noura Yehia (from Noupe) has launched a new site called DevSnippets. It’s a really neat browseable and searchable “Online Code Snippet Gallery“. There is already some great stuff in there, and I’m sure as the site grows it will become a go-to spot when looking for specific code examples to add to your site.
Top Ten Web Typography Sins
I’m sure most of you read Smashing Magazine already and they hardly need my link love, but I still feel compelled to mention the recent great article on Web Typography Sins. Things like “not using CSS for capitalization effects” will surely come back to bite ya! And you gotta love seeing (C), classic.
Thanks Chris for the mention, yesterday i was glad when you submitted your first code snippet there :)
btw, i have a small widget on Noupe to display the latest entries from devsnippets. I am trying to have a direct link to the source posts like what you have here and you mentioned before that you will tell us how to do this.
Can you give us a small hint :)
@Noura: Sure. I am using SimplePie on this site to parse Script & Style’s RSS feed. David hacked up the RSS feed to include a custom tag he called <directurl>. I’m not 100% sure how he did that. We use a WordPress plugin called TDOForms on there, which has a custom field for the URL, so that is what populates the “directurl”.
Then, since SimplePie doesn’t naively support tag “directurl”, you’ll have to use it’s “get_item_tags” function like this:
$media_group = $item->get_item_tags(‘http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom’, ‘directurl’);
Then, in order to echo it out onto the page, it’s like this:
$media_group[0][‘data’]
Super bizarre and ultimately above my head, but it works!
Chris,
Thanks for the “fee education”! I learn something new each week and can’t thank you enough!
Have you discovered jotform.com? It’s completely free (at least for my needs) and it’s very robust, just a notch or two below Wufoo.
Thanks again!
Andy