Friday, May 25th, 2007
Profile Mine: Rich Ajax MySpace Editor
Don Schmitt and his team has built a site using Microsoft’s Ajax extensions and
Ajax control toolkit called Profilemine.
Profilemine has a unique MySpace profile editor that enables you to edit
your actual profile without typing HTML code (not just the CSS).
The site includes a number of advanced Ajax-based features such as:
- Load your existing profile and edit it directly (and not just the styles).
- Automatic layout change submissions directly to your MySpace profile
without requiring copy / paste. - Ability to drag & drop elements on your profile.
- Ability to upload layouts and the site will automatically take a snapshot
of the layout and create the thumbnail and the layout will be available for
download immediately. - Upload images directly to the front page of your profile without writing
any code. - Save your favorite layouts and easily swap between them.
2.9 rating from 39 votes
I tried to get it working in firefox on mac and got the following:
Our advanced technology MySpace editor relies on the MSHTML engine. This engine is built into Internet Explorer by default, but is only available in FireFox with the use of the IETab FireFox add-on which can be downloaded from here:
Who develops to Microsoft standards anymore..? pfft
Microsoft standards = oxymoron
Nowadays it’s unacceptable an application that’s not crossbrowser… sorry, i dont like it.
Agree, completly unacceptable, and man I love the fact that everyone agrees on this.
I am all for standards, but honestly MySpace isn’t exactly mission critical. You don’t need to edit your profile. It would be nice if it was cross browser, but if I’m dying to update my MySpace page, I think i’ll just fire up IE and be glad I can use _something_ for free.
This editor is obviously built using IE’s incredibly useful contentEditable attribute, which has been around for ages.
When other web browser implementors get of their tails and implement it, a whole suite of IE-based tools will become cross-browser tools.
The MySpace crowd is somehwere around 90% IE-based, so taking advantage of IE-specific technology seems like a reasonable thing for them to do.
If I had any doubts that people who read this blog are in their own Web 2.0 world, they have been erased.
People who use MySpace aren’t techies or early adopters. IE’s just fine for those people. I bet if you polled MySpacers out there about Firefox, the majority wouldn’t even know what it was, let alone use it as their primary browser.
the ones who say “i can do this way because others browsers users are not my target audience” should read this article
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200704/lame_excuses_for_not_being_a_web_professional/
so many crossbrowser js frameworks, standards compliant, why use MS framework?
The MS AJAX framework is crossbrowser compliant. It’s the profilemine team that made the tool work only in IE. But like someone else said, the MySpace crowd would be almost exclusively IE users. It’s really just a matter of know your audience for your product. I highly doubt that this app was written for the same audience that frequents ajaxian.
if this isn’t something they intend to make money off of, I can’t fault them for not making it work in a browser they aren’t familiar with.
I wrote a little web toy/tool that only worked in firefox (mostly because some its cooler and more advanced features simply could NOT work in IE) but I had a hard time motivating myself to re-write the code to work with IE.
That said, I think id be too embarrassed to make something IE only. “Hi! I only know how to develop on a kludgey shitty browser! Please! Take me seriously!”
elevating their already HIGH pimp points. to all my hoes and pimps holla at you bio:
http://www.myspace.com/78094881
Thanks. Good article.
Thanks.Good article
I hate Myspace. Armenian Genocide