IT Update

by brennen
October 4, 2011

A few notes from your friendly local web nerds.

Hey folks. Brennen in IT. I thought I'd take a minute to point out a new site feature and rehash some old ones that people may not know about.

Comment replies: A while ago Pearce in Tech Support asked for a simple notification (via e-mail) of replies to comments. It's no orangered envelope, but it's worked well enough for us that we figured some of you might be interested. If you'd like to try it out, head to your account preferences, scroll down a bit, and click the checkbox for "Reply Notifications".

sprkfn: We're not big fans of generic URL-shortening services that take a full-blown URL and turn it into a tiny, unreadable hash. It seems like these break a lot of the good stuff about the web, and make people more dependent on a bunch of inscrutable databases. That said, a lot of us do use services like Twitter, where it's nice to have some extra space to work with. Enter sprkfn.com. If you'd like to link a product, news post, or tutorial somewhere with a character limit, instead of using the canonical address like so:

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9950

...you can chop it down to:

http://sprkfn.com/p9950

Where "p" stands for "product" and 9950 is the id of the product in question. (You can probably figure out the pattern for news posts and tutorials.)

Spreadsheet-related band-aids: Both your order history and individual wish lists can now be downloaded as CSV files. This may be useful information if you're beholden to Excel in any way.

Embeddable wish lists: We mentioned this a while back, but I'm hoping to get a few more eyeballs on it. If you've got a wish list, and said wish list is marked public, you can find a JavaScript snippet like the following: