Mobility Digest new feature on sidebar stock updates
I wanted to give Doug Simmons a slap on the back for a new widget he tweaked and added to the Mobility Digest sidebar that he is presently calling lol stocks!?. It simply has all of the major mobility stocks of interest displayed for your easy viewing. From time to time we report on a mobile companies stock health whether it be Apple’s stock value which seems closely tied to Steve Job’s or Google’s up and down trends. I am not saying that Simmons gave Google preferential treatment being on top the list because of the continual cannonball he does into the Google Kool Aid, but I am hoping a little coding and time on his part will add a sorting feature by stock performance.
So head on over to Mobility Digest and check out our sidebar to keep close tabs on your favorite companies stock value and let us know if you would like to see a stock added. Any other suggestions for our website are always welcome so please use the contact us button at the top or just leave a comment here.
BTW, it’s always worth a look at our current poll that is also on the sidebar that Simmons manages as well. Thanks again to Doug for his efforts and let us know how we can improve Mobility Digest.
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In addition to all the “coding” I did in manipulating some other guy’s code in order to get things to fit without line breaks, which is trickier than it sounds if you have to wait twenty minutes to see if your additional PHP modifications would work because I’m forbidden from disabling our annoying caching thing, I put some thought into the order of stocks. The server crashes all the time and I even though it has nothing to do with me I need to maintain plausible deniability that I didn’t mess with super cache, as much as I want to be the scapegoat. And thanks to Smith giving me this pat on the ass (thanks Smith, I like the way that feels), now I can bounce this off of you guys. Do you like the order and the included companies?
I put them in clusters of descending order of typical relevance to what we tend to talk about and within those clusters the companies relative to each other in terms of market share of whatever and yeah, Google up top in order to sort of incite some violence, to harness the pervasive anti-me hate. Top group of three is phone platform outfits that are somewhat solid, next four are OEMs from top dog to bloodbath territory, same kind of order with the remaining three, telcos, plus the NASDAQ, which I think I should ditch, but I tucked it in to sort of give you a baseline. Nah I’ll get rid of it.
As for your request to have them dynamically sort themselves based on (absolute value of?) percentage change from the previous close, file that under things Simmons admits is over his head. If anyone else thinks that is worthwhile and knows their PHP, do tell. What I might be able to do is get Apple and XOM next to each other which might be almost worth doing if I could have this thing drag out market caps, but no, that’s not worth doing and the list is already kind of big. Also for regulars to the site glancing at the thing, they get a feel for which stocks are where and if each time they reload the page it gets mixed up, ehh. But I like how you’re thinking Smith, good stuff, keep it up. 😉
So what Smith said — any other companies belong here people? Get rid of the NASDAQ or not? Rename it from lol stocks?! to something lame like Mobility Digest Portfolio? We love your input on this stuff, makes us feel like we put our ideas before a focus group and fantasize about having made the right move on things that won’t have significant enough contributions or detraction to be able to measure.
Note that Nokia and HTC are traded on foreign exchanges and in foreign currency (a Samsung share is probably not several hundred grand), different trading hours obviously, also got a delay compounded by the caching delay from super cache on which I gave up trying to wiggle around with some funky AJAX stuff — but good enough for flaming things up. Hell, might even lead to one of our Google Reader readers checking out the actual site once in a while. Probably not but we can pretend.
Glad to see some green on that list today…
Was not pat on the ass, it was slap on the back! LOL I like the NASDAQ at the bottom, which I see is now gone. I personally vote for sorting in stock performance order, but I am only one small voice. And I don’t think the caching plugin we run is going to make that big of difference to the readers. Just an update is good. 20 minutes is fine to update it. If any reader has skin in one of these stocks, my guess is they have WAY better monitoring tools than our sidebar to watch them with. In any case, kick in the ass, erm… I mean slap on the back to you Mister Simmons. LOL
BTW, I see you are still tweaking the comments plugin. I am going to start calling you Santa Simmons because every time I look there is a new site mod gift somewhere. Or maybe Easter Simmons, because I always have to hunt around for them. LOL
Ahh I was waiting for you to notice. Well done. Figured, hey, why not get to know each other a little better, you know? Also to exhibit our beautiful diversity (in terms of reverse geo ip lookups).
Another Easter Egg to tip you off about, in addition to putting the Nasdaq back up as requested, I tuned with some crazy-fancy PHP the date/timestamp to be more .. well, to take up more space I guess, and to debut the power of PHP to know whether to add th or rd or nd or to numbers like 7, 3, 2 and 1, among others. Also made it less euro with 12 hour format.
I’m just happy that the comment system time actually makes sense now. good stuff…
Oh yea, you wanted some feedback about the Stock ticker…
I don’t know if everyone realizes that the ticker for Samsung and HTC is for the KSE, therefore it’s not showing amounts in USD. aside from that, I think its fine.
Thanks Simmons well done.
Good eye, though people who care about that particular figure generally don’t think of it with a dollar sign in front of it, but as points and just go by their recollection of what Apple or Samsung was trading at the last time they saw it on CNBC which people don’t use to find out if they can afford a single share of a particular company. These points also carry symbolic weight, like the odometer effect resistance levels if Samsung, say, dips below 500,000. Converting to another currency would lose that in translation.
On the other hand, I bet it wouldn’t be that impossible, and it would have good geek value, to code in some sort of currency conversion thing for Samsung and HTC by pumping the numbers through some API. But without shell access to the server I’m not gonna bother.
Check out the ajax search thing on the bottom right. I know Smith won’t be interested as he went through some trouble to get a Google search thing so I’ll get rid of it but hey, neat trick (type slowly, don’t hit enter).
Speaking of the Google box (which has its Google branding stripped), it’s identified as being an AJAX thing but I ain’t seeing no AJAX behavior when using it. Is that key no good?
The key should be good and I am not a big fan of it. I am trying to narrow down a new theme which should come with a better search plugin. I took the Google logo off because it added clutter (yes I said that) My main problem with Google’s other search plugin is that it takes you awya form the site and spams the user with other websites information. Obviously we want to keep readers here and read our stuff. My only reason for keep the horrible search box is that it keeps you in the site.
So you’ve looked at the numbers for intra-site searching and think it’s worth consideration, spending time on this?
Fight: Nice icons.
@Doug Simmons: I agree, but I am hoping at some time we can get a better solution. I like yours too, but the ranking of relevant articles seems to be off. For example, iPhone 4 cases returns the Droid 3 review I did this week.
@Doug Simmons: For the record, I’d like to profess my love for Epiphany.
And as far as the snitch icons go, I try. (I’m not a complete Lemming)