Quick user stories and HTML5 storage

Andrew — Wed, 04 May 2011 18:48:50 +0000

After reading Mike Cohn’s post “Advantages of the ‘as a’, ‘I want’ user story template” I started thinking about the simplest and quickest way to create and capture stories. I’ve been using Evernote a lot recently and it’s a good place to keep a simple backlog that you can access anywhere. To have any advantage over using Excel, Evernote or Greenhopper directly the authoring step has to be very simple. The screen capture below shows how stories are displayed and you can try the live demo.

I’m using this as a learning exercise so I’ll continue with it, but some feedback would help me test my ideas and learn if anyone is interested enough to take a look at the code. I’ve focused on HTML5 local storage when building this page so that your stories are available next time you visit. Next I’ll make sure stories display in the order they were added when you return and clear the editable content when you begin to type.

Browser local storage has a lot of potential for prototyping. Having a simple way to persist data that overcomes cookie size limitations means you can try some relatively complex interactions using just HTML5 and javascript before launching into a fully fledged application. Smashing Magazine has a nice primer for local storage.

Delicious Pecha Kucha

Andrew — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:53:17 +0000

Recently I became aware of Pecha Kucha presentations. As the format is short sharp presentations I thought it would be good to have a quick way of creating the presentation. I’ve created a greasemonkey script that creates a presentation from a page of delicious bookmarks.

The key to this is creating images of the bookmarked webpages. I found the webthumb service which has a well documented api and gives you 100 free credits a month to play with. They kindly gave me 500 credits to do some testing as well.

For the script to work you need to add your own api key from the webthumb service. I realise that having to do this is a bit of a barrier so any ideas about making this easier would be appreciated. Look for the following and paste your api key into the script:

apikey = "Paste your http://webthumb.bluga.net api key here!";

Anyway, this is the first pass so let me know what you think. The video below shows the script in action.

Andrew Male » Code

Quick user stories and HTML5 storage

Delicious Pecha Kucha