Create products from worldinpictures.org

Integration of Cogteeth.com and worldinpictures.org now means that you can create Zazzle products from any images you see on worldinpictures.org. Just click the "Make product..." links.

Cogteeth Bookmarklet

Just added a new feature at Cogteeth: the Cogteeth Bookmarklet. Once installed, this allows you to create a Zazzle product from any image on the web.

Probably half the development time on this was spent getting it to work with Internet Explorer. In the end I had to produce a slightly different version specifically for IE which may not look so pretty when used on some sites. But of course there's an easy solution to this - switch to a decent browser.

Cogteeth decoder added

I've added a message decoder to Cogteeth.com so if you don't want to buy a t-shirt you can use it as a general UTF-8 coder/decoder!

Cogteeth.com - personalized T-Shirts

Partly as an experiment with the new Zazzle API, I've created a new site Cogteeth.com.

At Cogteeth you can create customized T-Shirts by entering messages for the back and front of the shirt. The text of the messages is converted to UTF-8 and the resulting codes displayed in hex. The result is a T-Shirt with a coded mesage that only those with too much time on their hands can read.

Here's what I've learnt from this exercise:

• Passing an empty field to http://www.zazzle.com/api/create is the same as not including it in the request (i.e. the text in the template will be used). So If you want to leave a text field blank, you must pass in a SPACE (e.g. http://www.zazzle.com/api/create?frontText=%20&blah=...).


• The Zazzle API does not yet support non-ASCII characters. Passing a UTF-8 encoded character sequence (e.g. http://www.zazzle.com/api/create?frontText=%C2%B7) will NOT result in the UTF-8 C2:B7 character. Zazzle say this may be supported in future.


• Javascript uses UTF-16 strings, so if you want to use Javascript to convert form field values to UTF-8 (and ensure Unicode characters above 0x10000 are handled correctly) you must first decode from UTF-16. Javascript appears to have no built in support for this kind of thing so I ended up writing my own functions to decode from UTF-16 and encode to UTF-8.


• Although the HTML 4 spec suggests that only ASCII values can be used in HTTP GET form submissions, most browsers will sensibly encode non-ASCII characters in UTF-8 and then URL encode them before submission. (This assumes the page containing the form was sent as UTF-8 encoded).


• Why isn't there an "onFieldValueChange" event for form fields? I currently use the "keyup" event but I'm not interested whether the change was due to a keystroke, I just want to know if a change occured. The onChange event is no use here - it only fires when the field loses focus.

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