When your business is searching for a web hosting company, you need to be aware of the many options available to you. A Premium web hosting provider will typically have many benefits to offer making your businesses entire online experience easy and affordable. This article will help you to choose which benefits and options to consider.

This November, the David Mikow Gallery—which is run by UMBC professor of political science Carolyn Forestiere—will host its first theatre performance. The play, “comfort/drones” is an original by UMBC professor Alan Kreizenbeck, and it will be performed by UMBC alumni: Rachel Hirshorn ’04, acting; Kevin James ’09, acting; and Daniel Friedman ’13, acting and psychology.

From the David Mikow Gallery’s release:

The play is based on the writings of Wallace Shawn and asks “What are the consequences of moral behavior?” After the performance, we hope to engage our guests in a lively discussion based on themes derived from the play.

Read more and reserve tickets.

Learn more about alumni events and services.

Find us on Facebook. // Follow us on Twitter.

Radishes: They’re not just for salad anymore. In fact, they may be useful for controlling runoff into the Chesapeake.

Stuart Schwartz, senior scientist with UMBC’s Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education, spoke with Tim Wheeler, an environmental reporter for The Baltimore Sun, for Wheeler’s article, “Radishes get tryout as runoff fighters.”

Wheeler writes: “City and most suburban soil is badly in need of aeration, Schwartz said. He and other researchers have found that even grass-covered ground, just below the surface, is often as dense and impermeable as concrete. Anything heavier than a light rain runs off, washing fertilizer, organic matter and other pollutants into storm drains and nearby streams.”

As it turns out, planting radishes might just help control runoff in urban areas.

“Daikon radishes, a long, white variety of the red ones that often grace salads, can grow taproots as big as a person’s arm. When farmers plant them after a late-summer harvest, their roots bore down through the soil, loosening it. Then, after winter frosts kill the plants, the roots decay, leaving behind deep openings that allow rain to soak in,” writes Wheeler. He continues, further down in the piece, “The deep-rooted radish offers a relatively low-cost, low-tech way to break up urban soil, according to Schwartz, who spent only about $50 for the seed mix. The vacant lot on Perlman Place was provided through a partnership with the city and with Civic Works, a nonprofit that runs Real Food Farm nearby in Clifton Park. The lot is one the city is leasing to Civic Works for expanding its urban agriculture initiative.”

To learn more about radishes, agriculture, runoff and the environment you can also read, Clare Leschin-Hoar’s piece, in TakePart, “Can Radishes Be The Secret Weapon In Protecting Our Water from Big Farming’s Runoff?”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is pleased to announce the availability of scholarships (includes internships) to college sophomore students majoring in STEM disciplines related to oceanic and atmospheric science, research, or technology, and supportive of the purposes of NOAA's programs and mission, e.g., biological, social and physical sciences; mathematics; engineering; and computer and information sciences. 

NOAA is accepting applications from students who will have Official Junior status in Fall 2014.

Undergraduate Scholarships (for students who are currently sophomores):

·         Educational Partnership Program Undergraduate Scholarship:  http://www.epp.noaa.gov/ssp_undergrad_page.html

Application Deadline:  January 31, 2014

·         Ernest F. Hollings Undergraduate Scholarship Program:  http://www.oesd.noaa.gov/scholarships/hollings.html

Application Deadline:  January 31, 2014

Eligibility requirements are: 

·         US Citizenship

·         3.0 GPA

·         Sophomore in college studying a NOAA science: atmospheric science, biology, cartography, chemistry, computer science, engineering, environmental science, geodesy, geography, marine science, mathematics, meteorology, oceanography, physical science, photogrammetry, physics, etc. at the time of application.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us!

Victoria Dancy and Sandra Sarvis
NOAA Office of Education
studentscholarshipprograms@noaa.gov

What if someone signs up for your web app and they type in their email address as susan_smith@gmaoil.com? They don't notice, they never get their confirmation email, they never can log in again, the "forgot password" feature doesn't work, and there is a lot of frustration and finger pointing.

Can't we help with that?

I had a really basic idea to suggest common email domains with a <datalist> suggestion dropdown. Essentially like this:

Datalists like that can be attached to any text-y input and they essentially provide suggestions. The user can still type in whatever valid value they want. It's like a cross between a <select> and and <input>, I suppose.

Here's how it works.

The Markup

Perfectly normal HTML that will work whether or not is supported or our JS runs or anything.

<label for="email">Email</label>
    <input id="email" name="email" type="email" placeholder="your@email.com">

Inserting the datalist with JavaScript

Datalist is an HTML element, but we can't put it in the markup straight away because we don't know what to put in it yet. The options we put in there will need to have the first part of the email address in them. That's JavaScript territory, so we might as well only add the datalist when JavaScript runs.

jQuery, because I like it.

// Create empty datalist and append to DOM
    var datalist = $("<datalist />", {
      id: 'email-options'
    }).insertAfter("#email");
    
    // Correlate to input
    $("#email").attr("list", "email-options");

The Email TLD's

There are a handful of very popular "Top Level Domains" for email. Let's put them in an array:

var domains =  ["yahoo.com", "gmail.com", "google.com", "hotmail.com", "me.com", "aol.com", "mac.com", "live.com", "comcast.com", "googlemail.com", "msn.com", "hotmail.co.uk", "yahoo.co.uk", "facebook.com", "verizon.net", "att.net", "gmz.com", "mail.com"];

Adjust as needed.

Watching for Keystrokes

We don't want to bug the user until they have pressed the "@" key and we know they are moving on to the domain part of their email address. So first, we watch for the key event:

$("#email").on("keyup", function() {
    
    });

Then we test to see if the value contains the @:

$("#email").on("keyup", function() {
    
      var value = $(this).val();
                        
      if (value.indexOf("@") != -1) {
        // it's there, update datalist
      }
    
    });

We'd Better Get Organized

As this gets more complex, the more we should worry about spaghetti code and generally hard to maintain messiness. Let's get organized using an object to keep it all together.

The structure becomes basically:

var EmailDomainSuggester = {
      
      domains: ["yahoo.com", "gmail.com", "google.com", "hotmail.com", "me.com", "aol.com", "mac.com", "live.com", "comcast.com", "googlemail.com", "msn.com", "hotmail.co.uk", "yahoo.co.uk", "facebook.com", "verizon.net", "att.net", "gmz.com", "mail.com"],
      
      bindTo: $('#email'),
      
      init: function() {
        this.addElements();
        this.bindEvents();
      },
      
      addElements: function() {
        // Create empty datalist
        this.datalist = $("<datalist />", {
          id: 'email-options'
        }).insertAfter(this.bindTo);
        // Corelate to input
        this.bindTo.attr("list", "email-options");
      },
      
      bindEvents: function() {
        this.bindTo.on("keyup", this.testValue);
      },
        
      testValue: function(event) {
        var el = $(this),
            value = el.val();
                        
        // remove the != -1 if you want the datalist to show up immediately as you type the @
        // with it in place, it won't show up until you type the NEXT character
        if (value.indexOf("@") != -1) {
           value = value.split("@")[0];
           EmailDomainSuggester.addDatalist(value);
        }
         
      },
      
      addDatalist: function(value) {
        
      }
      
    }
    
    EmailDomainSuggester.init();

Building the datalist on-the-fly

Notice in the above code I slipped in a little bit where I split the value that we pulled out of the input at the @ symbol. That allows us to pull out the part of the email address before the domain. For instance, the "chriscoyier" part of "chriscoyier@gm". Then we pass that over to a new function called addDatalist. Now let's use it:

// variables for iteration and string concatination
    var i, newOptionsString = "";
    
    // loop over all the domains in our array
    for (i = 0; i < this.domains.length; i++) {
      newOptionsString += 
        "<option value='" + 
          value + 
          "@" +
          this.domains[i] +
        "'>";
    }
    
    // add all the <option>s to our datalist
    this.datalist.html(newOptionsString);

Remove the datalist if we aren't ready for it

As a final bit of cleanup, we should remove the datalist if the value in the input doesn't have an @ symbol yet. Even if the user originally typed it but then backed up. We can handle that in our testValue function. We either update the datalist with the latest and greatest, or we remove it all together:

if (value.indexOf("@") != -1) {
      value = value.split("@")[0];
      EmailDomainSuggester.addDatalist(value); 
    } else {
      // empty list
      EmailDomainSuggester.datalist.empty();
    }

Final Demo

Rather than paste a huge chunk of code here, you can check it out in the Pen:

See the Pen Help Complete Email Addresses with by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen

A More Robust Solution

For the record, I'm not absolutely sure the datalist approach is a great idea. It would require some real UX testing to see if it's actually helpful. It may be hurtful in the form of user confusion. I am more sure that some form of email domain checking is a good idea.

There is an open source project on GitHub called mailcheck.js that looks pretty good.

Yup

Have you used something like this? What do you think about the approaches? Have you done any UX testing around this or similar ideas? Do you have any other ideas to approach the "wrong email" problem?

Email Domain Datalist Helper is a post from CSS-Tricks