Recent Blog Posts
Blogs » Archive for February, 2008
.NET on the ‘NET Feb 15-22: Silverlight 2 is Sweet
First, an abbreviated Windows 2008 Server trip report: it is freaking awesome in too many ways to enumerate at the moment. Now, on to the regularly scheduled foray into the DotNetosphere.
Today Scott Guthrie gave us a very impressive first look at Silverlight 2. Don’t miss the tutorials on building the Digg application at the end. On the IE 8 front, Dean Hachamovitch notes a milestone and announces that an IE 8 beta would be available in the first half of this year, and Eric Lawrence gives us the beta’s user agent string. For tools, the Microsoft Visual Web Developer Team posted a preview of the new tooling features for the MIX preview edition of ASP.NET MVC. And on IIS 7, make sure to check out the MSDN Magazine article on extending the IIS 7 pipeline.
Moving on to architecture, Alik Levin of the Microsoft Application Consulting & Engineering Team explores why one needs a distributed architecture. Don’t miss the links to the case studies on some of the biggest sites on the net. Udi Dahan posted a pointed piece about making CRUD apps Domain …
News Wire: Google’s Colorful Logo, jQuery Reference, and more
- Social Media Buzz Pocket Mining: The New Keyword Research - An interesting description of tools that take the temperature of a social community's “chatter” patterns.
- Beware of id and name attribute mixups when using getElementById in Internet Explorer - "When using getElementById to get a reference to an element via the id attribute, Internet Explorer for Windows (and some versions of Opera) will also match an element whose name attribute contains the same value."
- Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 3 Release Notes - "Firefox 3 Beta 3 includes approximately 1300 individual changes from the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements."
- GWT-Ext 2.0 Released - The GWT-EXT team has announced the release of version 2.0 this week. The project is a combination of the Google Web Kit and Ext.
- 6% of users click 50% of all ads - This study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population, yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks.
- Handy jQuery API Reference - A simple, useful reference guide for the jQuery API.
- Yahoo Offers All-You-Can-Eat Storage and Bandwidth - Yahoo! launches surprisingly reasonably priced web hosting for small and medium sized businesses. Unlimited storage and bandwidth for …
Structured data - set to take on Google
After posting the Yahoo microsearch entry last night I had a thought. Google has already mastered web 1.0 style search. I use it all the time (even if I am not always thrilled with the results), rarely do I use Microsoft or Yahoo or anything else when I just want to do a quick search. So how can others compete? Even if Microsoft and Yahoo merge and Microhoo emerges, how can they take on Google. Well, with basic search I don’t think they can.
This is when Yahoo microsearch jumps up and starts waving its arms… “Why do a search on conference in San Francisco on Google and get this”:
“When you can do the same search on me, microsearch and get this:” (not sure why microsearch speaks in the first person)
Note the map, the timeline and the little bar sitting above it all. It shows the amount of extracted metadata - the really useful bits. In the above search it pulled out 16 vCards and 182 events. It also makes all this metadata goodness available as RDF if you click the little box logo …
One small step for Yahoo, one giant leap for embedded metadata
The Semantic Web means a lot of different things to a small group of people and it means pretty much nothing to a larger group of people.
Yahoo is working hard to change that. It is no secret that Yahoo is a very forward thinking company, they have a lot of great web systems and are a major early adopter of technologies like microformats - used on sites like flickr. That embedded metadata is a gold mine just waiting to be tapped into.
Firefox 3 will ship with built in functionality to display this embedded metadata. Since Firefox 3 is not officially out yet, Firefox 2 users can start exploring what is out there with the Operator plugin. It gives a visual indicator of hidden metadata and give you ways of doing interesting things with it:
- Geo locate an address on Google Maps
- Add web contact addresses to your local address book
- Add events from Upcoming to your calendar
- Heaps more…
So, how does this relate to the Semantic Web and how is Yahoo set to give it a boost? Peter Mika of Yahoo Research Spain has just released Microsearch, a search engine that:
…instead of hiding metadata, brings it to the front, thereby showing the user …
The Week in ColdFusion: 13-19 Feb: Hidden gems
The Software and Information Industry Association have announced the Codie Awards finalists for 2008 - and ColdFusion 8 is listed in the Best Web Services Solution category. The winners are revealed in May.
One for the Mac users: the built-in rich text editor in ColdFusion 8 uses FCKEditor - but at the time when CF8 was released, Safari was not supported by FCKEDitor. According to Ben Forta, the next CF updater, which is due out “shortly”, and includes support for Leopard and 64-bit Windows, will include an updated library which adds support for the WebKit rendering engine.
Charlie Arehart has done a round-up of all the ColdFusion podcasts - including those that started and have since disappeared. In fact, there’s more that have fallen by the wayside than are currently producing new episodes! Charlie has also has his chapter from CFWACK posted online in PDF format, on Using the CF8 Debugger.
Onto some technical stuff - Rupesh Kumar, from the ColdFusion engineering team, has posted code showing how to read meta data from swf files using ColdFusion (via Java). Handy for dynamically embedding Flash files - particularly to get the correct dimensions, as Rupesh points out. Anuj Gakhar has found another hidden …
Email Sucks; Mozilla Wants To Fix It.
Mozilla have launched a spin-off company, Mozilla Messaging, which states as its mission to improve “the killer app of the internet” — email.
The initial focus for Mozilla Messaging is the development of Thunderbird 3, which will deliver significant improvements, notably integrated calendaring, better search and enhancements to the overall user experience. Thunderbird is a free, open source email application that is used by millions of people around the world and is built using the same open source development model as the award-winning Mozilla Firefox Web browser.
Thunderbird has been my mail client of choice for roughly 7 years (I created a wishlist of features a few years ago, some of which have been since incorporated) so I’m delighted to see it get this kind of backing. Thunderbird has its quirks, as does every mail client. Yes there are features that are sorely lacking (calendar integration, for one), however when you look at factors such as reliability, interoperability, spam filtering and price, you just can’t beat it.
With a team of full-time, paid developers and a terrific community of users, testers and developers, I’m excited to see what comes out of this project. Thunderbird may well step out of …
Bad Documentation is a Killer
Almost every developer has run into some bad documentation in their day. I can’t even remember how many times I’ve had to talk to a disgruntled tech support guy about an issue that should have been easy to find. Two of the companies I’ve worked with have even stopped using otherwise good software due to bad documentation.
The challenge with documentation is that most developers really have no desire to write it. For those of us working on the web, we’ve had it easy because documentation hasn’t been critical for many web projects. Most of my clients don’t need instructions on how to navigate their sites or use the basic admin tools I provide. However, things have been changing.
As websites and web-based tools have become more advanced, I’ve found myself working on more projects that require documentation. I’ve written documentation for external APIs and services, instructions for other developers on my team and tutorials for end-users. Most of my early attempts were unsuccessful and I ended up being the disgruntled support tech. To prevent this from happening to you; here are a few ideas to help make your documentation better and save you some time in the process.
Know Your Audience
Just like …
Remove Color Casts Using Photoshop Lab Color
Color Correction is one of those things you don’t get a lot of practice on as a web designer, so I thought we might look the quick and mostly foolproof method I prefer to use.
Let’s start with a question. What is this? (see blue chip to the right). If you said, "it’s a particularly pleasant shade of blue," you’d be at least partially right.
However, you’d be only be 100% correct if you said, "a zoomed up section of Cameron Adams’ cheek," for, as you can see the photo below, the man in blue was the man of blue the day this particular picture was taken.
Now, this is a great photo, but it presented problems when I came to use it as his author shot on a book cover. While the blue tint looks pretty cool in isolation, it comes off a bit odd when placed alongside a handful of normal, pinky-yellow toned author shots. I needed to moderate the blue tint (or more correctly "cast"), but as …
Yahoo! For Sale: Will Developers Be Left Behind?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you know that Microsoft is looking to acquire Yahoo! for $42 billion. Yahoo! has rejected the offer and is now reportedly exploring options with other potential buyers, including News Corp and AOL (Time Warner).
Much has been said about what might happen to Yahoo!’s various properties—search, email, and advertising—if the Microsoft acquisition were to go forward. But as a developer, I’m personally curious about what could happen to Yahoo!’s developer outreach initiatives.
Since their launch two years ago, the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library and the Yahoo! Design Patterns Library have set the gold standard for well-documented, reusable JavaScript and user interface design resources. And these resources are just two prominent examples of all the good work Yahoo! has been doing (and giving away) at the Yahoo! Developer Network.
I’d go as far as to say that Yahoo! is the only big web company in business today that I’d trust with the future of the Web. Their continuing efforts to make life better for web developers, their willingness to provide open APIs for getting data into and out of their applications, and their recent investments in open initiatives like OpenID all point to a company …
WWW or NO-WWW?
Last week saw the launch of 99designs.com. SitePoint’s first spin-off company, 99designs will shepherd SitePoint’s Design Contests section into its new life as a separate site. One particularly geeky detail on this new site is the fact that its hostname doesn’t start with ‘www’.
While we have certainly launched non-‘www’ subdomains before (reference.sitepoint.com being the most recent), the main homepage for SitePoint has always been located at www.sitepoint.com. The launch of 99designs.com without a ‘www’ represents a change in approach and, to some degree, a nod to web fashion.
In the past, it was expected that companies would have different servers (and thus different hostnames) for each of the Internet services they would provide. www.example.com for their web sites, ftp.example.com for their file transfer services, and mail.example.com for their email services.
As things turned out, many small companies can’t afford to have a separate server for each of their services, so they run many of them on the same box. As a result, the above naming convention doesn’t really make much sense in most cases.
There are other reasons to do away with the ‘www’ prefix—the fact that it takes forever to say, for instance. As a result, fashion has shifted such that …
Sponsored Links
Logo Design, Web page Design and more!
- Custom logo designs created ‘just for you’.
- Pick the design you like best.
- Only pay if you’re satisfied with the result.
SitePoint Kits
Download sample chapters of any of our popular kits.
The Web Site Revenue Maximizer
The Search Engine Marketing Kit, 2.0
The Web Design Business Kit 2.0
The Email Marketing Kit
The Usability Kit
SitePoint Books
Download sample chapters of any of our popular books.
Simply Rails 2
The Principles Of Project Management
The Ultimate CSS Reference
The Art & Science of JavaScript
The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2nd Edition
The ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks
The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2nd Edition
Simply JavaScript
The Art & Science Of CSS
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
