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Blogs » Archive for July, 2008
Did Facebook Flub their Redesign?
As Facebook pushes new users to their redesigned site, some users are noticing something strange: applications listed on their apps page that they never installed. Is this a bug or a feature?
4 Ways to Beat Google at Search
The latest so-called “Google killer” launched earlier this morning. It’s well-funded, has a great founding team, and probably won’t beat Google. But here are 4 approaches that the next would-be Google slayer can take to better their chances of besting the beast of Mountain View.
Hasbro Sues Facebook App Scrabulous
Hasbro yesterday initiated a lawsuit against popular Facebook application Scrabulous and sent a DMCA take down notice to the social network demanding the app be removed. Is this the end for one of Facebook’s most popular games?
CenSEARCHip: Visually Comparing the Effects of Online Censorship
CenSEARCHip is an interesting project from two University of Indiana computer science students that takes creates a visual comparison between search results in countries where government censorship is known to take place.
Knol: Google vs. the Internet
Google launched a user generated content site called Knol yesterday that many people have called a Wikipedia killer. There’s some evidence that Knol is in competition with more than just the web’s favorite user generated encyclopedia, though.
What the Heck Happened to our Attention Spans?
The Internet and other media has impaired our ability to pay attention to things for sustained periods of time. But now, new web services seem to be made with the goal of eroding our attention spans even further.
Finally, Facebook Reportedly Adding Web Search This Fall
According to a report from CNBC, Facebook will be adding Microsoft web search to the site in the fall. That’s something that many web pundits have been calling a “no-brainer” since Microsoft invested $240 million in the social network last fall.
Mangling XML as Text with PHP DOM
Recently I had to do some mass-conversion of HTML files to DITA XML — material I’d written for the upcoming JavaScript Ultimate Reference (the third, and arguably most complicated, part of the SitePoint Reference).
But a problem I came across several times was the sheer complexity of recursive element conversion — <code> becomes <jsvalue> (or one of a dozen similar elements), <a> becomes <xref> … and that’s all simple enough; but each of these elements might contain the other, or further child elements like <em>, and as we walk through the DOM so the incidence of potential recursion increases, until it gets to the point where my brain explodes.
There’s a limit to how much recursion I can get my head around — or rather — a limit to how much I’m prepared to get my head around before I just go the heck with this, why can’t I mangle it as text with regular expressions!?
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way with PHP DOM to get the text equivalent of any arbitrary node, but we can do that at the Document or DocumentFragment level; so with a little toying-around I came up with a way to leverage that …
Facebook Connect is Beacon Done Right
Earlier today Facebook announced Facebook Connect, which extends their development platform to outside sites. In many ways, this is what their Beacon outside advertising platform should have been when it bombed last fall.
GitHub Gist is Pastie on Steroids
GitHub’s new Gist site takes the pastebin idea and makes it a lot better by adding things like version control and easy forking. Gist is Pastie on steroids and will be useful for many developers.
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