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Blogs » Archive for September, 2008
Twitter Launches Election Mashup, Could Be So Much More
Twitter tonight launched an election mashup that streams and parses political tweets. Unfortunately, it fails to leverage the data in any meaningful way, which is unfortunate, as that could have uses well beyond politics.
Web Directions South, Day One: Conversation Is King
The SitePoint/99designs team were out and about at Web Directions South today, mingling with the punters and sharing coffee and carrot cake with the speakers.
Miles mentioned in a recent issue of the SitePoint Tribune that there are a number of reasons why you should attend conferences, and gave some tips for getting more out of your conference-going experience. We’ve made it clear from the outset, however, that our objectives for attending Web Directions South are a little different.
So rather than summarise the different sessions that were on (you can read all about them on the Web Directions South site), I thought I’d reflect on our objectives for being here in the first place, and see how we’re tracking at the end of Day One.
1. Brand awareness
One very big reason for why we attend this event every year is brand awareness. Our t-shirts are bright orange for a reason—they stand out. We often meet customers in the hallway who own our books or who visit our site, and having a presence (both in the audience and on panels) means that the SitePoint brand remains fresh in the minds of people who are most likely to become customers. …
Facebook’s Future is as a Search Engine
At a panel at the EmTech conference at MIT, a bunch of very smart people talked about the future of the web including how social search will be more prevalent in our lives. Though not explicitly mentioned by the panel, it seems clear that social search is how Facebook will finally make money.
Microsoft Talks Up Client + Cloud Future
Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft, talked about the company’s vision of the future today at the EmTech conference at MIT. Microsoft is working toward what it calls a “client + cloud” platform that marries local computing devices with web services.
Google Celebrates 10th Birthday, Gives Away Money
This month Google is turning ten. To celebrate, the world’s number one search engine today launched a birthday page featuring an interactive time line of their history. In addition, they’ve announced a social change project pledging $10 million to fund ideas that change the world.
DOM vs. Template
Fredrik Holmström recently posted a small template engine, based on DOM-manipulation. While there are certainly a lot of template engines around, I find this approach interesting. The concept is simple enough; The template is parsed into an object model (DOM), and then values can be assigned to these through PHP code. The main difference to traditional template engines (Such as Smarty), is that the template it self doesn’t have any imperatives within. In fact, the template doesn’t even have to be written to the template engine, to be used – Any markup can be used as a source.
Since the template can’t contain any view-logic, it ends up in a separate place (In PHP code). This makes the separation between presentation and logic airtight, which was the main idea of template engines in the first place. Another benefit is that since there is no string-level manipulation, it is virtually impossible to inadvertently get injections-type security breaches.
The template may be unaware of the view-logic, but the opposite can’t be said. To bind values to the template, the view-logic needs to be aware of the internal structure of the template. This means that if the template changes, so must the …
Gina Bianchini: The Web Is Still Walled
The web circa 1995 was a web of walled gardens — but is the web circa 2008 really that much better? Gina Bianchini, CEO and co-founder of Ning, doesn’t think so. In her EmTech08 keynote today, Bianchini told the audience that walled gardens still exist, they just have new names.
Cool SitePoint Schwag At Web Directions South
If you’re heading to Web Directions South this year, be sure to keep an eye out for Team SitePoint. Apart from presenting on many of the panels, there will be plenty of us circulating amongst the crowd, handing out plenty of free schwag—namely some “old faithful” orange and blue SitePoint t-shirts, as well as some brand spankin’ new 99designs white t-shirts (and a handful of limited edition black ones), as pictured to the right in our spur-of-the-moment “Make Me A Supermodel” session on the hotel balcony.
We’ve also got a stack of books that we’ll have on our person and will be keen to offload to anyone who is interested in hearing us talk about some of the jobs that we currently have on offer, so feel free to wander up and say G’day. We really love meeting our readers and our customers, and we’re always looking for talented people to join the team.
We’ve survived the first of the many social events happening around the conference, the Port80 meetup, and are as excited as everyone else in Sydney about the conference starting tomorrow. Of course, if you can’t …
ISP: We Can’t Stop Illegal File Sharing
Ordered a year ago by the courts to remove all illegal P2P traffic from its networks, Belgian ISP Scarlet now says that it can’t do that. Blocking all P2P traffic would be detrimental to user experience, and filtering out illegal content is infeasible, says the ISP.
More Free Stuff? Yep, Take A Quiz And Win A Book!
We seem to be doing a lot of these giveaways lately!
The latest Flex article that we set live today on sitepoint.com, Map Your OpenSocial Data Using FLex, follows a trend of late—complete a quiz to test your knowledge of the tutorial, and you can win a copy of Jack Herrington’s pocket guide, Getting Started With Flex 3 (that’s the print version), delivered to your door for free!
You’ll have to be quick though—only the first 100 people will receive the book (if you’ve signed up to receive a book from previous giveaways, be kind and don’t grab another one, eh?). If you miss out, don’t despair though. Everyone else can still download a PDF of the book.
