Aug 29, 2006 News Wire

A cute demonstration proving that search engine optimization is not dead. Unfortunately, all the attention has broken the demo, but for awhile at least this SEO pro was able to grab the top 5 search terms on Google in the desired order.

This JavaScript library is something of an upstart compared to more established players like Dojo, Prototype and others. It has, however, developed a strong following and a reputation for fostering a simple and elegant coding style.

A brief account of the goings-on at a “Web 2.0 Patterns” workshop organized by Tim O’Reilly to expand on the conclusions of his “What is Web 2.0” paper. The list of Web 2.0 “values” they produced is nice enough, but I look forward to more detail.

An entertaining comparative review of the main web-based “Office killers”.

An open source programming language and environment specialized for producing animation and sound. The current implementation produces Java applets, but it’s simple enough for programming novices. Feels like Logo for the 21st century.

Odeo CEO and Pyra/Blogger co-founder Evan Williams provides this analysis of the dwindling usefulness of page view statistics in measuring the importance of web sites. Williams suggests time spent, or attention, as a potentially meaninful metric.

A summary of all the new developer features coming in Firefox 2, with links to more detailed information.

A neat idea for managing CSS code bloat. Produce an HTML page that demonstrates each of the CSS style elements in use on your site as a reference for future maintenance and modification.

Justin Palmer’s amusingly accurate account of what usually happens when a designer (read: non-programmer) attempts to contribute to an open source project. Might explain the relative ugliness of most open source software.

In the first of three blog posts, the Internet Explorer team shares its tips for improving the performance of JavaScript code by reducing unneccessary symbol look-ups. Some of these tips I’m seeing for the first time, and they apply across all browsers!

A minor bugfix release of the Yahoo! User Interface library comes in tandem with extensive updates to the lovely, YUI Cheat Sheets in PDF format.