Software As She’s Developed

TechDirt discussion about web advertising. This reminds me of a recent Doc Searles article, Why Online Advertising Sucks and is a Bubble: It isn’t adveristing itself. It’s the way it’s too often done. I almost never click on an ad, for three reasons. First is that I almost never find what I’m looking for. Second is that [...]

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It’s often a requirement for an Ajax app to “bust the cache”, i.e. call a service and ensure its response comes direct and not from a cache. For all the talk of fancy header techniques, the easiest way to do it is by appending an arbitrary parameter, typically a random number and/or a timestamp i.e. [...]

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I made a new Ajax toy. Web-O-Random is a random website finder with some Ajaxy goodness: Sites load into a carousel (slider) component. Thanks to Bill Scott and Yahoo! for providing the original component and Sebastien Gruhier for the prototype port which is used here. Pages load into an IFrame (as with WebWait). User can re-randomize, [...]

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Here’s a view of upcoming events in London at this time. Three closely related topics with a number of web-savvy taggers (if attendees of events like this can’t tag, who can?). And yet, zero tags in common. It would be very compelling to subscribe to events in your area and under a certain topic, so they automatically [...]

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Ajax/Javascript: 8 Ways to Create Graphics on the Fly - digg this The ability to create rich graphics on the fly is one of the critical gaps in Ajax. There are indeed techniques to do it, albeit far from perfect, and some are do-able today if you take a pragmatic view of things and keep graceful [...]

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This is the fourth and final podcast in the series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). This 54-minute podcast covers seven patterns of Ajax Architecture (Book: Chapter 17, pp 473-530): Lazy Registration Direct Login Host-Proof Hosting Timeout Heartbeat Unique URLs Dynamic Favicons Dedicated to the Nitobians, whose last podcast inspired me to crank another one out again. Recent events [...]

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Ajax Design Patterns is Book of the Month in this month's .Net mag (p.23, Issue 155, October, 2006). Incidentally, the mag is about the 'Net, not specifically MS .Net (which it pre-dates). The review says: So AJAX might be the hottest thing in programming since, er, ordinary Javascript, but it's no good just learning how to [...]

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GigaOM discusses "How Odeo Screwed Up". Odeo is a service I want to like. I promoted it to others when it came out and I frequently use it as an example of the Richer Plugin pattern as it uses an effective combination of Flash and Ajax. However, I had to stop using Odeo six months ago, [...]

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This is the second in the four-part series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). The guest for this week is Dave Johnson of Nitobi (the Ajax component developers formerly known as E-Business Applications), widget guru and author of the upcoming Enterprise Ajax book. Dave helps me walk through the patterns and [...]

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Another day, another round of VC. From TechCrunch this week: Online social network Multiply has closed a Series A funding round with $5 million from Transcosmos and $1 million from the company’s founders. Multiply is a service that filters all networking functions, from highlighted users to visible tag clouds, through a proximity filter with a slider. [...]

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