HTTP Caching Talk at RailsConf '09
This will be my first talk at a major conference.
Things Caches Do
An illustrated re-introduction to HTTP caching with a focus on gateway caches and their potential benefits within the context of modern, dynamic web applications.
Introducing Rack::Cache
Real HTTP caching for Ruby web apps.
Administrative Debris
“I hold that simplicity is the most important attribute of design,” I say. To which Tufte would reply, “No, you don’t.”
So, What Does "HREF" Stand For, Anyway?
Today it occurred to me that, after a little over ten years of basic fluency in HTML, I have absolutely no idea why the href attribute is named “href”. Why not “url”, “link”, or even just “ref”?
PrinceXML Is Extremely Impressive
I didn’t know it was possible to build such nice closed-source programs.
Browser Usage
I've long thought that the percentage of visits going to Firefox in my site statistics were oddly high. It turns out it’s pretty much in line with numbers put out by both Bob Sutor and Joe Gregorio…
IE8 To Make Tender Chickens
“The MIT guy did not like this solution because it was not the right thing.”
Full Page Zoom Is For Sissies
Did I ever tell you about the guy that spent the better part of a day making his site’s layout entirely em based …
Help! The WS-* vs. REST Debate Has Been Hijacked By People Who Want To Have Logical Discussions About Actual Real World Issues!
A call to arms.
Speaking of, "lying through their teeth..."
Sanjiva Weerawarana is such a tool.
Google Docs Basically Sucks
The quality of the generated HTML is poor and we need to be able embed custom stylesheets … and do something about those nasty URLs!
WS-* == Windows Services Dash Star?
It’s that bad.
"Helpful" Thumbnails
Wherein Snap.com impresses me a great deal by allowing their service to be centrally disabled.
This word - "Web" - I do not think it means what you think it means.
Somebody pinch me; this must be a nightmare.
Digg Scares Me (403 Go Away!)
403 Go Away!
Parallels Makes IE Testing Suck Less, Melts Power Cord
A look at the new Coherence Mode feature in Parallels desktop.
The REST Dialogues
The REST / Web Arch. crowd falls back to its secret weapon in the fight for mankind: The Dialogue.
XML Templating in Python Evolves
A brief history of the Kid templating language and an endorsement for the next generation of XML-based templating: Genshi.
analogies.google.com
Need an analogy but don’t have the time to actually think of one your self?
Web Based Site Monitoring Tools
Some praise for Site24x7.
Motherhood and Apple Pie
The axioms of web architecture and an invitation for big vendors to understand them.
IBM Poopheads: "LAMP Users Need to Grow Up"
That is to say, they don’t get it. This started out as a simple rant and turned into a decent sized essay on basic shared-nothing architecture and scaling down.
Cha-cha-cha-cha-changes...
A reflection of my time at Sterling Commerce, the value of boring, laws of the web, and more.
The Winer Decoder Ring
Dave missing Mark.
On HTTP Abuse
And why we need more three-legged stools.
Not to bring up an old topic but..
Who Owns Your Browser revisited.
Web Services: what is "success" and how do we get there?
What I think success means with regards to “Web Services”.
What WS-* got wrong
It has nothing to do with the web.
Joshua's Rule
On the growing importance of del.icio.us.
Jonathon Schwartz on WS-Mess
The loyal opposition is growing in weird ways.
Netscape 8 - Setting the browser back two years
How to not understand the value of a web browser.
Yahoo! Launches REST-based Web Services
Praise for Yahoo! as they launch an initial set of web style APIs.
Scary Rails vs Quixote Stats
Wherein we avoid a Python vs. Ruby flamewar by changing the subject to Object vs. RDMS persistence.
The Tool Vendor's Dilemma
A theory on why big vendors, big analyst houses, and the tech press want to sell you the worst possible solutions to your problems.
Web Dominated by J2EE?
The web as currently imagined by the tech. industry is quite different from the web that actually exists.
No Rails for Python?
What does Ruby on Rails have that we don’t and why?
Web Antipatterns Strikes Again
Video on the web stick sucks.
How I Explained REST to My Wife
It’s not a robot thing.
The factors that led them to choose IE..
Microsoft is so completely out of touch with reality it hurts.
Web Antipatterns
A look at various ways people misunderstand the value of the web. If it’s not useful, don’t use it.
Bosworth on WS-Mess
Adam Bosworth dumps on WSDL and hints at simple REST/HTTP interactions as being superior to WS-* in many ways.
How the other half lives
A report on meeting real life evil people.
Del.icio.us Address-barlets
Using the address bar as a quick del.icio.us lookup tool
Who Owns Your Browser?
Are there restrictions on how local content can be modified (e.g. user stylesheets)? Should there be?
Per Site User Stylesheets
A Firefox hack for styling specific sites using user stylesheets.
Why You Should Not Use Markdown
It’s too good to be true. Avoid anything this simple and elegant.
Things I Regret Saying
I am my own worst enemy.
Gmail as Mailing List Aggregator
A report on my experience using GMail for mailing list activity.
What to Look For in a HTTP Proxy/Cache
mnot on how to evaluate different proxy cache options for your needs.
Relationship between latency and throughput
Interesting reading if you found Nick’s handling of latency vs. throughput (in the gogaruca talk) intriguing.
3 Reasons Why Heroku is a Game Changer
We've been getting a decent amount of PR-ish type coverage since the commercial launch but I still say blog posts like these are infinitely more interesting:
Remember when microwaves first hit the scene and people couldn’t believe how fast they could ‘deploy’ a meal? Yah me either, but the microwave changed the game big time.
And, unlike the microwave, Heroku doesn’t make your apps taste like cardboard :)
The Uzbl browser
Minimalist, keyboard controlled (modal vim-like bindings, or with modifier keys) browser based on Webkit. A lightweight vimperator, maybe?
The Web vs. the Fallacies
Tim Bray evaluates the web’s basic design from the perspective of the Fallacies of Distributed Computing. Reminds me of TimBL’s Axioms of Web architecture a bit. This stuff is essential to understanding why the web succeeded where other systems failed and why the web seems quirky in some ways compared to other distributed computing systems.
Top significant moments from the Internet history
Pretty. Y axis is a category of significance, X axis is the year. There’s at least one error: no mention of suck.com ;)
Mechanical Analogies To Web Stuff, Part 2.
Really interesting analogy between web architecture and a car crash. This is the piece that’s missing from almost every conversation about whether any given web framework or component “scales”. (via @jperkins)
Mark Nottingham's HTTP Status Report presentation at QCon '08
Protocols are hard. Nobody understands this.
RackDAV - Web Authoring for Rack
Matthias Georgi’s framework for building DAV servers in Ruby with Rack. Could make building apps that mount into a local filesystem quite simple.
8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Designs
Measure, Leading, Quotes, Rhythm, Widows, Emphasis, Scale, and Rags. Great piece.
Dive into history, 2009 edition
Mark Pilgrim: “Anyway, I now realize that there were some hidden assumptions behind my design decisions in 2000. Some of those assumptions turned out to be wrong, or at least not-completely-right. Sure, a lot of people downloaded dip, but it still pales in comparison to the number of visitors I got from search traffic. In 2000, I fretted about my ‘home page’ and my ‘navigation aids.’ Nobody cares about any of that anymore, and I have nine years of access logs to prove it.”
I don’t think most people realize how little site navigation matters anymore. Your site’s navigation is google, topic sites, blogs, and feeds. The “website” is dead. Long live the individual useful resource.
Gay People, Come To Rails
Well said. It appears PHP’s culture of stupidity isn’t limited to technology. What a bunch of assholes.
Rack::Test released: Simply test any Rack-compatible app
Nice. This is very similar to the Sinatra::Test module but with a few additional features (i.e., the session/cookiejar thingy). If this gets traction (and it will), we’ll deprecate Sinatra::Test and recommend people use Rack::Test instead.
Deploy Merb, Sinatra, or any Rack App to Heroku
I worked on this a bit. Jazzed to see it announced. Actually, they pretty much had everything working when I got there. I wrote some docs and tightened things up a bit is all.
Now go deploy something – it’s free!
Heroku - How it Works
Things are starting to get interesting around here. James pulled together some (fucking sexy) high level architectural diagrams and annotated them just so. We can start talking about what we’re up to a bit more now that this is out. I'm jazzed.
Why It's Worth Fixing HTTP Authentication (and How to Do It)
Why browser UI for HTTP auth is so horrible has always baffled me. This could be improved significant without any changes to HTTP whatsoever.
Twitter's Varnish config
John Adams posted a bunch of details of the Varnish configuration they use in front of search.twitter.com to the varnish ML. Great stuff and nice to see the Twitter devs continuing to share their experiences with the community.
Twitter / sinatra
Harry Vangberg put together a Twitter relay bot in #sinatra (nick: nancie) so a bunch of the cool cats there are keeping the @sinatra twitter feed lit up with a stream links, tips, and announcements.
Sliding Stats: Rack Middleware to keep an eye on your traffic
Another interesting use of Rack middleware.
Ryan Tomayko on the Ruby on Rails Podcast
Geoffrey Grosenbach interviewed me yesterday for the Ruby on Rails podcast. We had a nice chat about Python/WSGI, Rack, Sinatra, Rack::Cache, Heroku, and other random stuff.
Easy client-caching with RestClient and Rack::Cache
This is one the amazing benefits of having an insanely simple but well defined SPEC (Rack) around the edges of your library. It makes it trivial to hook things up in new and interesting ways.
Public Service Announcement: the "P" in "HTTP" stands for "protocol"
I've written this same exact blog post a dozen times. For some reason, each hop along what should be a pure HTTP pipeline wants to invent their own psuedo-protocol for transferring HTTP messages. Why?! Your reimplementation of HTTP is not going to be any less complex — by definition, it must be at least as complex; and your reimplementation is definitely not going to be less buggy than the real HTTP implementations that have been around for a decade or more.
This is why can’t have nice things …
Sinatra
We gave the Sinatra website a major face lift. Check it out. Don’t leave without subscribing to the feed.
Javascript, it's Python with braces!
Guyon Morée shows how JavaScript 1.7/1.8 have been moving more and more toward Python with a few side-by-side examples. List comprehensions and generators would definitely be extremely cool to have in browser land.
Classy Web Development with Sinatra (Screencast)
The Prag’s have published two screencasts in a new series on Sinatra.
When in Doubt, Turn to _why
Magnus Holm disects a couple of implementations for parsing nested form parameters (e.g., “person[name]=Joe&person[zip]=55555”) in Ruby. _why’s is the most interesting (as always). We just added this to Sinatra and I'm fairly confident we’ll see something like it land in Rack before 1.0.
Video of Matt Todd's Rack Presentation @ ATLRUG
Matt Todd did a nice presentation on Rack to the Atlanta Ruby Group (ATLRUG) and they were nice enough to put video of the slides + audio of Matt’s narration online.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Learning in a Hypertext environment
Via Ted Han (@knowtheory): “Hypertext allows information to be organized and connected in a variety of ways that provide the user with a flexible working environment. The following advantages highlight the benefits of working and learning in a hypertext environment…”
No More Secrets
Ian McKeller shows how easy it is to find web API “secret keys” when the user has access to the (network) client code. It’s actually a nice little crash coarse in how to write cracking software (here “crack” means warez scene type “crack”). That crazy shit like this is possible is why I got into software in the first place. Completely
rack-esi
Christoffer Sawicki has started in on a partial implementation of ESI (Edge Side Includes) as a Rack middleware component. Put something like this in front of Rack::Cache and things get real interesting real fast :)
Sanitize: A whitelist-based Ruby HTML sanitizer
Finally, a sane looking sanitization lib that doesn’t try to do too much.
Resourceful
Interesting looking HTTP client library for Ruby with support for HTTP caching (with pluggable backends), basic and digest auth, intelligent redirect handling. It’s been around for a while and looks like it could eventually become similar in feature set to Python’s httplib2.
cachet
Nick Kallen has started a project to implement a HTTP cache in Scala. Seems like an excellent idea given Java’s extensive collection of stable HTTP server libraries and Scala’s strengths in concurrency and performance.
Rails and Merb -- Why Merge At All?
A much more sober but constructive take on the plan to merge Rails and Merb.
Google Groups: rack-cache
Mailing list for Rack::Cache users and hackers. Come on in, the water’s warm.
CloudKit via cURL
Jon Crosby’s RESTful JSON-based data store with OpenID and OAuth support. It does versioning and produces HTTP cache friendly responses all in a Rack middleware component. Jon’s been working on this for some time and it shows in the code and docs. Awesome.
Concluding Remarks
Jean-Jacques Dubray: “How do the RESTafarians work? They take Roy’s REST, they try to use it for anything in their day to day activities, and then when they stumble upon a problem, they try to find a more or less ‘RESTful’ solution and post it on a blog.”
Precisely!
Sinatra: 29 Links and Resources For A Quicker, Easier Way to Build Webapps
Peter Cooper: “Lots of awesome articles about Sinatra, Sinatra apps, and various links and resources have cropped up over the past few months. The remainder of this post links to the best we've found – most of which you should find useful as you start to explore Sinatra in detail.”
Introducing Rails Metal
David Heinemeier Hansson: “Rails Edge adopted Rack a while back and we’ve been exploring ways to expose that better. The first thing we did was to make it really easy to hook up any piece of Rack middleware in front of a Rails request. In your config/environment.rb file, you can do: config.middlewares.use(Rack::Cache, :verbose => true)”
Oh hell yes.
Rails Metal: a micro-framework with the power of Rails: \m/
Rails riding on Rack is going to be a big deal.
What’s Ruby’s future
Rafe Colburn: “On the other hand, I find programming in Ruby enjoyable and educational, so it’s not like I’m looking to give up. It’s just that even after a couple of years of doing it, I still feel like we’re dating rather than married.”
It seems like a lot of people are down on Ruby at the moment. Odd. I'm actually more excited about Ruby than I've ever been. Things seem to be moving along nicely, especially on the web tooling front.
ncache
An Nginx module that acts as a gateway cache. I haven’t tried it yet but it’s a really good idea.
Building a iPhone web app in under 50 lines with Sinatra and iUI
Nicely done. I have to take a serious look at iUI one of these days. It sounds like you can get really close to a native app experience.
Ruby on Rack #2 - The Builder
Pratik continues his series on Rack with a deep dive into Rack::Builder.
Showcase Of Clean And Minimalist Designs
Smashing Magazine shows off a massive catalog of minimalist designs and then attempts to deconstruct them.
Ruby on Rack #1 - Hello Rack!
Pratik’s first in a series of pieces on Rack: how it came to be, why you need to understand it, along with some simple examples. Future installments will cover Rack::Builder and Middleware.
An Introduction to A/B Testing
I've read about five extremely solid articles on this site (20bits.com) today; all thorough, easy to read, and cover interesting topics.
Rack cache headers
Interesting approach to setting cache related headers using a Rack middleware component.
Reverse HTTP
Allows a server to turn the tables and make HTTP requests to the client. I've been trying to come up with some use for this for 45 minutes and I'm totally baffled but it’s kind of interesting anyways.
Advanced Squid Caching for Rails Applications
So, I got an email yesterday disagreeing with my remark about HTTP caching being wildly under-appreciated in the Ruby web community. I felt bad, a little. Then I read this article (posted the day after my remark), which talks about Scribd moving to a Squid reverse proxy setup to front their Rails deployments:
“But there was a problem – no one uses caching proxies in 2008 :–) So, we’ve got an idea – why can’t we place such a server in front of our application and make it cache content for all users in the world?”
The fact that Scribd had to “have this idea” on their own and had not previously been exposed to a ton of literature/tools on reverse proxy / gateway caching is completely fucking unacceptable. I'm back to agreeing with myself.
Creating a Rack Middleware for Minifying Your Javascript files
Pretty good introduction to building pieces of Rack middleware and using Rack::Builder.
What's New in Edge Rails: Even Better Conditional GET Support
Much nicer, IMO. I'm interested to see if someone can get Rails + Rack::Cache working together so that you can maximize the benefits of generating these validators.
Introducing ActsAsMarkup: A Markdown, Textile, Wikitext, and RDoc Plugin for ActiveRecord
Interesting Rails plugin from Viget Labs that adds ActiveRecord attribute helpers for various humane markup languages. The markdown variation supports both rdiscount and rpegmarkdown. Cool. Not sure how I missed it when it was released in August.
Ezra's "Merb, Rubinius and the Engine Yard Stack" Google Tech Talk
So I've been skeptical about Merb but I really like the world-view Ezra puts forth here: core framework code should be simple (no/little meta-programming), fast is good, Rack is awesome, etc.
What I Believe Roy Said
Paul Downey translates Dr. Fielding’s REST APIs Must be Hypertext Driven into lay-hacker speak.
AJAX should not mandate HTTP
Huh? In a sane world, “Ajax” would have been called “HTTP” (or, more elaborately: “JavaScript gets a mostly-standard asynchronous HTTP client library”).
At first I thought this was going to be one of those articles that confuses animated JavaScript effects for Ajax but it goes on to talk about how Ajax is bad because it breaks “Save Page to File” … or something. Save Page to File?!
Qwitter: Catching Twitter quitters
Sends an email notification when someone stops following you on Twitter. I don’t have the nervous system for it myself.
Conditional classnames
Using conditional comments to stick an “ie” classname on <body> so that you can target IE from a single CSS file instead of bringing in a separate stylesheet. Nice hack.
Varnish's ESI Support
“Varnish implementes a subset of the ESI Language 1.0 defined by W3C, this document lays out some of the thoughts and rationale for choices made and advice for usage of these features.”
This lets you perform includes at the cache layer so that each included resource can have its own caching policy. Akamai edge proxies have supported this for some time, apparently.
Varnish 2.0 released!
Looks like a really solid improvement on 1.0. I haven’t had a chance to play with any of the betas but I'm anxious to see whether If-Modified-Since/If-None-Match validation made it in. There’s a note on “serving expired objects until we have a fresh one” but that sounds more like stale-while-revalidate.
class='robots-nocontent'
Apparently, Yahoo!’s indexer supports marking specific content on a page as “extraneous to the main unique content”. This lets you prevent headers, navigation, and other types of site-level crud from overwhelming the content and the search results will excerpt only content that’s relevant to the page.
From the Yahoo! Web Crawler FAQ: “… apply the robots-nocontent attribute to indicate to search engines any content that is extraneous to the main unique content of the page. Yahoo! Search observes the class='robots-nocontent' present on XHTML elements, such as div, span, and all others.”
The Web is Agreement
This is really close to what “the web” looks like in my brain:
I try to stay in the general vicinity of the “principles mound.” :)
"Air Budd Form Builder" meets "/admin Considered Harmful"
Bill Burcham applies the technique of making form controls inherit style from their container in the Air Budd Form Builder Rails plugin. Cool.
Minima
Alex Payne’s tumble-like blog on minimalism in coding and design. I didn’t realize @al3x was such a huge conscious follower of the minimalist aesthetic, although I've definitely noticed it in his work.
Google's undocumented favicon to png convertor
I'm using this on all of my “linkings” index pages now (see here, for example). It works pretty well. I really like the idea of integrating a piece of the destination site’s visual identity instead of using a generic del.icio.us/bookmark icon. Some site’s with favicons don’t work properly, however, and I'd give anything to have another parameter that let me override the default globe icon (this one: ). It'd be nice if I could say, grab the favicon for this domain but if it doesn’t exist, give me the favicon for delicious.com (
).
Managed Ajax - A New Approach to Ajax
A horrible and misguided idea. I've personally never even liked the RJS/JavaScript generation stuff in Rails, and it’s actually well designed, thought out, and quite simple. “Managed Ajax” takes it to a whole new level, building from the assumption that “JavaScript is the new assembler,” and moves most types of interaction logic to the server. Reality seems to be moving in the exact opposite direction. Do yourself a favor and get real comfortable with JavaScript.
Latest iPhone Software supports full-screen Web apps
“One unpublicized feature introduced by Apple’s latest iPhone software updates is the ability to save Web apps to the home screen and have them launch in full-screen mode without the Safari wrapper, essentially mimicking the experience of a native app.”
Cross Site XMLHttpRequest Design
Oh, nice. Here’s a high-level design document that describes the new cross-site XmlHttpRequest (their calling it, “XXX”) functionality and ties the other documents floating around out there together. It seems that servers will be able to signal that certain resources are accessible from other domains using HTTP headers or (gasp!) XML processing instructions (PIs). Weird.
Bug 389508 – Implement Cross-site XMLHttpRequest
Just landed on mozilla trunk a few days ago. See the draft spec for specifics.
Varnish 2.0 beta 2 released
Lots of good stuff coming in Varnish 2.0. GC, regexp based purge, custom hash funcs, backend load balancing based on health or other metrics, and the thing I'm personally most interested: what looks like support for validation based caching.
HTML5 Validator
Highly experimental HTML 5 validation service. More info and bookmarklets available on the about page.
How to usurp PHP’s place: an outline
Aristotle Pagaltzis on eating PHP’s lunch: “It will have to be more than just a programming language, because PHP itself is really more than a programming language. It includes a crude web framework (an invocation model reminiscent of CGI, with extensions) plus a crude deployment solution (just make all the libraries part of the language and let the sysadmin worry about it – who in turn often defers to his operating system vendor). This is PHP’s way of taking the worse-is-better philosophy to dazzling new depths …”
I was having this conversation at work the other day and came away with the conclusion that even if something were to reach feature / ease of use parity with PHP today, it would be many years before it actually surpassed the language in real deployments. PHP is everywhere.
Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind
“When the Texas Education Agency evaluated its Technology Immersion Pilot, a $14-million program to install wireless tools in middle schools, the conclusion was unequivocal: ‘There were no statistically significant effects of immersion in the first year on either reading or mathematics achievement.’”
Dead Man's Switch
Sends emails to people when you die. Awesome.
“This is how this works. You write a few e-mails, and choose the recipients. These emails are encrypted with military-grade algorithms, so you can be sure that no-one except the intended recipient will ever read them. Your switch will email you every so often, asking you to show that you are fine by clicking a link. If something were to… happen… to you, your switch would then send the emails you wrote to the recipients you specified. Sort of an ‘electronic will’, one could say.”
The C10K problem
Dan Kegel: “You can buy a 1000MHz machine with 2 gigabytes of RAM and an 1000Mbit/sec Ethernet card for $1200 or so. Let’s see – at 20000 clients, that’s 50KHz, 100Kbytes, and 50Kbits/sec per client. It shouldn’t take any more horsepower than that to take four kilobytes from the disk and send them to the network once a second for each of twenty thousand clients. (That works out to $0.08 per client, by the way. Those $100/client licensing fees some operating systems charge are starting to look a little heavy!) So hardware is no longer the bottleneck. ”
Looks like this is from 2003 but is still pretty accurate as far as I can tell.
Typography for Lawyers
For lawyers?!?? This site is way too useful and right to limit it to lawyers.
Django’s cache framework
All frameworks should approach caching the way Django does. The core app/origin framework does no real caching but provides utility/helper methods for setting standard RFC 2616 cache related headers on the response easily and correctly. A completely separate set of caching goo (“middleware”) sits between your app and performs the actual caching based purely on the headers set by the origin. The benefit to this approach is that caching is totally independent from the app framework and can be swapped out for a true gateway (“reverse proxy”) cache at any time.
Opentape
PHP-based Muxtape clone that you host yourself. From the project page: “Opentape’s creation and design are proudly inspired by Muxtape’s success and sleek interface. We were sad with it’s untimely shutdown and wanted to let the web mixtape movement continue.”
muxtape.com was RIAA'd a couple of weeks ago. And while the EFF believes they could have decent legal footing if they wanted to challenge the take-down, it seems unlikely that the site will reopen anytime soon, if at all.
alan.dean's REST Bookmarks on Delicious
Alan Dean has bookmarked over 100 REST related articles in the past two days (and 757 all time). For comparison, I've been bookmarking REST related articles since July 2004 and have a total of 107 bookmarks. It appears that Dean is shooting for a comprehensive list of every resource related to REST ever posted on the web.
Best Comment Policy Ever
“This ain’t the goddamn Barney show, I'm not a goddamn purple dinosaur, and I don’t give a flying fuck about your feelings. I don’t love you, I don’t want to be your friend, and as far as I'm concerned, caring means not setting your house on fire.” — Phillip Birmingham
REST in the front, RPC in the back
Assaf Arkin: “There’s also some back-end processing going on, and I think that part is using DRb for now. But maybe the next update it will switch over to RMI or UNIX pipes or whatever. I don’t much care because the library does the talking, and besides, it’s only distributed in the sense that we have two pieces of code running with different PIDs. Not particularly important what’s happening on the wire, as long as it’s fast.”
REST as an engineering discipline
Bill de hÓra knocks one out of the park: “I think sometimes that the problem people have with REST is that it’s so well-defined; it’s not witchcraft, it’s not a cargo cult. You can’t argue with it on a relativistic basis or apply clever rhetoric or continuously redefine what it means. An architectural style isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – you have to decide if it’s the right fit for your problem space and if not, you have to come up with a more appropriate one.”
Don't Fear the URLs
Adam Wiggins on Sinatra’s blasphemous approach to controllers and routing. AKA: the thing that makes Sinatra my web layer of choice (well, that and throw :halt).
Minimalism Revisited Theme
Jonas Arnfred: “This theme is a sleek and simple minimalist design for wordpress made to bring the content forward, and everything else out of view. The theme is designed with a focus on typography and effective whitespace …”
Web Development for the iPhone
“You can specify CSS based on viewport orientation which you determine via javascript and update the orient attribute of the body element. Target the browser with body[orient=‘landscape’] or body[orient=‘portrait’]”
Why Ogg Matters
Interesting. This is the first time I've seen mention of Firefox shipping with Ogg Vorbis and Theora built-in. That could definitely change the horrible pace of adoption we've seen thus for.
Timeplot
Very nice and functional JavaScript based timeplot library. Looks good, shows data-points on mouse over, approachable API. Good stuff.
beyond rest
joshua schachter on Rabble/Kellan’s “Beyond REST?” presentation, with an interestingly simple HTTP-based callback system.
Building Load Resilient Web Servers
Great look at varnish and concerns around putting a front-end reverse proxy cache in place.
The Five Best Firebug Extensions
Awesome. I didn’t even know there were such things as Firebug Extensions.
blog.txt
A minimalist’s WordPress theme. Focus on typography and simple markup. Various configuration options and a print stylesheet.
Typesites review's jon tangerine
Nice review of the various typographic tact found at Jon Tangerine’s Pith & pulp http://jontangerine.com/
Minimalism
Hilarious! What Mark doesn’t know is that much of my “minimalist redesign” was ripped directly from what he’s had in place for 2-3 years; “administrative debris” was just a convenient alibi.
Firefox Add-on: AmIOnMySpace.com
“This plugin will alert you if you accidentally stumble onto MySpace.com, and take you back to the site you came from.”
Plainview - A full-screen web browser for Mac
Free (as in beer). Built on WebKit. Simple. Beautiful.
Babelmark — Markdown Testbed
Compare (as in, diffs) the output of 15 different Markdown implementations. Includes every Markdown implementation I've ever come across and then some…
Announcing AJAX Libraries API: Speed up your Ajax apps with Google’s infrastructure
Interesting. I've been using the jquery-1.2.3.js hosted on google code for a few months now. Maybe I should have read the TOS…
peg-markdown
An implementation of Markdown in portable ANSI C that’s roughly 28.5x faster than the canonical Perl implementation on a 179K test file. Looks like a complete implementation; includes smarty and footnote extensions.
Apache 3.0 (a tall tale), Roy Fielding
Nice ApacheCon EU ‘08 presentation (warning: video + slides, no transcript) covering various blue sky stuff on Roy’s brain for Apache and HTTP.
The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces
Interesting look at evolution of UI and the semi-recent trend of adopting the web’s content oriented interface. Definitely overlaps with the fundamentals of “admin debris” and related ideas.
Mozilla Firefox 3 RC1
And I was just starting to get used to the Minefield icon… I've been running the nightlies for about three months now and FF2 is really feeling a bit like legacy software.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
“Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.”
Doctorow Declares His Virgin Media (ISP) Contract Null, Void
In response to Virgin Media CEO stating that he considers Net Neutrality to be “a load of bollocks” and promising to put any website or service that won’t pay Virgin a premium to reach its customers into the “Internet bus lane.”
Google App Engine
Christmas in Python land! Run Python/WSGI code on Google’s infrastructure. This is an incredibly H U G E win for the Python web community and further validates WSGI’s architectural awesomeness.
The immediacy of PHP
David Heinemeier Hansson: “PHP scales down like no other package for the web and it deserves more credit for tackling that scope.”
Agreed!
What Is the Open Web and Why Is It Important?
Brad Neuberg (Google Gears): “Our historical closeness to the web creates a kind of myopia, where we can’t see how amazing it is. It’s a billion Library of Alexandria’s dropped into our laps.”
April First Reconsidered
Interesting take on AFD as launch-crazy-but-legit-projects day. I didn’t use the Internet at all this AFD and sent everything in my reader to /dev/null. Now, I feel kind of bad. Sorry about that, internet.
On software architecture
Roy Fielding on the difference between architecture, architecural styles, patterns, implementations, and applications.
Addressing Doubts about REST
Stefan Tilkov addresses some of the most common doubts people have when first deprogram and come up to speed on REST. Short and well done, IMO. I think I’ll be handing this out quite a bit in the future.
The Common Lisp Directory finally crashed after 823 days
“So the CLD lisp process uptime experiment is now over and I will move the CLD to a better place than a simple server in my basement.”
Presentational JavaScript to adjust text line-height in proportion to text column width.
“If you can’t control the text width the next best thing you can do to compensate for an overly wide text measure is to increase the leading.” — I never considered that but it makes sense.
HyperText.m - source to TimBL's first implementation of hypertext (Sept. 25, 1990)
From the comments: “HyperText is like Text, but includes links to and from other hypertexts.”
Mozilla Bug 417302 – about:robots
“In the spirit of the Firefox 3 firstrun pages, I would like to permanently commemorate the noble deeds of the robot community in their fight for an open web.”
Javascript online massive social password cracking ?
Yes! Please. Make your friends on myspace work for you. Idle CPU is wasted CPU, dontchaknow.
NginxHttpEmptyGifModule
“The ngx_http_empty_gif_module keeps a 1x1 transparent GIF in memory that can be served very quickly.” — That’s so amazingly awesome; spacer.gif for life.
Zero Sign On - 1 better or Infinitely better than Single Sign On?
This is so right. Why didn’t client certificates ever catch on in the browser? Or signed emails? Neither are hard to get set up but nobody uses it. It’s weird.
GitHub: mongrel_proctitle GemPlugin
I repackaged mongrel_proctitle as a GemPlugin so that all mongrels on use it automatically. This is the first chance I've had to play with GitHub, too. Lovin' it.
Process title support for Mongrel
Constantly updates the the process title ($0) with something like: “mongrel_rails [10010/2/358]: handling 127.0.0.1: HEAD /feed/calendar/global/91/6de4”. Let’s you monitor backends with ps and top.
IBM Web services guru predicts WSDL future
From 2002: “On this latter specification, Sutor is emphatic: web services are defined by whether they are described in WSDL.”
Firefox 3 nightly builds shipping w/ FreeBSD's malloc(3) implementation
“The reason we are integrating our own allocator is that we've found jemalloc to be better than all the default allocators of our three main platforms (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)”
Single file Rails Application
A “Hello World” Rails webapp in fewer LOC than a Java console app that System.out.println(“Hello World”). The routes and controller DSLs look pretty interesting as well.
9 Practical Ways to Enhance your Web Development Using the Firefox Web Developer Extension
From the comments: “the only things i find [useful] in Web Developer Extension is the shortcut to clear cache… for other things i use Firebug…” — Me too!
Tab Control
Lightweight Firefox extension that causes new tabs to open to the right of the current tab. Works with Firefox 3.0 betas and nightlies with extension compatibility checking disabled.
W3C's Excessive DTD Traffic
“Our hope was that the authors of misbehaving software and the administrators of sites who deployed it would notice these errors and make the necessary fixes to the software responsible.” – You must be new here.
Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's Company-Wide Memo Regarding the Microsoft Takeover Bid
“Welcome to Microsoft.”
Google Super Tuesday Twitter Map View Thingy
Watch tweets pop up around the country on a google map as people comment on the goings-on of Super Tuesday.
Håkon's Wium Lie
Ahh, it turns out Håkon’s Wium Lie (Opera CTO and the guy who first proposed CSS) is on YesLogic’s board, makers of PrinceXML. I'm not sure how I missed that.
The Technology Rejection Curve
Joe Gregorio: “This is what I call the ‘Scooby-Doo’ phase of the technology rejection curve, where the rubber mask has been ripped off and the crook yells as he’s dragged off by the cops […]”
Dear IE6, I hate you
“There comes a time in every old browser’s life to pack up shop and, well, fuck off. This time has come and gone for IE6 …” Also: “42% of global users are still browsing the web with IE6.”
Modern Firefox Theme That Looks Like Netscape 3.0 Running On Windows 3.1
This is pretty funny. Even the options dialogs are themed.
Mother Earth Mother Board
Neil Stephenson writing on “the longest wire on Earth” (undersea fiber) for Wired in 1996.
Hypermedia WTF!
“… there’s a sub-constraint that goes by the unwieldly name of ‘Hypermedia as the engine of application state’, which is arguably the most important constraint of REST in the sense that it alone provides the bulk of the ‘shape’ of RESTful systems …”
Reddit: "merely a collection of trivia, narrow, shallow, and sensational"
Kragen throws some useful criticism at Digg/Reddit: “If you fill your head with ‘merely a collection of trivia, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational’, it won’t stay there; it’ll trickle right out again.”
What should Microsoft do instead?
Holy crap, this is insane. Just let people run IE6 and IE7 as separate standalone browsers side-by-side with IE8. As James said in my previous post, they can even rebrand it as “Intranet Explorer” :)
put a proxy in front
“… even if you have a single server, a proxy in front can help performance significantly. Through the simple expedient of buffering, your heavyweight processes don’t waste time serving every request for the entire length of time the client is connected”
Django People
Simon Willison’s latest project makes it easy for people developing in Django to hook up and get laid (since they have so much free-time due to developing in Django).
Websphere CTO Jerry Cuomo on REST & Project Zero
Whoa. I apparently haven’t spent nearly enough time looking into IBM’s Project Zero. It seems to come down to REST + (Groovy|PHP) and sneaking practical technologies in the front door with a “SOA” label on it. Interesting strategy.
The problem with pixels
“… anybody who’s ever built out a relatively complex design using ems will agree that at some point they wondered if the benefit was really worth the effort.”
Give Me a M: The MySQL/Sun Q&A
Steve does the Sun/MySQL aquisition Q&A and speculates on some interesting effects of the deal: “… YouTube sold for $1.6 billion, and consumed virtually no software. If that acquisition was to take place today, they would have been buying from Sun.”
Myth: RESTful Web Services Don't Need an Interface Definition Language
Dare weighs in on the usefulness of description languages in REST-based design and seems to conclude that Uniform Interface != Description Language and that simple discovery ( style) is the appropriate comparison.
Lying Through Their Teeth: Easy vs. Simple
Steve Vinoski compares IDL as used w/ CORBA/DCOM with WSDL as used by WS-*. It’s interesting that IDL served as more than just a description for machines. Humans used IDL as spec text and built services accordingly, just like REST :)
ArchitectNotes - Varnish
“I have spent many years working on the FreeBSD kernel, and only rarely did I venture into userland programming, but when I had occation to do so, I invariably found that people programmed like it was still 1975.”
Reverse proxy roundup
Bob Ippolito wrote up some pros and cons to reverse proxy implementations in different servers a few months back. I don’t think much of it is out of date at this point but nginx isn’t represented.
NetNewsWire is now free!
I wonder why newsgator would make this free. Seems like there was a pretty decent slate of paying users. Losing ground to Google Reader? Eventual ad placement? Just wanted to be nice? Weird.
A pool for the W3C validators
This is a good idea. The w3c hosted validators tend to perform on the bad side of horrible. I've run the validator locally but never thought to look for mirrors.
moz-snapshooter.rb
Like khtml2png but using the gtkmozembed Ruby extension library (which I haven’t been able to build yet).
The solution is quite clear: each browser tab should have its own thread, in which a separate instance of a JavaScript interpreter executes...
I had assumed that was already happening today. I really have to dig into the mozilla codebase someday… Seems like it would be worth it to get a better feel for browser internals – even if you weren’t planning hacking on the browser.
Google Chart API Developer's Guide
I would use this ASAP if not for the privacy requirements around the data I'm charting. There’s really no good general purpose graphing libraries that use nice and simple vector shapes and styles.
Run Internet Explorer 5/6/7 Natively in OS X
This trumps Leopard for most important Mac development this year as far as I'm concerned. Words cannot explain the hatred I've developed for booting up multiple Parallels VMs to get at IE.
WS-* is to REST as Theory is to Practice
Dare talks about his transition from WS-* to REST proponent. This mirrors a lot of people’s experience, including my own.
Sinatra : Classy web-development dressed in a DSL
something to dig into during a 1 hour conference call or whatever …
RESTafarian SOA killers?
“We (the RESTafarians) are not stubborn zealots. We’re just right. Sorry :–)”
The Nerd Handbook
“Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface …”
Prism Prototype Now Available on Mac and Linux
That was quick. IMO, the Mac needs this application more than other platform’s (including Windows) because of its document oriented application switching.
Fair use advocates hit back with copyright principles of their own
“The Fair Use Principles for User Generated Content offer a set of guidelines that video sites should use in order to ensure that their attempts to keep infringing video offline don’t run roughshod over users' rights to fair use of the content.”
Ian Bicking: Prism
“… if all you can think of is reasons why the web is stupid and awkward, and you think it’s some giant step backward (from what?), then you haven’t thought very deeply about what’s happened in the world of technology and why.”
Configuring Apache httpd
Starting with absolutely no configuration file. This is why I've prefered lighttpd, because I can put together a separate config in about five minutes. httpd’s sprawling default config has always scared the crap out of me.
The ESB Question
This is a scary description of a small chunk of my tech career: “In a previous life, I helped develop ESBs. I’ve written about them and I’ve promoted them. But somewhere along the way, I lost the religion.”
NoSquint: Firefox Extension
NoSquint remembers your text zoom level per site, so you will only need to adjust text size once for each site that uses text that is too small for your eyes.
The Rule of Least Power - W3C TAG Finding 23 February 2006
“There is an important tradeoff between the computational power of a language and the ability to determine what a program in that language is doing.”
Rails 2.0: Preview Release
“… Rails has picked a side in the SOAP vs REST debate. Unless you absolutely have to use SOAP for integration purposes, we strongly discourage you from doing so. As a naturally extension of that, we’ve pulled ActionWebService from the default bundle.”
What nine of the world’s largest websites are running on
Linux, Apache, PHP, and memcached are the big winners. Nice to lighttpd represent.
How a non-Neutral ISP could work
An extremely effective method of explaining the important of “net nuetrality”.
HTTP Errors Poster
Stefan Tilkov with a poster-size illustration of HTTP client errors (4xx series only).
7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails
“But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails’ preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It’s do-able with a lot of glue. But it’s damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you’re really doing this.)”
CSS 3: A Giant Serving Of FAIL
“… CSS 3 is a joke. A sad, sick joke being perpetrated by people who clearly don’t build actual web apps…”
Ruby on Rails Security Guide
Comprehensive look at common Rails security concerns with links out to in-depth articles.
The Rest of REST
Slides from the presentation Roy will be giving in about an hour at RailsConf Europe.
A little REST and Relaxation
How long has this been floating around? Roy Fielding on building the web… (via Aristotle Pagaltzis on rest-discuss)
Joe Gregorio | Projects [bitworking.org]
Aww man, Joe’s real project list looks like my wish-i-was-hacking-on list.
Twitter API Traffic is 10x Twitter’s Site
Do not try to measure APIs vs site traffic… that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth… There is no APIs.
The IPhone Is Internet Explorer 4 All Over Again
“And the more I’ve been thinking about that argument, the more I realize that it’s exactly how Microsoft spun the proprietary, non-standard HTML features in IE 4.”
3D Mailbox - FREE 3-Dimensional Email Software. Bring e-mail to life! (And put spam to death!)
This just ruined my day. I'm going home. Absolutely horrible. Just horrible.
Bill de hÓra: Design for the web
“… on Java, too many web frameworks – think JSF, or Struts 1.x – consider the Web something you work around using software patterns. The goal is get off the web, and back into middleware…”
HTML Entity Character Lookup
Oh wow. I've been trying to find a single page that has every unicode character on it with its hex counterpart but this is pretty fantastic.
Udell Interviews Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby on "RESTful Web Services"
Ugghh, this is 7 days old now and I still haven’t had a chance to listen… It’s the best interview ever when I imagine it in my head :)
The future is yesterday [plasmasturm.org]
I saw this same note on rest-discuss the other day and thought it struck a chord. :) Jon Hanna on SOAP, Web 2.0, other stuff…
RESTful Web Services (Paperback) : by Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby [amazon.com]
A site for sore eyes :)
Fielding’s Dissertation [docunext.com]
Section by section interpretation and notes on Fielding’s Disseration on REST.
Silly season [diveintomark.org]
“Sigh. I used to have the strength to argue against such foolishness. Nowadays I’m reduced to nothing more than Grey’s-Anatomy-esque catchphrases. Seriously? Seriously? Do I really have to explain why this is a bad idea?”
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 [google.com]
“Results 1 – 10 of about 283,000 for 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0” – This is officially the craziest thing I've ever seen on the internet (with the exception of the Hasselhoffian Recursion).
Running Ruby in the browser via script type="text/ruby"
I no longer think applet support should be dropped from all major browsers. I've got links for anyone who produces a Jython version.
Koranteng's Toli: Crawl Before You Walk
On JSF: “Waiting 5 years before you adopt the native architecture of the web is almost inexcusable. The web won’t (and didn’t) wait that long.”
Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid
Yes! I've been doing this for a few months now with the corp. assets and I won’t go back. You can really see the text snap into a vertical rhythm when you hit it.
mjt
Browser-side JavaScript template engine with concepts borrowed from Kid. Used by Freebase to drive formatting around JSON. Looks interesting.
Primary sources? You don’t need ‘em. Trust us. [jonudell.net]
I'm surprised to see that any of the news sites linked to the original report.
Sun proposes to apply Web service standardization principles to REST
Elliotte isn’t pulling any punches :)
Web Developers: 13 Command Line Tricks You Might Not Know
Anyone who doesn’t know every single one of these probably hasn’t been developing for the web very long. Probably a useful crash course for newbies making their way over from FrontPage or ASP.net though.
The window.onload problem (still) [peter.michaux.ca]
Nugget of wisdom: “… developing for the web is frequently about accepting small compromises to big philosophical ideals.”
your clever screen name is not clever
“There’s a time and place for a penis decal on your forehead and the Monday morning staff meeting is not it.”
HTTP/1.1 (DELETE, GET, HEAD, PUT, POST)
Nice activity diagram describing the resolution of response status codes given various request methods and headers. Full res GIF, JPEG, PNG, and SVG.
My Life As An RSS Junkie [medialoper.com]
Bob Saget: RSS is not a drug! I used to [expletives deleted] for coke. Other Guy: I saw him! Bob Saget: Now that’s an addiction, man. You ever [expletives deleted] for RSS?
Amos O. Olagunju / St. Cloud State University
This is the “home page” of a professor who teaches web design at St. Cloud State University. Don’t go there.
subtlety : a remote subversion excursion
Put in a subversion URL and get back an RSS feed for tracking changes.
Are we gonna bash Restlet next? [brandonwerner.com]
I've been meaning to spend some time in Restlet for some time now. Looks like it’s gaining traction with the EE crowd. Err, well, uhh, some of the EE crowd, anyway.
Access localhost via name from Parallels Desktop [macosxhonts.com]
This is another thing that’s been driving me crazy for a while now. I'm going to try the bonjour technique mentioned in the comments.
Can't save in Google Docs? Disable Firebug!
Grrrrr. This has been driving me crazy for almost two weeks. I don’t understand why the main google search doesn’t include google groups – I thought the whole point was to put everything behind a single search box. Bha.
An OpenID is not an account!
OpenID solves the identity problem, not the trust problem. When a user authenticates with OpenID, what they are doing is stating “I have the ability to prove my ownership of this URL”.
demoroniser - correct moronic and gratuitously incompatible Microsoft HTML
“The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform.”
OpenID for non-SuperUsers [intertwingly.net]
Sam with a very simple, step by step tutorial on using your site as an OpenID identity provider.
ngrep - network grep
“strives to provide most of GNU grep’s common features, applying them to the network layer. ngrep is a pcap-aware tool that will allow you to specify extended regular or hexadecimal expressions”
IEs4Linux
Whose going to get this running on OS X? I guess it doesn’t really matter. I can always X over to a Linux box…
The Role of Resources in REST
“Each resource demarcates a subset of an application’s state, and becomes a handle by which other applications can interact with that state.”
Maruku: a Markdown interpreter written in Ruby
This looks promising: handles all of Markdown proper plus various extensions.
Socio-political and Commercial Motivations for WS-*
Nice bit of history showing the chain of events that led to WS-*.
A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft
I guess this could be good thing. Good people have a tendency of being taken advantage of in ways they wouldn’t expect at MS though so I have to give the whole deal a respectful thumbs-down.
Web Pages That Suck presents the biggest web design mistakes in 2004 learn usability and good Web design by looking at bad Web design
A perfect article.
Stefan Tilkov on SOA
Extremely clear and right take on REST, WS, and other techniques for distributing systems.
Ruby for the Web! (irb running in an applet via JRuby)
I take back everything bad I've ever said about Java Applets ;)
? will save us, or, Applicative trumps imperative in the large
Aristotle just destroys that recent reg article that suggests we need to shit-can 20 years of engineering masterpiece for distributed objects. Nice piece!
tech decentral » a RedMonk blog about web technology by Anne Zelenka
Go RedMonk. This is a major pick-up, IMO.
ViewSourceClan
Somebody should create a feed that posts a single random entry per day from the Atom Wiki.
A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change
Outstanding piece. Adrian ought to write more often. Microformats.org could really use someone with Adrian’s background to squash some of the “why?” type questions.
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
This site is really starting to come along now. The latest addition on how to manage vertical spacing in intervals is something I've been wondering about for a while now.
webkit2png
Dumps graphic (PNG) representations of a webpage to disk using Apple Webkit. Similar to a screenshot but better because it can capture the entire height and width of a page even when they extend pass your screen size.
Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
Doc just got upgraded to hero status…
What Is TurboGears (Hint: Python-Based Framework for Rapid Web Development)
Really cool to see TG and Kid getting some press on O'Reilly
Javascript Event compatibility tables
Nice list of DOM events and the varying support of different browsers.
Color Scheme Generator 2
This is probably the nicest color picker for choosing compliments off of a base color.
LAMP and J2EE competition heating up
it seems the tech press is only about a month behind the bloggers now… :)
Squawkbox: Corporate Use of MSN Spaces-- check out CNBC. Rant alert
Damn, looks like Microsoft is back to their old ways again…
Journalism and weblogs, part 327
Word. Authority has been set on its head. There’s been no better time in history to be an ornery bastard. :)
Gallery of DRM-Related Antipixel Buttons and Badges
If you must put badges on your site, make it one of these…
A Bright, Shiny Service: Sparklines
Joe Gregorio throws together a RESTful web service for generating sparklines.
Lever and fulcrum
“Jim Gray reminded me that TerraServer does offer SOAP interfaces. And yet those interfaces demonstrably have not inspired a flurry of innovation. Why not?”
del.icio.us: casting the net wider
Oh crap, he did it this time. Is the RIAA/MPAA going to be after del.icio.us now? Insane, I know but not impossible considering past history.
The Long Tail: Bring tha noize!
“It sounds like a paradox, but it isn’t. Much of what you want is in the tail. Most of what you don’t want is also in the tail.”
The Power Of Us
“Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business” — that’s not all it’s shaking up…
Integrate This
Looks like an interesting new blog with proper taste for integration technologies. I can’t figure out who it is though…
300 Images From 1800 Sites
A bunch of nice little bullet images. I can never find them when I need them…
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
Holy crap this is the coolest language book I've ever seen. No seriously, you have to flip through the chapters – there’s regular comic strips and other crazy non-sense.
Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
“People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you'd think we'd have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf.”
Cory Doctorow - All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites
I bookmark a lot of doctorow and I bookmark a lot of IT Conversations; this is two birds with one stone. Doctorow sick genius as usual…
Dracula Blogged
Bram Stroker’s Dracula blogged based on dates in the book. This will run for the next six months. Subscribed.
JavaScript Reference
Decent javascript reference. I really like the format but the cards are images so you can’t use your browser’s find to locate stuff…
Business Week predicts corporate takeover of blogs
BusinessWeek has “Blogs” on cover but they don’t get it. Predicting a massive takeover of the blogosphere by major corporations – no one is going to some shitty feed-me-PR blog. We have those today, they’re called “Corporate Websites” and “Magazines”
PEAR 1.4.0, meet REST 1.0
Greg Beaver talks about some of the benefits of REST based design as he’s moving PEAR from XML-RPC to standrad HTTP/URIs/XML.
The spit fight that ended my career at MSNBC
“So, fuck it. I quit.” – David Weinberger on leaving MSNBC because they’re clueless.
Rupert Murdoch should buy Jon Udell.
I wish I could buy Jon Udell; I'd keep him in my cubical to impress my friends.
SFP: Come see us
Aaron Swartz writes a novella about his startup interview w/ Paul Graham et al. I'm so jealous!
Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review
Oh wow – this is the definitive work thus far I guess.
Greasemonkey FUD
Hi, we’re Forrester Research, a division of Microsoft. — I really didn’t expect Firefox to get this much FUD thrown at it.
What Does SOAP/WS Do that A REST System Can't?
I didn’t know SOAP/WS systems were so capable. Astounding!
Malcolm Gladwell's South by Southwest (SXSW) 2005 Keynote
Talks about Blink and other cool stuff as usual.
Analyst Report: Scripting languages lag in Web services support
That’s because they don’t have shithead analyst speculation driving feature development…
[delicious-discuss] big news
Joshua gets some funding for del.icio.us so that he can work it full time. Congrats!
Don't throw out the SOAP with the bathwater
Udell wishes REST and WS-* could get along… The REST people did too – two or three years ago (e.g. Prescod, Baker).
Lesson's learned launching a web service
Google reflects on some of the decisions made for the AdWords API.
Yahoo! Buzz Game
Interesting prediction market that uses buzz around different technologies. I split my starting cash between REST, delicious, and Python.
The del.icio.us Screencast
Jon Udell runs through some of the potential of del.icio.us in a screencast. rockin…
Roots of the REST/SOAP Debate
Paul Prescod gives some background and opinion on the REST/SOAP debate.
The on-demand blogosphere
An Udell screencast on the future of the blogosphere. del.icio.us as a shared brain.. all great stuff. watch it.
NS8, part 1: I need closure
Blake Ross tearing into Netscape/AOL on Netscape 8. Can’t wait for part 2.
Show Me the Code
Joe Gregorio’s second installment in his series on building RESTful applications shows us how to build a bookmark service kind of like del.icio.us. He nailed this one really nicely.
Web Building: Style Templates
Big list of sites that provide CC licensed CSS layouts and tools for generating layouts.
Emacs WebDev Environment
Information on setting up emacs for (X)HTML web development including nxml-mode, rng-validate-mode, etc.
SOAP is Comatose But Not Officially Dead!
Carlos Perez with a nice wrap up of recent WS-* vs. REST discussion around the blogosphere.
SHA-1 "Broken"
Sam Ruby with one of the better write-ups on the impact of the SHA-1 break. Short and accurate.
SOAP is boring, wake up Big Vendors or get niched
More reports of shrinking WS-* mindshare and cries for tools for building REST based architecture.
The false promise of template languages
David Hansson (of Ruby on Rails fame) on why codeless template languages don’t work.
del.icio.us/popular/sparkline
del.icio.us/popular with nifty sparkline graphs for tracking popularity over time (via Simon Willison)
The sad state of SOAP interoperability
Complexity is kryptonite to interoperability. It’s that simple.
Gartner urges caution before downloading Firefox
Redefining the concept of making sense: “some of the factors that make Firefox more appealing than Internet Explorer are likely to go away as the browser gets to be more popular”
Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain
Really interesting concept. Tags can be combined to form “tagwebs”
Why Craigslist Works, by Craig
The whole PDF requirement at ChangeThis sucks but this looks like a good read anyway..
TheyWorkForYou.com
Track whether your MP is working for you in the UK Parliament.. Really cool looking piece of civic software.
Bootstrapping a Corporate Wiki
Best practices for creating and managing an internal Wiki in a large company.
New York Times Link Generator
Generates non-expiring links to New York Times content. Bookmarklet included.
PBS FRONTLINE: Watch online
Full video library of PBS' Frontline. I've never heard of Frontline but they've covered some interesting topics. All available through the web.
WS-Who's-on-First
Oh, this is brilliant. Look at the bright side, Mark, at least it’s horribly useless in a way that’s interoperable!
REST Intro and Overview
Paul James wrote this nice technical summary on REST and competing technologies back in September 2004 and I missed it somehow.
Old People
Gabe from Penny Arcade let’s the geezers in on this little secret the whipper-snappers have been hoarding to themselves called “The Internet.” Check it out at your local library!
CSS - Quirks mode and strict mode
Information on quirks vs. strict mode for HTML/CSS rendering: how to trigger, what DOCTYPEs do what, etc.
Web Application Component Toolkit - Template View
Excellent look at various HTML and XML templating methodologies..
An anonymous Internet communication system
One of these freenet clones really needs to get some traction. The EFF is providing funding for these guys.
Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One
Finally hits 1.0. If you read one big nasty spec this year, this should be it. It’s actually full of stories and other weird stuff that make portions kind of fun.
4096 Color Wheel Version 2.1
Is it just me or are color pickers the only apps that are innovating on the web? You can never have too many of these.
The Restful Web
Joe Gregorio has a new XML.com column called “The RESTful Web” where he just posted his first article. This is great news. No one seems to want to stand up and bring REST to the masses.
Quotations and citations: quoting text
Some information on using proper q and blockquote elements in HTML and then styling them with CSS to fix all the browser brokeness.
Emacs Keybindings for Firefox
This is one of the last things I've been waiting for before switching from Safari. Now if only the scrollwheel worked a little nicer and I could get a decent proxy-configuration plugin…
Gmail: How do I enable POP?
looks like POP is finally coming. I'm seeing reports of it being switched on for selected accounts.
Why I Like Windows
IE team on Firefox 1.0 release. The comments have me rolling on the floor. I can’t believe microsoft is letting these guys keep comments on.
G4 Optimized Firefox builds..
Haven’t tried yet but these optimized builds are rumoured to blow the doors off the standard distribution.
One Internet, Many Copyright Laws
New York Times article on copyright law differences across countries and how the internet complicates enforcement.
httperf - A Tool for Measuring Web Server Performance
I can finally shelve my bash/curl framework :)
Full CSS Property Compatibility Chart
red/green/yellow for specific css attribute support in major browsers.
Fear of Bloggers in Business and Journalism
sigh.. corporate resistence to change never fails amuse me.
Free Online Graph Paper / Grid Paper PDFs
adobe reader is a tool of pirates. this will undoubtedly strangle the nascent graph paper market!
Showing Off
:) “… it isn’t about REST or SOAP or WS-* or .NET or Java or whatever, it’s about easy.” — Tim Bray
Scobleizer: Are you afraid to blog
Surprisingly interesting look at fears of corporate blogging both internally and externally. Scoble thinks most people are afraid to get fired.
Jon Stewart "Crossfire" feud ignites Net frenzy
news.com covers the Jon Stewart on Crossfire phenomenon..
Doctorow's Edinburgh talk video .torrent
Video for the “Web 2.0 == AOL 1.0? How the Sinister Forces of Darkness are Conspiring in Smoke Filled Rools to Make the Web Illegal, and You’re Not Invited” talk.
CSS Negotiation and a Sanity Saving Shortcuts
Some tips I haven’t seen before for dealing with IE’s broken CSS support. Using conditional comments for ie specific css, setting manual defaults, etc.
Can a resurrected Netscape compete with IE?
No. Netscape as a brand/browser is irrelevant. Anyone with a cluestick care to drop by cnet and whap those monkeys around a bit? Some decent history here though.
Buffalo News - New Firefox browser is smokin' as upstart challenges Internet Explorer
More good Firefox press.
Ed, settle down. And please don't call it "WS-mess"...
… there has been a recent round of “glowing reviews from analysts”. What could possible go wrong?
Using inline frames (iframe elements) to embed documents into HTML documents
Everything that you can possibly know about iframes.
Bloglines Web Services API Documentation
A nice, simple HTTP/XML based API for bloglines. I hope this trend continues.
Technology Review: Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Nice profile on TBL followed by a brief Q/A on semantic related stuff.
Developing Web Applications with Quixote
Condensed version of everything you need to know about using Quixote. (From PYCON 2004).
The ‘Web’ in Web Services
Mark Nottingham wondering why WS-Transfer (HTTP wrapped up in SOAP wrapped up in HTTP bwhhahaha) didn’t get more heat from the opposition.
SOAP Problems
A big list of problems with the current WS stack. Contains pointers to mailing-list discussion on various issues.
IT Conversations - New Ideas Through Your Headphones
Kind of pissed no one told me about this. A bunch of audio of really smart people talking about important geeky stuff.
A complete guide to WS in one, short paragraph
Sean McGrath backing Tim Bray on the Loyal WS-Opposition.
Joe Joins Loyal WS-Opposition
Joe Gregorio on Tim Bray’s “The Loyal WS-Opposition” post. This might end up being a real committee or something.
Google Groups : jslaves
Delicious Developers: “A point of rendezvous for developers "standing” on the platform provided by the del.icio.us API; i.e. those who are slaves to Joshua."
Help the Googlebot
Tips and techniques for helping Googlebot. If you are a symantic markup perfectionist, you probably already have most of these right.
The Loyal WS-Opposition
Tim Bray on WS-Sanity: “So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to stay out of the way and watch the WS-visionaries and WS-dreamers and WS-evangelists go ahead and WS-build their WS-future.”
Web Colors: html color names, hexidecimal values, hex codes
Color name chart with hex codes and overlays.
XML/XSLT/CSS/JavaScript/ Treeview component..
..that rocks. Quite possible the only javascript treeview I'd ever consider using.
Building a Large-Scale E-commerce site with Apache and mod_perl
Disects the components of a large scale e-commerce site run on Apache/mod_perl with some Berkeley DB and Oracle thrown in for good measure.
mod_python - Integrating Python with Apache
Nice article on how mod_python integrates with apache. Goes into significant detail on non-CGI type stuff you might want to do.
Password generator bookmarklet
Generates per-site passwords based on a master password and the site’s domain name.
Wikipedia Reputation and the Wemedia Project
Nice summary of the recent wave of crap swirling around wikipedia. No one can quite believe an open and free culture can produce quality factual content.
classification?
Article on simple free-text classification systems such as those found on del.icio.us.
Coral: The New York University Distribution Network
A distributed P2P web cache thingy that looks cool. Need a bookmarklet to generate the URLs.
Architecture of the World Wide Web, First Edition
A beautiful mish-mash of what works on the web. Hits Last Call WD.
Google.rss - Serves you Google's search results as RSS feed.
This could be really really really big.
QuickTopic - Instant Discussion Space
Thinking about using this for my comment system. They have an XML-RPC API but it isn’t documented on the site.
In Search of a Browser That Banishes Clutter
New York Times talking about people moving away from IE. It may finally be happening…
Stu Nicholls | Doing it with Style
“This site documents my attempts at understanding and exploring the possibilities of CSS.”
what is 'the flow'?
“So with this tutorial I hope to lay out the concept of the flow, and why understanding it will give you a greater grasp of CSS.”
W3C members: Do as we say, not as we do
“…only 21, or 4.6 percent, of 454 member sites Karppinen could access passed the W3C’s own HTML validator…”
XML on the Web Has Failed [xml.com]
“Syndicated feeds are wildly popular, but they’re not a success for XML. XML on the Web has failed: miserably, utterly, and completely.”
I dream of Gmail [dive into mark]
“If your web site doesn’t work in Lynx, your web site is thoroughly, thoroughly fucked.”
Simon Willison: Site-specific extensions
“Pop-up blockers have only scratched the surface. Let’s see some innovation.” — Users should control much more of their browsing experience.