Archive for November, 2006

Nov200616

Christian Decker

0

Google Sitemaps

Last year I was excited when Google announced the release of their Sitemaps Protocol which helps Searchengines to index content more efficiently.
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
And today Microsoft and Yahoo are jumping on the train too, they announced today that they will be supporting the protocol. More information at sitemaps.org.

»crosslinked«

Did you like this? Share it:

Nov200616

Christian Decker

0

YUI Blog on JavaScript

Even if you aren’t a user of the Yahoo User Interface library this post from Douglas Crockford can be really insightful as it explains the main differences between Object Oriented Languages (like Java) and Javascript (which is a prototyped language):
Do not use new Function to create function values. Use function expressions instead. For example, 
frames[0].onfocus = new Function("document.bgColor='antiquewhite'")
is better written as 
frames[0].onfocus = function () {document.bgColor = 'antiquewhite';};
The second form allows the compiler to see the function body sooner, so any errors in it will be detected sooner. Sometimes new Function is used by people who do not understand how inner functions work.
Did you like this? Share it:

Nov200616

Christian Decker

0

Gang warfare, Web 2.0 style

I’ve been pushing this post around in my aggregator for some days now, never being able to read it, yet wanting to throw it away because it’s a nice article (and I love the picture they have included:) ) Gang Warfare Chris Messina takes an in depth look at Adobes recent donation of Source Code to the Open Source Community (this is to be read as Mozilla).
On the other, more cynical, hand, I know enough to read between the lines and see this for what it really is: business as usual, with the good grace of open source being used as a context for making this appear “nicer” than it really is.
Adobe wants to be front and center in every browser; it’s smart enough to recognize however, that, like Google, the core threat to their position in the market is Microsoft’s Live platform technologies. An Adobe browser couldn’t dent Microsoft’s platform share, but two open source browsers can by creating the de facto web publishing environment and tools for the future of the web-centric desktop.
He definitely got a point in this theory, and maybe he got it all right (it certainly looks so), but the effect we have right now is that it is a bold move from Adobe, and it will help Standard compliant browsers to become more popular, thus making live easier for us developers. Making Business is not a bad thing as such, it’s bad if you are the only one who gets something, which is not the case here: we get a better user experience :D And god I love that picture ;)
Did you like this? Share it:

Nov200616

Christian Decker

0

Web 2.0 Designs

I’m not a designer, so I often need some, let’s call it, “help” with the design of my webapplications, and it looks like I’m not the only one having trouble in getting the look and feel right. Don’t get me wrong, but there only very few pages that are well designed compared to the huge number of ugly, sluggish looking or copycat sites. Why am I telling you all this? Lynn Chang at Yahoo Publisher Network has posted a roundup of Web 2.0 design styles. She lists the styles that have become popular during the Web 2.0 Hype:
  • Layout
  • Gradients
  • Strong and contrasting colors
  • 3D Icons
  • Rounded Corners
  • Oversized Text
Especially interesting is that for nearly every style she also gives a n example. So if, like me, you find yourself once again without ideas on how to design the next Webapplication I suggest you let yourself be inspired by those example :D
Did you like this? Share it:

Nov200613

Christian Decker

0

Keeping up with the rest of the world

It has become very busy lately and I couldn’t keep up with all the new stuff that was pubblished during these last few days, so, once again I have to do a quick roundup of what hapened and most of all, what’s worth reading :) To start things off I would recommend taking a look at the (lenghty) article of Andy Bakun about Race conditions with Ajax and PHP sessions, which focuses on the downside of doing things asynchronously, namely synchronization issues on both sides of the wire. I remember a post some time back that discussed exactly the other way round (synchronization problems on the client) with suggest boxes, the problem was that sometimes when you haven’t entered a long string yet the response would take really long to complete (because of the sheer amount of data) while shorter responses would take much shorter, thus it might happen that the slower (older) response completes after the shorter (younger) overwriting the result. Andy discusses in depth the issues you might encounter on the server side. GWT on the other side has got some new stuff: And for all those of us who hate having to load and reload static things over and over again from the server, here’s JSOC (JavaScript Object Cache):
The JSOC framework is a a pluggable, extensible, open source client-side caching framework for Web 2.0 applications. JSOC offers Web developers a straightforward way to perform common caching techniques (add, replace, remove, flush, etc.) inside any JavaScript-enabled browser. Since JSOC is a standalone JavaScript module, incorporating JSOC into a Web development project is a matter of including a script reference, and working with common caching methods. Low-level methods are contained in the JSOC JavaScript module so that developers can focus on the Web development task at hand.
Fancy some nice effects for your application? Then take a look at the JavaScript Particle Engine by Jason Harwig (the post includes a fully functional version of the code). It’s cool, but I simply can’t see where it might be usefull, so until somebod proves me wrong I’ll just put it into the “Proof-of-Concept” drawer :D Also there were plenty of releases: Ok I think this should be enough for now, I’ll cover the rest in some more detail later :)
Did you like this? Share it:

« Older Entries   Recent Entries »