April 4, 2007

Y! Pipes support for Prototype

Christian Decker wrote this in the early evening:

Dojo did it about a month ago, they added support for Y! Pipes to dojo.io.bind. So I figured I should write a small wrapper that works like the Prototype Ajax.Request object (as I did a few months ago for Google Calendar) for Yahoo! Pipes. So here it is: YPipe Library 0.1.

To use it just find the id of the pipe you want to request, so if the URL of the pipe is something like this

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=vp9FNLji2xGA7PYxEpPZnA

then just take the bold part of it and create a new request just like this: 

cal = new YPipe("vp9FNLji2xGA7PYxEpPZnA",{
    onsuccess: someFunction
  });

This immediately fires up the request and after completing the someFunction will be called with the first argument being the returned JSON-Object. It’s as simple as it gets :-P

For a quick demo head over here.

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December 10, 2006

Read all your mail in one place with Gmail Mail Fetcher

Christian Decker wrote this in the early evening:
gmail.pngGmail has added a feature that allows you to read mail from any other non-Gmail account within the Gmail interface. To say this is convenient is an understatement. Set-up looks like a snap, and you can add up to five non-Gmail accounts.I’ll be able to consolidate my Yahoo, Outlook, and Hotmail accounts within about five minutes flat if I’m lucky. For the privacy conscious, you can disable email archiving (it’s not set by default), and you can also disable importing non-Gmail mail anytime you want to very easily.

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November 16, 2006

Google Sitemaps

Christian Decker wrote this at around evening time:
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.

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Web 2.0 Designs

Christian Decker wrote this in the early evening:
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

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August 4, 2006

dp.SyntaxHighlighter source code syntax highlighting

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:
Yahoo! UI uses a really nice syntax highlighting script that is freely available: dp.SyntaxHighlighter:
The script is meant to help a developer to post code snippets online with ease and without having to worry about applying format. People who use blogs like MovableType, .Text (dotText), dasBlog and any other system can easily add code to their posts.
Take a look at its features.

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