Ajax Girl

There was a mysterious outage on MySpace this morning. It lasted just 2.5 hours, and the site itself performed mostly as it should. All that happened was this: Anyone trying to add a Flash widget to the site, or show an image via an inserted link, or otherwise embed any sort of code, couldn’t do it. Existing widgets worked fine, but none could be added. And if a MySpace user edited their page, any existing embedded code produced an error.

So far, MySpace hasn’t returned our request for a comment on exactly why this happened. But executives at some of the countless startups that are building their businesses on the back of MySpace, now the largest Internet site, in the hope of a YouTube-like success sure are talking. All off the record, of course. A common comment is “I don’t want MySpace to single us out.”

What they’re saying is that MySpace just made its first move in an upcoming big stakes game of “chicken,” and that a senior exec there is making a career-defining bet that everyone else will blink first. MySpace is still prickly over the YouTube acquisition (they wanted it), and rumors are that they weren’t happy that PhotoBucket didn’t ping them about an acquisition before taking their last round of financing, either. Perhaps the recent $20 million Slide funding was one straw too many. All of these companies rely heavily (understatement) on getting their content onto MySpace user pages.

People have been predicting this for some time, but until now MySpace hasn’t taken any drastic steps to cut these services off. Today may have been a test to see how easily they could cut these widgets out, and to see how people would react. Or, it could have just been a bug.

If MySpace does start to permanently ban widgets and other embedded code, they’ll almost certainly say it is for security reasons. But they’ll continue to push their own competing services, and allow only “certified” partners back in. And my bet is that the certification process may have a fee involved.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/77612000/

SixDegrees is a new site that urges users to donate to celebrity charities and then place a widget on their sites promoting those charities. It’s not explained very well, and it appears to be little more than a wrapper for Network for Good, a really excellent charity social network. It’s also, of course, a shot in the dark to revive Kevin Bacon’s flatlined career.

Users are urged to add a celebrity widget to their site which is tied to a donation page for a specific charity or charities. Donations made through the widget are tracked and the total is displayed in the widget. Users can also create their own custom widget, sans the celebrity photo.

Bacon goes into detail in the video below about the Six Degrees of Separation movie and the subsequent game making fun of the fact that he’s appeared in so many films. However, the connection of all that to this service isn’t really explained, although it can be assumed that since we all are so close in the global community, giving to charity is good.

We’ve created a widget to test it out. Donations go the the Red Cross.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/77551866/

Paul Kafasis from Rogue Amoeba writes up a nice piece on the costs associated with exhibiting at Macworld.

If you’ve ever wondered how much it would cost for you to put your product in front of tradeshow browsers, this is a good read. It obviously depends on the show, your product, your people, etc, but it’s a nice bit of information. [via df]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/204-exhibiting-at-tradeshows

Prototype 1.5.0 is here… kinda… in secret… in Changeset 5969.

(Chances are as soon as Rails 1.2 ships, we will see this announced)

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/prototype-150-changeset-5969

Late last year Google fired a few shots at PayPal when they waived merchant fees at Google Checkout for the rest of the year. Today they hit hard, using their biggest gun to promote the service: the Google homepage.

Google has added a link to Google Checkout along with a $10 coupon to use with Google Checkout merchants. Hitwise predicts we’ll see a big spike in Google Checkout traffic. I agree.

Small merchants overwhelmingly use PayPal to take credit card payments (we use them on CrunchBoard). But Google’s Checkout product is superior in a lot of ways. And the fact that they are promoting it on the Google home page and in search results is a real competitive advantage. Whether it is enough to overcome PayPal’s own big gun - their lock on eBay - isn’t obvious. But everyone loves a good fight, and the word is Checkout has more interesting stuff coming.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/77520647/

Oliver Starr over at MobileCrunch has dished out a thorough review of the new Nokia N800 tablet phone he’s been testing under NDA over the past month. Oliver contrasts the 800 with the 770, saying it has a nicer form factor, with larger stereo speakers. The N800 features an 800 x 480 color display screen, two memory card slots (Micro SD, MMC, SD, and Mini SD) for cards up to 2 GB each (4GB by user experience), a faster processor than the 770, plenty of battery-life for a day of use without charging.

Check out Oliver’s post for his detailed review.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/77578423/

this is the explanation

leave more titles or other ideas

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/202-i-want-to-be-faster

We’re currently in the process of translating the online version of Getting Real into other languages. So far there are chapters available in Spanish, Italian, and Russian. German, Croatian, Chinese, and Slovakian are coming soon.

In order to keep the translating process as simple as possible, we’re doing the editing in Writeboard. Writeboard lets us keep track of all the edits, who made them, when they were made, makes it easy to compare versions, and saves us the hassle of emailing files back and forth all the time.

Thanks to all our translators for their help! If you’d like to volunteer to help translate Getting Real into your language, email svn@37signals.com.

Reminder: If you prefer the portability of paper, Getting Real is also available in paperback now ($29 via Lulu).

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/201-getting-real-in-other-languages

Joe Hewitt somehow managed to find the time to write an article on Ajax Debugging with Firebug, which he created.

The article will show you that Firebug is more than just a JavaScript console:

• The Firebug Workflow: modify the page in place
• Exploring Objects: An AJAX-ian web page never stands still. HTML nodes are constantly being created, modified, and removed by JavaScript. As changes occur, Firebug’s HTML view stays up to date in real-time and highlights the changes in yellow. When you see things moving and changing in a page, this gives you a quick way to learn how it was accomplished.
• Pixel Perfection: Firebug helps visualize the previously invisible. When your mouse moves over anything that represents an HTML element in Firebug, the element’s rectangle in the page is highlighted, and its margin, border, padding, and content are each shaded a different color.
• Experimenting and Tweaking: Firebug is not just an inspector, it’s also an editor. Virtually every object in Firebug can be edited inline just by clicking or double-clicking it. As you type, Firebug applies changes immediately, giving you constant feedback. All editors support autocomplete. The CSS editor autocompletes as you type, and the DOM editor autocompletes property names when you hit the Tab key.
• Network Activity: The core idea of AJAX is that small snippets of data will be fetched from the server using a channel called “XMLHttpRequest”, then used to update the page. Without Firebug, all that traffic is invisible. But with Firebug, you can observe the progress of each request and inspect the sent/received text.
• Log Debugging: Firebug is not just a way for you to examine a page from the outside; it is also a place for you to send messages from within the page itself. To facilitate this, Firebug provides every web page loaded in Firefox with the console object that contains a number of functions for logging. As your script executes, you can fill the console with an ongoing stream of data for you to analyze.
• Breakpoint Debugging: Firebug’s Script tab contains a powerful debugger that lets you pause JavaScript execution on any line. You can then step forward line-by-line to analyze how the state of the program changes in real time. Breakpoints need not be triggered indiscriminately; Firebug lets you specify the circumstances under which a breakpoint is triggered.
• Profiling: console.time(”loading”); loadWidgets(); console.timeEnd(”loading”);

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-debugging-with-firebug

Christian Heilmann is talking about Event-Driven Web Application Design on the YUI blog:

The crux of the matter is that we don’t really yet understand how to build a real web application. We take tried and true methodologies that cover other development scenarios and try to shoe-horn them into something that helps us to achieve what we want on-time and within budget (and when was the last time that happened?).

The other problem is that we approach web application design with browser limitations in mind and plan only for what browsers can do rather than what the application should offer the user.

When it boils down to it, the main differentiator of a web application and a web site is that an app has much more interaction and is process-focused rather than content-driven. Users come in to achieve a goal: They provide data to the application, they use the application to enhance that data, and then they expect data to come out. They interact with components of the application and expect them to do something that brings them closer to their goal. It is of utmost importance that we plan for how users interact with the product and react accordingly.

When trying to accomplish this in the browser, there is one core technique at our disposal: Event handling.

He details the event-based scenario when he details planning for an Event-Driven Application, and taking events past the DOM. Do you agree?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/event-driven-web-application-design