Ajax Girl

RustyBudget is a new web based application that provides a people and story management tool for multi-author blogs.

RustyBudget is essentially “a writers or editors budget”, where a blog owner and blog writers can manage story leads, including author allocation, story notes and overall task management.

RustyBudget comes from RustyBrick, a company headed by Barry Schwartz. As well as being CEO of RustyBrick, Schwartz is also the owner of Search Engine Roundtable and a writer at Search Engine Land, both highly regarded and popular blogs within the SEO and search engine communities. Schwartz comes with impeccable credentials when it comes to dealing with multi-author blogs; this is a solution that has been created from experience as opposed to being a theoretic solution to a management problem by someone who really has no idea.

RustyBudget is an interesting take on author management. The application uses accounting terms and applies them to blog management, which could throw some people at first, but hands-on it’s easy to use and simply does exactly what it promised. This isn’t a top level, complicated or incredibly deep people management tool; if you’re looking for something that calculates wages or tracks time this isn’t for you, but for people managing multi-author blogs or websites that need a way of allocating and managing stories RustyBudget is well recommended.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/135811918/

Reddit co-founders, Steve Huffman and Alex Ohanian, sold their company to Conde Nast at the end of last year. Now they’re planning giving their laptops a liquidity event.

They’re placing the two Apple G4 Powerbooks (12″ & 15″) used to start Reddit on this eBay auction. 100% of the proceeds are going to the American Brain Tumor Association.

The laptops come adorned with all those super-rad Reddit alien stickers Alex designed and the palm imprints of the founders themselves. Alex guarantees “it will at least double your already obscene valuation”, but notes “Luck not included”.

Bidding is starting at $300 + $60 shipping and handling.

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/~3/135779354/

Pete Cashmore has posted about the 30+ AJAX-Powered WordPress Plugins that he things are good.

He has split-up the plugins into two categories, for the blogger, and for the reader which includes:

Blogger

• AjaxWP - Adds AJAX to all aspects of your WordPress site speeding up the load times.
• Alexa Rank - Display your Alexa rank with pride.
• Ajax Comment Preview - Allows readers to preview their comment before submitting.
• asTunes - Retrieves data from your Audioscrobbler/last.fm profile and posts it as a list on your blog.
• Codebox - Side scrolling box for displaying code snippets.

Reader

• AJAX Comments 2.0 - Auto updates the comments page with no full reload, much smoother commenting than the older full reload system.
• AJAX Google Video Search - Search Google Video without having to leave your favorite blog.
• AJAX Shoutbox - Realtime conversation with sound to alert of new messages.
• Cool Weather - Allows visitors to see the weather forecast for any area they define.
• Currency Converter - Adds a real time currency converter to the page with data pulled from Yahoo Finance.
• Google AJAX Search - Allows you to set search for just the contents of your site and the web, or another option allows for search of a second site such as your Flickr account.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/135714449/best-uses-of-ajax-in-wordpress-plugins

Bemoaning feature creep

“The truth is, many consumers bemoan the incessant rush of innovation that pushes manufacturers to tamper with products the consumers feel are already perfect. Their grief is not just nostalgia. Drivers who miss the subcompact Japanese cars of yesteryear, and runners who yearn for the discontinued New Balance 855 running shoe with an anti-pronating roll bar, are victims of ‘feature creep,’ said Jon Linkov, a managing editor at Consumer Reports. This phenomenon, generated by market forces, media hype and twitchy retailers, creates a cycle in which products are constantly improved even if they don’t need to be…’[BMW] was a company that talked about ‘no cup holders. You’re supposed to be driving, not drinking in your car. Now they are power-everything, bigger, heavier in every way. They are these luxury tourers filled with leather and wood.’”

Michael Bierut radio interview

“In a world where a logo can induce epileptic seizures (as did the 2012 London Olympics logo), being a graphic designer involves a lot of responsibility. Graphic design expert and critic Michael Bierut joins us to answer your questions about logos, packaging, and fonts.”

“Dick in a Box” rush job

“The week of ‘Dick in a Box,’ the trio wasn’t even planning to do a short, but [Lorne] Michaels pushed them to do a musical parody because Justin Timberlake was hosting the show. (‘I gave them a direct order,’ Michaels says.) So they wrote, shot, and cut together the sketch between Thursday night and Saturday afternoon. A couple of months and over 10 million downloads later, [Andy] Samberg found himself singing a surprise duet with Timberlake in front of 18,000 screaming fans at Madison Square Garden.”

101 simple, one-line recipes that take 10 minutes or less

“The trouble is that when it’s too hot, even the most resourceful cook has a hard time remembering all the options. So here are 101 substantial main courses, all of which get you in and out of the kitchen in 10 minutes or less.”

Limiting emails to five sentences

“Every e-mail I send to anyone, regardless of subject or recipient, will be five sentences or less. Like a cinquain. Ideally, it would be a 160 character count like an SMS message, but since that would require an actual e-mail plug-in (viz. “work”), we’ll go with the much-easier-to-count concept of sentences instead.” [via DF]

Enough with the annoying little lights on everything

“My PC and other computing equipment make my office look like a jet cockpit. I have two LCD monitors, each of which has two indicator lights that flash even when the PC is turned off. The attached sound control has a light on it. My keyboard has multiple lights. The power cord has lights, the printer has lights, and the power button is illuminated. My cable modem and Linksys router flash like crazy all the time. Together, these useless lights create a visual cacophony of blinking, multicolored lights that make me feel like I’m taking part in a NASA stress test for astronaut candidates.”

Sucky iPhone+AT&T bill

It’s a staggeringly, hatefully complex document, designed by some Monty Pythoneseque committee in charge of consumer confusion.

17 bookmarklets for your iPhone

“Here’s a little known secret: bookmarklets work on your iPhone…There are billions of them, and below are my favorites. These work wonderfully on a computer, but they’ll add an extra boost of functionality to your iPhone.”

“Every problem comes from a solution.”

“Bad side effects are perceived as failure, but they are just as likely to be the product of success. It was the automobile’s utility and affordability that led to highway congestion, the computer’s limitless adaptability that brought us spam, the cell phone’s functional convenience that turns it at times into a public enemy. As architectural planner Jane Thompson says, ‘Every problem comes from a solution.’ Or, to put it another way, every silver lining turns out to be under another cloud.”

Facebook vs. MySpace

“MySpace was a great social network for a while, but now there are too many spammers and the developers have stopped innovating. Facebook is just starting to become popular (well, popular with those who were not on it when it was limited to schools). So, you might want to check it out, while it’s still cool.”

The ecology of innovation

“An innovation economy depends on intellectual property law, tax codes, patent procedures, export controls, immigration regulations and factors making up what [William Wulf] calls ‘the ecology of innovation.’ Unfortunately, he argues, in the United States too many of these components are unworkable, irrelevant, inadequate, outdated or ‘fundamentally broken.’”

The marketing blog post formula

“Find something topical. In [Lauren] Turner’s case, it was the release of Michael Moore’s new film. Identify the shiznit you wish to pimp. In Ms Turner’s case, it was Google’s Health Advertising services. Find a line (however tenuous) between the two and the post just writes itself! These posts are easy to write, and so everyone does them. Hell, even I’ve been guilty of it at times. The posts are unsatisfying for the same reason they’re easy to write: they have no actual insight or useful information.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/524-sunspots-the-ecology-edition

I don’t normally post many “mashups” but Prague 360 is to beautiful to pass up.

Jeffrey Martin and his brother David have created some high quality views on some of the cities, and they use the Google Maps API as the platform to show the content.

If you head over to Prague, you will see that along with the usual normal map, satellite, and hybrid options, there are gigapixel versions for Winter and Spring. Jeffrey finds a high spot where he sets up his camera and takes lots of photos of the area. These pictures are with a very nice, zoomed in lens, and then he stitches them together to make one REALLY large photo.

Then David takes the image over to matlab world and cuts it up into tiles for the various zoom levels on the map. Now, on the map, when you click on one of the gigapixel options the new tiles are overlayed.

You will also notice that on the various mapping views not all of the points of interest are shown. Instead, they use the MarkerManager component to package items that are close together as one point on the map.

You will also notice that the right hand side has 360 closeup views of the given areas. We all remember the original “VR” versions of this with poor quality. These are definitely a 2007 version. One of the use cases for the site is for people to check out real estate. With this level of quality, you really can get a good view of the property, easily enough to narrow it down.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/135647869/prague-360-maps-with-quality

Joe Walker will probably be happy to see this, and will be able to test DWR with it. Chris Shiflet has created a simple CSRF Redirector inspired by the XSS POST Forwarder:

It’s a simple tool that makes it easy to test CSRF using POST, hopefully demonstrating how prevalent CSRF vulnerabilities are as well as reducing the misconception that forging a POST request is complicated.

To use it, construct a URL of the form http://shiflett.org/csrf.php?csrf=URL&NAME=VALUE, where URL is the (URL-encoded) target site, and NAME and VALUE represent a name-value pair, of which there can be zero or more.

Google’s online security team recently posted about Automating web application security testing which discusses various XSS issues.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/135590357/csrf-redirector

Theseus, a German based project that is aiming to develop “the world’s most advanced multimedia search engine for the next-generation Internet.” will received a cash injection of $165 million from the German Government, under approval by the EU.

According to an AP report, the German Government will initially fund Siemens AG, SAP AG, Deutsche Thomson oHG and EMPOLIS GmbH to kick start the project with later funding to be given to small and medium businesses to build on the initial research.

Theseus was inspired by a perceived need by European countries to challenge American hegemony on the internet by Google.

Like just about everything in the history of Europe, France and Germany disagree. France is said to be discussing a similar subsidy plan with the European Commission that is aiming to deliver $112 million to a French Google competitor Quaero, a project previously supported by the Germans, which is led by French video-technology company Thomson.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/135575898/

The iPhone is here and it’s fabulous. I will be rolling into Budapest on Monday morning and we will be meeting at 19:00 at Maghaz, Rottenbiller u. 32 in Budapest on Monday, July 23, 2007.

Please drop me a line at john at crunchgear dot com or drop a note in the comments if you plan on attending. I look forward to meeting CG/TC readers.

Special thanks to MobilPort.hu!

Warsaw Readers: We’ll be having the Poland meet-up on Thursday, July 26 at 19:00 in Pub Lolek in Pole Mokotowskie. Please contact me if you’ll attend.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/135590056/

64squar.es is a completely free, fully featured and easy to use online chess site with a clean simple interface.

Users can play opponents in real-time by dragging and dropping the pieces just like a real chess board. Ajax is used to make your moves on the opponent’s board and vice versa.

We are trying to blur the distinction between real-time online play and correspondence chess. If a user is not online when a move is made, they are sent an email.

Other features:

• Customize board color
• In game chat
• Take-backs
• Avatars
• Implementation of ELO Ranking
• Email Notification

64squar.es is built using Ruby on Rails and jQuery. It also uses Juggernaut (a ruby on rails plugin) to remove the need for polling to improve responsiveness and ease future scaling.

More info:

• Blog
• Discuss
• Created by parkerfox

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/135566125/64-squares-jquery-chess

YouTube has launched a new “custom player” feature that allows users to customize embedded YouTube videos.

Users are able to customize player features including the name of the player, color theme, layout (a standard layout or one with related videos to the right), and content.

The content feature allows users to include their own videos or other videos from a YouTube Favorites List or YouTube playlist.

Examples as below. We were unable to embed the player with the related videos to the right due to a width consideration (it’s 780px wide) but the shrunken screen shot shows what it looks like. Below that is a custom embed from Chris Pirillo, who I also have to thank for the tip.

The new feature can be accessed at youtube.com/custom_player.

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/~3/135550694/