Ajax Girl

January has started the month out in some style. We are seeing a lot of news that shows the Web may actually be moving forward a little. One sign of that is the trickle of news that comes out of Redmond on IE 8. IE8 Compatibility with X-UA-Compatible sparked debate throughout the entire Web community, and when all is said and done, it shows you what happens when you do not have good early communication. Just work with us. Before you ship. Chat with Hixie and get involved in HTML 5 now.

JavaScript continues to thrive and move throughout the stack. First we had the news of Aptana Jaxer, which allows you to write your Ajax code and have it run on the server. This even means munging with the DOM and having it all work and spit out HTML. This isn’t your old ASP JScript.

I also had the pleasure of chatting with Steve Yegge on Rhino on Rails: JavaScript MVC on the server where we discussed the implications of having a Rails port in JavaScript.

The browsers keep getting better, and we saw real support for Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest in Firefox 3 and the like. I have been talking over Google Gears future APIs that may be in early stage work, or just ideas in my head. I think that we are getting the word out about Gears not being just about Offline, but a tool to upgrade the Web on the fly.

We are seeing more of the social networks getting into the mix. Facebook released an Animation library and then followed that up with a full JavaScript Client Library.

And then Google just released the Social Graph API.

A great month, and here is to the next one:

JavaScript

• Aptana releases Jaxer, Ajax server built on Mozilla
• Rhino on Rails: JavaScript MVC on the server
• Secure String Interpolation in JavaScript
• DomAPI 4.5: New, improved, and more free
• Favicon access via JavaScript
• Graceful Degradation of Firebug Console Object
• Eloquent JavaScript
• Making Ajax Applications Scream on the Client
• Ajax.NET: Move to ASP.NET Ajax with PageMethods
• Dean Edwards IE7.js 2.0 Release
• Autotesting JavaScript in Rails
• Apache CouchDB: Congrats to IBM and Damian Katz
• JavaScript: It’s Just Not Validation!
• window.onload: another solution to get it going
• EditArea: Rich Sourcecode Editor
• Survey on Ajax IDEs and development
• Beyond DOM
• Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest in Firefox 3
• XUL Templates
• Accessible Google Charts
• Highslide JS: JavaScript Thumbnail Viewer
• PBwiki JavaScript Testing
• Qooxdoo 0.7.3 Release
• Eclipse RAP Demonstration
• Debug apps with Drosera for Windows
• MooTools 1.2 Beta 2 Released, Adds New Element Storage
• The Art and Science of JavaScript Games
• Sexy JavaScript?
• Library Agnostic LightBox
• Facebook releases Animation library
• Facebook releases JavaScript Client Library
• Lily, JavaScript Visual Programming Tool
• Dreamweaver Users Rejoice! Support for JS Libs Now Available.

Prototype

• Prototype 1.6.0.2 security and performance improvements
• Prototype: new cheat sheet and in place editor
• Do you have a pretty date?

Dojo

• dojo.moj.oe: parody of script.aculo.us homepage in Dojo
• Bunkai: Dojo Interactive Workbench

Ext

• Lipsiadmin: Rails 2.0 Ext Admin
• Ext 2.0.1 Released, Community Projects Continue to Grow
• Ext Scaffold Generator Plugin for Rails
• Ext 2.0 and ColdFusion
• Simplicity: PHP Ajax Framework using Ext
• ExtTLD: Create Ext components with XML

jQuery

• jQuery Validation Plugin v1.2 Updated
• jQuery ScrollTo Plugin

GWT

• GWT Videos from GWT Conference Available
• Cool and useful GWT Solutions

YUI

• YUI Grid CSS and Grid Builder
• YUI ready to celebrate 2nd Birthday

DWR

• DWR/TIBCO GI Integration: gi.js
• Book: Practical DWR 2

Gears

• Google Gears Future APIs
• Buxfer: Another Personal Finance 2.0 Site
• XSTM: Shared Transacted Memory

Flash / AIR

• as3Query: jQuery port to ActionScript
• CommandProxy: Integrating AIR and .NET
• Adobe AIR is on Fire

JSON

• JSON 2.0: Libraries and browser support
• JsonSQL: JSON parser, SQL style
• JSONLib: JSON Extensions a la E4X

Browsers / HTML Standards

• IE8 Compatibility with X-UA-Compatible
• How IE Mangles The Design Of JavaScript Libraries
• The IE7 auto-rollout: fact and fiction
• John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, Interviewed
• Mozilla hires Aza Raskin and other Humanized folk
• Full Page Zoom Is For Sissies
• Sub pixel fun with browsers
• HTML 5 Public Working Draft Released
• Getting HTML 5 styles in IE 7+
• Animated PNG in Firefox 3
• Microsoft JavaScript Memory Leak Detector

CSS / Design

• Javascript CSS Selector Engine Timeline
• Acid 3 and the future of memory leaks
• Effect.wobble and Effect.illuminate: iPhone effects in the browser

Comet

• Native Comet Support for Browsers
• 20,000 Reasons that Comet Scales

Security

• Is using a JS packer a security threat?
• Book recommendation: Ajax Security by Hoffman and Sullivan
• XSS: Flash and Rails
• Dangers of Remote Scripting

Editorial

• Zed Shaw interview on Rails community, enterprise, Ajax, patents, and a whole lot more
• How widgets go viral
• A Study of Ajax Performance Issues
• You Used JavaScript to Write WHAT?
• Most Relevant Browsers of 2009

Showcase

• Triggit: WYSIWYG Content Insertion Tool and Platform
• Drinking offline at the Happy Hour while being openly social
• Tastebook: Rails Ajax Cookbook App
• Dominos: Changing the feedback model
• Protagonize: Choose your own Web 2.0 Adventure
• Mibbit: Ajax-based IRC Client
• iDesktop: YouTube Viewer
• Photophlow: Interactive Community Flickr
• CNN Politics Election Center
• AjaxSwing 2.0: AJAX front end for Swing applications
• AjaxRain.com Gets a Facelift
• Flemish Politics Election Center
• HTML Purifier 3.0
• Winter Holiday Christmas Lights
• Amaltas SVG Drawing Tool
• CuePrompter: Javascript Teleprompter
• Roxer: Simple web page creation and editing
• New Twist on Date Pickers
• Audience Measurement Demo
• O’Reilly Maker
• Less maintenance code tutorials with Ajax Code Display

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/227675295/ajaxian-roundup-for-january-2008-javascript-turtles-and-ie-8

Weblogs, Inc. co-founder and CTO Brian Alvey is preparing to launch his new startup - a content management and hosting system called Crowd Fusion. From what we hear (I haven’t been able to speak to Alvey yet), the company will provide a hosted all-in-one platform for blogging, wikis, podcasting, standard web pages, forums, etc., and will also allow management of a variety of properties under a single dashboard. It will compete directly with blogging platforms like Wordpress.com and Typepad, as well as more industrial strength CMS systems that large publishers use.

If anyone can build it, Alvey and co-founder Craig Wood (also of Weblogs, Inc.) can. Alvey has been building content management systems since at least the mid nineties, including systems for Business Week and TV Guide. He was also the architect of Weblogs, Inc. and their associated CMS, Blogsmith. AOL acquired Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005.

Crowd Fusions seems to be the next generation of Blogsmith, since it includes lots of content types other than blogs. The company, which is based in New York, hasn’t launched yet, but we hear they’re busy raising a first round of capital. Ross Levinsohn of Velocity Interactive Group confirmed that they are considering an investment in Crowd Fusion tonight via email.

Alvey co-founded Weblogs, Inc. with Jason Calacanis. Calacanis launched his new startup, Mahalo, in May 2007.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/227648907/

Following ongoing criticism from users that Digg doesn’t consult nor listen to its user base, Digg’s Jay Adelson has announced that Digg is to commence holding Town Hall meetings.

The meetings will consist of Adelson and Rose giving an update on “what’s happening at Digg, discuss topics you propose, and answer your questions.” Digg Town Hall meetings will be webcast live and made available for download from Digg after the show, with the first show kicking off January 25.

The Digg team is also planning on holding some more face to face meetings as the year progresses, details including dates and cities to be advised.

It’s good to see Digg’s management team appreciating its user base in this way. Far too often successful startups forget that they didn’t get to their positions alone, but with the help of their user base. No doubt that Digg’s rabid fan base will tune in and actively participate in these meetings.

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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/~3/227644543/

Apologies, it’s time for a weekend rant. I know it’s all the rage right now to be green. but is it really necessary to put a line at the bottom of every email telling me to consider the environment and not to print it?

It was fine when just a few people did it last year (it was a ding against their startup, but didn’t necessarily kill a story), but now a significant percentage of emails coming in every day have some variation of the “do not print this email” message. Not everyone does it, just the condescending holier-than-thou types. But it happens often enough to have become a serious annoyance. For background on the “movement,” see this article.

You know what? I don’t need you to tell me that I need to be a good Earth citizen. I don’t print emails (no one does, you idiots), but if someone wants to I have no problem with it. Maybe they want to print out a map or something. I don’t think that makes them a bad person.

The same people who insist on wearing colored rubber bracelets to show their support for the cause du jour put this crap at the bottom of emails. My suspicion is that they don’t particularly care about the issue, they just want credit from everyone that they are a caring, thoughtful human being.

This isn’t the way to show support for the our planet. Last week at Davos, Earth defender Al Gore himself made it clear that personal choice decisions at the individual level have little to do with helping the environment. What matters is that our governments make the right policies and hold us, particularly corporations, accountable. That isn’t happening yet. If you really want to change the world, start talking to your elected representatives. Or march on Washington.

Or even better, stop eating meat. Raising livestock causes more greenhouse gasses in the U.S. than all transportation combined (and, I bet, all email printing combined). So put down that hamburger and get out of my inbox.

Update: hah. I forgot we have a “Print Posts” button below every post, sponsored by HP. I encourage you to use it. And don’t forget Google Paper, Google’s April Fools joke, where “you can request a physical copy of any email with the click of a button, and Google will deliver paper printouts to you in 2-4 days via the mail.”

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/227573570/

We’re happy to have added web-designer and author Dan Cederholm’s freshly redesigned and popular SimpleBits to the list of places carrying ads from The Deck, our advertising network targeting web, design and creative professionals.

Dan is a perfect edition to the group. His territory is the area between practical, technical design issues and those defined more often by talent and taste. As far as we’re concerned, that’s a pretty sweet place to be.

Welcome aboard, Dan!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/827-simplebits-joins-the-deck

Want to use CSS sprites but you are too lazy to create them in Photoshop? Edward Eliot and Stuart Colville released a CSS Sprite generator quite a while ago that does the job for you.

Now they topped this by releasing the source code of the generator on launchpad (get the tar file), in case you’d like to make the generation process a part of a release script or just want to run the generator on your localhost. The license is BSD, which means you can even use the generator commercially.

We’ve introduced Edward Eliot and Stuart Colville back in October in an interview about web performance and the generator is a great tool to cut down on HTTP requests of your site, which are the main reason for bad page performance.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/227532475/css-sprite-generator-source-code-released

You know how on eBay, if you really want to win an auction, you have to snipe in your bids at the very end? Well, something very similar may be happening in the ongoing government auction for wireless spectrum. The FCC set up the rules of the auction to try to prevent such last-minute sniping, but some deep-pocketed bidders may have found another way to hold back their true bid until the very end of the auction.

According to the rules of the auction, bidders in each round (several of which are held each day) must submit an upfront payment to be eligible in that round. And to remain eligible, they have to either bid each round (except that everyone gets three waivers to sit out a round), or remain the highest bidder (in which case they don’t have to beat their own previous bid).

There are dozens of blocks of spectrum companies can bid on, but the one that has gained the most attention is the so-called nationwide C-block that pulled in a bid of $4.7 billion yesterday, and then saw no more action. Because of the pattern of previous bidding, and the eligibility rules, some of us watching concluded that the bidding war was over for that block and that an unknown winner existed, perhaps Google or Verizon.

But there is another possibility. Companies can also bid on parts of the C-block on a regional basis (Northeast, Southeast, Great Lakes, Mississippi Valley, Central, West). Although there have been bids on these regional blocks, none of them have shown up as “provisionally winning bids” because the $4.7 billion for the whole country is still more than the sum of the regional bids. But a company can stay eligible by placing new bids for one of the regions, and then make a bid for the national block at the end.

And that may be exactly what is happening. If you look at bids for the Mississippi Valley region over the last few rounds, for instance, there was a bid for $884 million in Round 24, $1.2 billion in Round 25, and $1.4 billion in Round 26. That is a big company (or companies) with a lot of cash making those bids. One theory is that this big company is just biding its time until it makes a bid for the national block. The longer it waits, the less competition it is might encounter because other bidders will be more likely to have used up their waivers or stopped bidding altogether. Unless, of course, the other big potential bidders are pursuing the same strategy. So this ain’t necessarily over yet.

Anyone can watch the auction electronically as it occurs. Go to this FCC Web page for Auction 73, click on “View Auction Result,” then click on the Results tab. Round 26 just finished, and the FCC is currently due to collect $18.6 billion in provisional winning bids across all blocks.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/227525522/

A new social network called eDirectree launched today that wants to make it more fun to form groups with people online.

eDirectree was founded this past November by Raj Abhyanker, who also founded Fatdoor in late 2006 but left when that startup hired a new CEO. Whereas Fatdoor, once out of private beta, will help neighbors get to know each other online, eDirectree helps people who already know each other reunite and associate in different ways.

The network essentially takes the “groups” feature found in most social networks, adopts it as a central concept, and injects it with steroids. By default, group and member profiles on eDirectree are wikis that anyone can add and edit. If you want to set up a group (as I have for TechCrunch) you can add your friends even if they’re not eDirectree members yet. Enter their names and email addresses manually, or upload a group photo and draw boxes around their heads. With the latter method, each person’s mug will be cropped out of the photo automatically and used as an avatar for their new profile.

Once a group has been established, anyone within that group can edit both the group’s settings and the profiles of other members. This wiki functionality is reminiscent of the control Yahoo Mash users have over each others’ profiles by default. You can add your friends to other groups and change their profile information, as long as they haven’t locked things down.

eDirectree has clearly been designed with MySpace users in mind. The site will piggyback off that social network by encouraging users to embed group and profile badges on MySpace profiles that will direct traffic back to eDirectree (see our badge below). In a way, eDirectree serves as a super-feature for MySpace, although it can be used by itself and the embeds can also be placed in blogs. The site could have been created as a Facebook application (or MySpace application, once their platform finally launches) although it may have better luck with user adoption as an independent destination.

As a way to encourage user participation in the whole wiki theme of the site, eDirectree will be tracking users’ activity and rewarding them with points that can be redeemed for prizes like t-shirts, iPod nanos, and Wiis. The more users add their friends and set up groups, the more points and prizes they get. Let’s just hope they can control the gaming that will inevitably arise.

TechCrunch

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/227487848/

Ever since the rear-guard at the Wall Street Journal won the battle to keep its news pages behind its subscription wall (although, its opinion pages are now free), they have been cracking down especially hard on anyone trying to breach that wall—even if those people happen to be paying subscribers. In what appears to be an attempt to discourage freeloaders, the WSJ.com is locking out anyone from its site when it detects more than one simultaneous log-in on the same account. But innocent, rule-abiding subscribers who may be using multiple computers, or doing nothing wrong other than forgetting to log out of their accounts, are being shut out as well (see email below).

That is no way to treat your customers. In fact, it shows an utter disdain for how normal people actually use the Web. But it is an understandable, and classic, reaction. Incumbent executives always try to fend off inevitable disruption by blindly protecting their current sources of revenues. I liked Rupert Murdoch’s original idea of tearing down the entire subscription wall much better.

Here is the e-mail I received from a paying online subscriber, describing his ordeal with the WSJ.com and a screen shot of what he saw when he was in breach of the multiple login rule.  Hopefully, this is an isolated case. Otherwise, the WSJ.com could have a reader revolt on its hands of its own making. (If anyone else has experienced the same thing, please share in comments).

I’ve been a paying subscriber of the Wall Street Journal online since 1995.
About two weeks ago they made a change so that they allow only one
login per account at a time and closing a browser isn’t sufficient,
you have to manually logout. If you forget and try to access the site
from another browser or machine, they lock your account and make you
call in to get it reset.

As one who uses many computers and browsers, this is a major change
and hassle. They don’t even let you get to the free version without
clearing cookies if your account is locked; you just get a nasty
message.

Furthermore, the unlock process requires long-wait times on the phone and
answering lots of questions. I tried email, but no response after 24 hours.
I’ve been through this twice now and they insist that they will continue this
policy to prevent subscription sharing.

Given general trends and that there was recent talk of them going free
and 100% ad-supported, this feels quite draconian. I fully appreciate
their desire to prevent people from stealing their service, but they
are actually preventing paying subscribers from easily using the service.
Also, there are better technology solutions to the problem.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/227423531/

Reposted from my blog

Would you like to be able to make a quick call to get a JSON response that ties together a social graph made up of resources available on the Web?

Brad Fitzpatrick, Kevin Marks, and others at Google have released a new Social Graph API that does just that:

The new Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful. You can make it easy for users to bring their existing social connections into a new website and as a result, users will spend less time rebuilding their social networks and more time giving your app the love it deserves.

Here’s how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF. When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they’ve said they’re friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site.

This is exciting to me as:

• It actually uses the microformat standards such as XFN
• The API is a simple URL, like the Chart Server API. E.g. http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/lookup?q=bradfitz.com&edo=1&pretty=1&callback=onDataLoaded
• Brad uses a resource that others do not have access too…. he uses the Google crawler. Genius!

I gave it a quick test drive, and when I say quick, I mean 5 minutes

I built a tiny JavaScript library that takes a base URL, and it graphs out the relationships using Canvas.

You get to call loadGraph(URL, { width: w, height: h }) and the graph will be injected away.

It needs to be nicely abstracted and isolated so you can call it willy-nilly, but it works.

Watch the introduction video:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/227405975/google-social-graph-api-released