tijs.org

try ruby! (in your browser) (via: James)

I fully agree with David that there is no such thing as a general-purpose CMS, Lots of people have tried but in the end a custom built CMS is usually better suited for the task at hand, more user friendly and maybe most importantly; easier to adapt to changing needs. A nice in between is software that handles a specific type of content management like a weblog tool but there are not a lot of domains where this is a viable option. A good example would be e-commerce where there are many ‘one click web shop’ solutions but no succesful online retailers using any of the standard solutions that are available. In fact most of these successful shops get their edge from rolling their own software and thus gaining the flexibility to beat their competition.

The popular photo sharing site Flickr.com just announced that they are now offering prints and backup dvd’s through third party suppliers, which is pretty neat. Even cooler is that they made a commercial API (Application Programmer’s Interface) to service these partners which allows them to open negotiations with anyone that thinks they could sell a service to Flickr users. Which in turn allows them to add a licensing model to a ’selling subscriptions’ model, which might make Flickr the first (the first successful example at least) for a new business model in which you create a service that many people people use and then sell the right to sell extra services to your user base through a ‘closed’ API. Although not many services will be able to repeat this feat it is a pretty cool stunt that many failed to achive back in the web 1.0 days. For effect just let me repeat:

You can make money offering stuff on the web for free (or next to nothing).

Th snag is in the ‘closed’ API of course. Flickr flourished in part because the API was open to all and developers around the world built nice applications that extended the functionality of the basic service. With the extra functionality only appearing for paying commercial partners the incentive to build cool stuff for Flickr quickly vanishes. On the other hand, if they manage to keep both unpaid enthousiastic developers and paying customers happy they have created a very successful, and cool, web service indeed.

I’m in the process of adding some automatically gathered meta information such as flickr photo’s, del.icio.us links and my current location (through plazes) to this weblog. I currently use their javascript badge although it is rather buggy and won’t actually show up on IE which is a bit of a shame. I tried to wrap the functionality of PlazesPHPBlog in a wordpress plugin but the xmlrpc class it uses tells me the xml that plazes is returning is not well formed so i’ll have to look into that some more later. It’s suppossed to show my current location together with some photo’s grabbed of off flickr with that location, which should be pretty cool. To be continued…

The idea of course is that all the data i already generate just by using some of the web apps out there should be enough to fill this blog, relieving me of the duty of coming up with things to post

Na de must-have plugin voor safari met de zelfde naam komt David Watanabe nu met inquisitor ~ instant search. Een super handige search engine die, net als de safari plugin, je zoek opdracht aanvult terwijl je typt gebruik makend van zijn kennis over voorgaande zoek opdrachten.

update: This web service was of course based on the safari plugin which did something similar and which has just been upgraded to 2.0. I actually like the simplicity of 1.0 better but this new release is a must have if you use safari anyway. The donate and download system is a really nice model for software delivery in it’s own right by the way. Clean simple and effective.

Update: This is pretty amazing… Purely based on some network tracing wizardry plazes calculated the exact longitude difference between my own and a neighbors location who lives only 100 metres away. Just to emphasize; plazes only uses a little app you install on your mac or pc that calculates your location without any gps, user input, whatever. Cool stuff.

Under the header “AJAX: Revolution or hype-fest?” Sitepoint has a small write-up on AJAX in this weeks newsletter from which i cull this interesting quote:

Without giving too much away, our meeting with O’Reilly revealed
that technical book publishers are targetting AJAX as the hot
topic for the end of this year, with no less than six separate
book titles planned for release in the coming months from
various publishers.

That’s six books people. So what’s an AJAX programmer anyway? Actually having experience building an app that uses XMLHTTPRequest counts of course but if you know your way around the DOM with JS, have a reasonable knowledge of CSS and XML and you know how to build a basic proxy in one or more programming languages (preferably PHP and… Ruby?) you should have all the bagage you need to get started.

Ever since Audioscrobbler became Last.fm i am pulling my hair out at all the idiotic UI design issues the new site has. To add a friend you have to find the + sign way over at the right on the menu bar on a user’s profile. They won’t say what the plus does, -after- you manage to find it, mind you you’ll just have to go for it. Now for adding yourself to a group the secret + sign is appearently not good enough, here they have opted for a miniscule text link in between the items on the -left- of your screen. At least this one says what it does. After you find it…

Last.fm is one of those really cool ideas that never really got implemented very well. Aside from the UI issues there is so much more that can be done with the wealth of data (and users) the site has. Still… go install the plugin and start scrobbling. It’s pretty cool nonetheless and Joi Ito is advising them appearently so it’s bound to become better somewhere down the line

Command-Tab has implemented a nice spotlight styled auto complete search field on his weblog and has just made the code available on his weblog. Nice work.

I tried out the delicious automatic posting of daily links thing for a bit, as you may have noticed, but the crappy html (whats with all the br’s and divs in the list items?) is just too much too bear on my little site. On another note; i amy try out lightpress one of these days. Appearently someone has ridden wordpress of all it’s extra baggage (heavy SQL mostly) and made a tuned version. Neato!

update: installing lightpress was easy enough (it installs as a WP plugin). and it works, which is nice. you are looking at the default template right now which is… ehmm. Clean! At least it feels less cramped than the overusd Kubrick. One day i will actually put some effort in a new template… really!

update: i just turned on lightpress’s built in del.icio.us plugin to show my latest bookmarks on the homepage. It’s shows all now but you could easily set it to just post bookmarks with a specific tag.