Microsoft has just published an extension to RSS and OPML to enable updates to be share back and forth (I think) via RSS and OPML.
Extension to RSS Spec Released
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Category Archives: Code
W3C Forms Working Group on Web APIs
The W3C is forming a working group to look standards for Web APIs. This will be good in the long run for making AJAX interfaces much easier to develop across browsers and platforms.
The W3C Web API Working Group is chartered to develop standard APIs for client-side Web Application development. This work will include both documenting existing APIs such as XMLHttpRequest and developing new APIs in order to enable richer Web Applications.
MySQL and Oracle
Oracle just bought a company that provides a key piece of technology for the MySQL database. Here is Jeremy Zawodny’s summary of the situation.
MySQL is now faced with the prospect of licensing technology they cannot ship without from their biggest rival. Interestingly, there’s always been once piece of the InnoDB puzzle that’s not available under the GPL: the InnoDB Hot Backup Tool. Without it, database administrators cannot backup their InnoDB tables without shutting down MySQL or at least locking out all transactions.
Oracle just bought themselves a whole lot of leverage with MySQL AB and a talented team of database engineers to boot.
Keep an eye on this if you use MySQL within your organization.
tRuTag: Aggregate Your Tags
Here is a nifty web app: tRuTag
I’ve created tRuTag with Ruby because I wanted to explore tagging. What it does is create an html page of your tags on various sites and then allows you to explore them on other sites.
I use it as my homepage and have just implemented some of it’s functionlity on my Ruby on Rails site. Below is a sample page. Please view the readme or download tRuTag and enjoy!
It requires Ruby on Rails to run. I’ll probably try to get this set up on my laptop this weekend.
(Via O’Reilly Radar.)
Scaling Applications with Ruby on Rails
One of my more geekly habits is to track up and coming technologies for the web. Ruby on Rails is a relatively new development framework that focuses on allowing rapid prototyping of database-driven web applications. Here is a nice post on how RoR can scale up under heavy load.
Bonus link: a 15 minute video on how to create a weblog system in RoR in considerably less than 15 minutes. Assuming you know RoR inside and out, of course.
Nick Bradbury on Microsoft & RSS
You may have heard that Microsoft announced recently that they will be building in RSS support to a great extent in their next operating system. Nick Bradbury provides his perspective on the move. He talks about some interesting possible outcomes and how, as a newsreader developer, he isn’t worried about MS eating his lunch, something they have been known to do in the past.
Technorati Redesign
Eric Meyer discusses his role in the recent redesign of Technorati.
I was pleased to have Eric work on a redesign project when I was at ASHA where he optimized our xhtml/css design. Eric does great work, as he should since he literally wrote the book on CSS.
Unintended Consequences of the Google Web Accelerator
If you have been getting weird bug reports lately about and your site uses GET links to make changes to data (rather than posting via a form), you should read this: Google Web Accelerator considered overzealous. This is old news in blog time but I’m not sure it has gotten much play in the association world yet.
Cheat Sheets
Spotted via Joe Gregorio:
Dave Child does cheat sheets. He does them very well. So far he has ones for PHP, CSS and mod_rewrite. Warm up the laminator, baby.
Very nice!
Password Generator
Nic Wolff has posted a really cool tool: Password generator
So, this is a little Javascript program that will concatenate two fields and MD5 them. The idea is that you choose one master password to secure all your others, and then generate passwords for each site, server, router, &c. by putting a completely obvious name for that resource in the “Site name” field.
Half the web seems to be linking to this but I thought I would get in on it too. Looks like a great way for simplifying your personal logins while still being very secure.
C. David Gammel, CAE 