New Relic - a Ruby on Rails performance and diagnostic service.
Adobe’s Open Screen Project - write once, play anywhere - opening up the runtime for Flash, removing licensing fees, publishing API’s and publishing Adobe protocols.
Web developers SEO cheat sheet
Zappos - a good example of using Twitter and social media to increase and maintain brand awareness.
I was doing some research into using Amazon’s S3 storage as a cheap CDN alternative to Akamai, but various people around the web have reported hiccups and problems with the service giving indication that Amazon’s service is not quite mature enough. On the other hand I discovered some discussions on using Google’s Gadget Ad platform for caching images.
Here’s another technology I need to start looking into: OAuth. ProgrammableWeb describes it as:
Like the feature on many cars today where you give the parking attendant a special key to your car that gives him some, but not all, access to your vehicle. On the Web you now have your own keys to dozens of sites but how to best handle the mashup-style case of site A wants you to grant them access to get some data from site B? Ideally you don’t want to give site A your password to site B. OAuth aims to simplify this problem: “It allows you the User to grant access to your private resources on one site (which is called the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer, not to be confused with you, the User).”
Google has stated that they are going to use this technology for all their API’s.
I just read a review about BooRah on ReadWriteWeb. I definitely think this is just the beginning of the future of the web. The site aggregates reviews from different sites on the web and serves up results based on semantic analysis and natural language processing - a very cool idea.
It’s interesting how semantic analysis and NLP are becoming hot topics since I was an AI (artificial intelligence) major in college. maybe LISP and Prolog will re-emerge as the next hot web application programming languages.
I spent a couple hours trying to diagnose why I couldn’t log into one of my blogs that used the Tarski theme. Every time I tried to login Wordpress would just hang forever. At first I thought it might be due to the Wordpress 2.5.1 update so I reinstalled. Then I thought it might be a database corruption so I created a new database and imported all my entries. Then I thought maybe it’s the plugins so I removed all plugins. Nothing seemed to work. But then I noticed that there were “edit” links on my blog entries - indicating that I was successfully logged in. So I clicked on the “edit” link and discovered I was able to edit entries. I just couldn’t get to the Dashboard or Tarski Options. So I tried going to the Tarski theme website looking for a possible solution - only to find that their website was not responding. That gave me a clue to start looking through the Tarski theme files for callbacks to the Tarski theme website.
VOILA!
It’s the stupid Tarski theme version checking function that’s hanging because it’s not able to retrieve the atom feed from their website. So I just commented out the code and now my blog is back to normal. The problem lies in wp-content/themes/tarksi/library/classes/version.php. I chose to disable version checking completely by commenting the body of the tarski_update_notifier() function on line 196:
function tarski_update_notifier($location = 'dashboard') {/*
$tarski_version = new Version;
$tarski_version->current_version_number();
$current = $tarski_version->current;
$svn_link = 'http://tarskitheme.com/help/updates/svn/';
// Update checking only performed when remote files can be accessed
if(can_get_remote()) {
// Only performs the update check when notification is enabled
if(get_tarski_option('update_notification')) {
$tarski_version->latest_version_number();
$tarski_version->latest_version_link();
$tarski_version->version_status();
}
$latest = $tarski_version->latest;
$latest_link = $tarski_version->latest_link;
$status = $tarski_version->status;
if($location == 'options_page') {
include(TARSKIDISPLAY . '/admin/version_options.php');
} elseif(!detectWPMU() || detectWPMUadmin()) {
include(TARSKIDISPLAY . '/admin/version_dashboard.php');
}
}*/
}
But the problem really lies with the version_feed_data() function on line 66. They need to set the timeout option for CURL and use ini_set(’default_socket_timeout’, $seconds); before calling file_get_contents(’http://tarskitheme.com/version.atom’);
TO THE CREATORS OF TARSKI: FIND A BETTER HOST AND FIX YOUR CODE!!!
TO THEME CREATORS: LEARN FROM THIS LESSON!!!!!
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about CDNs (content delivery networks) because of the challenges I’ve been dealing with user submitted photos on a highly trafficked site. Most projects I work on use Akamai with great success, but what about alternatives CDNs for personal projects? What first came to mind was Flickr. I mean why not? Flickr was built to serve photos so why couldn’t Flickr serve as a CDN for images on my site? The next thought that came to mind was Google. Google already caches websites and images, so why not use Google as a CDN? So I did a quick search and found a tutorial of how to write a Google Gadget that will cache images. Sounds perfect! Has anyone implemented this across their site? What are the caveats?
I also found this interesting P2P cache/CDN called Coral that is worth looking into.
Techcrunch has a great article on how traditional search engines might be nearing the end of their usefulness. The future lies in the semantic web and delivering filtered relevant results.
Multiple outages over a 3 week period, unstable VPN connections, and server configuration problems has plagued a high-traffic/high-profile site I’m managing. Their customer service is responsive, and the staff very knowledgeable, but unfortunately it can’t make up for constant service issues. At this moment, I’m on my 6th attempt to deploy code updates because I keep getting kicked off of OpSource’s VPN.
Yahoo wants to turn itself into a huge social-networking platform offering more API’s and it’s own application platform to compete directly with Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services. Sounds interesting. I think this idea could help rejuvenate Yahoo.