Sunday, July 6th, 2008 - No Comments
The first thing to come out of githorde is full support for individual topics from Digg, along with some nice speed improvements too. I uploaded the improvements last night so lets check them out.
Topics
If you go to the Topics Page you’ll see a list of all the topics that are currently on Digg, this is fresh from Digg so if they change or add any topics, the new ones should show up automatically (as long as they don’t change or break their api).
Each link on that page is an atom feed of the 100 latest popular stories in that topic, with all the usual goodness (direct link to the story, full description, submitter name, comment and digg count and mirror) in the form: http://feeddit.com/topics/apple.atom
I’ve not added any personalization, feeddit doesn’t use any kind of database, and I’d like to keep it that way, so if you want, say, everything except political news then you’ll have to subscribe to every other individual topic.
To make this a little easier I’ve created this OPML file with every topic in it, just import that into your feed reader and delete the ones you don’t like.
Other goodies
I’ve also added a few other bits and pieces. All of the pages are nicely cached, to save my server and Digg’s API from melting, so there is no need to push it through Feedburner anymore, you can subscribe directly to the feed: http://feeddit.com/feed.atom, this will be useful for anyone using the feeddit feed as a service on their own webapps.
There is also a spanky new open source information page with information about contributing and where to get the source code from.
It’s all still a work in progress, feel free to make suggestions, or even just fork the project and build the suggestions yourself, there is a list of TODOs in the readme file if your stuck on how you can help: http://github.com/andrew/feeddit/tree/master
Plus if you want to keep very up to date with feedit you can now follow feeddit on twitter at http://twitter.com/feeddit, which will contain service updates as well as details of any commits to github.
There is an iPhone web clip icon too, just for niceness.
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 - 1 Comment
Perfect for sipping on a brew whilst browsing some truly WTF code!
From thedailywtf.com, one of my favourite coding blogs.
Thursday, June 26th, 2008 - 2 Comments
I miss Uncov, before they jumped the shark with persai they were the best thing to happen in web 2.0 since sliced lolcats.
Basically, it was the anti-techcrunch, picking wholes in all the shitty web2.0 applications and their non-existent business models.
So in time honored tradition I’m going to emulate their once great blog with a rant about Jaxer
“Jaxer is an Ajax server. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are native to Jaxer, as are XMLHttpRequests, JSON, DOM scripting, etc. And as a server it offers access to databases, files, and networking, as well as logging, process management, scalability, security, integration APIs, and extensibility.”
AJAX server? With “native” css? WTF!!
That has to be the buzzwordiest webserver I’ve ever heard of!
And who ever serves ajax? Isn’t it supposed to be a client side technique?
“Access existing pages written in other languages like PHP, Java, or Ruby on Rails”
A html/json/xml page produced by any language is still just a html/json/xml page, even their example uses json, which as it happens, is not php!
“Database, file, and socket access from JavaScript”
Well doesn’t that sound like the most secure site in the world, and I thought sql in your wordpress templates was bad!
“Because Jaxer is a full Ajax server, you can not only run JavaScript on the server using the same techniques you’ve mastered in the browser, but you can also manipulate the DOM in the APIs you already use — and you can even use Ajax libraries like jQuery on the server side.”
Because rendering a DOM and then manipulating it with javascript on a server is definitely going to be faster that using.. oh i don’t know… a server side program, and people say that rails doesn’t scale!
Do you even know what that means?! Why would you ever want to do that, who would in their right mind would want to write everything in javascript?
“Write entire applications or presentation layers in Ajax
Your client code, your server code, and even shared code can all be written using the Ajax skills you already have.
Has anyone told these guys about separation of content? Although this is coming from a website which has inline css and table based design, maybe I’m expecting too much from them?
True “single page applications” are now possible, as well as full-featured end-to-end-Ajax web applications and rich presentation layers against your current back-end.”
Hello Camping
And finally a quote from Greg Wilkins, CTO of WebTide, whose website’s meta description looks like this:
Webtide java web server experts Jetty servlet ajax bayeux cometd asynchronous threads open source support developers performance pro management webapp web 2.0
“Ajax, and JavaScript as a first class language, are coming along in leaps and bounds. It is a logical step to bring many of the Ajax technologies to the server side so that there are convergent development paradigms and improved appropriate code reuse. Jaxer is the product of some great lateral thinking to take this step towards better ways to create and maintain web applications.”
It’s a good thing jaxar is open source, otherwise you could have be fooled into thinking they were trying to con VC out of their cash!
Let the FAIL’s begin!
Thursday, June 26th, 2008 - 1 Comment
As you may have noticed, there as been a distinct lack of activity around here lately, I’ve been worked off my feet and as a result I’ve struggled to find the time to sit down and write long form posts.
I have continued to post all the interesting links that I find over on my ticketapp account: http://ticketapp.com/andrew
There is usually around 20 posts of the best stuff from my RSS feeds plus pictures and opinions there, Tickets has made it easier and more enjoyable to post lots of content than using wordpress has been.
The Solution
So I want to get most posts back onto Teabass.com, the easiest way would be to hack wordpress to import my tickets rss/xml feed into the main body, but not only is that not nice, it’s not maintainable.
One of my main reasons for wanting to move away from Wordpress is so I can easily extend and modify any of the application (my knowledge of php is lacking and wordpress is a bit of a mess when you get deeper down).
Plus as a ruby on rails developer, I really should build my own website to show off my talents, the new site will be an advertisement for myself too.
Instead I’ve made Bumble, the bastard child of wordpress, tumblr, pownce and ticketapp.
There are 6 different types of post that bumble has built in (Blog, Video, Quote, Image, Link and Code) using the STI design pattern, each with different validations and template partials, unlike a standard tumblog it also has comments.
I’ve yet to put any real page design or javascript magic into it, but the core app plus basic html is there now, I’m hoping to get it all pulled together over the next month or so.
You can follow the continuing development of it over on Github: http://github.com/andrew/bumble/
And of course it’s open sourced under MIT, free for anyone to do what ever the hell they like with it.
Friday, June 13th, 2008 - 3 Comments
I’ve just finished putting together my first cocoa application, click on the button and "hello world!" appears in the center. Let the mac application development begin!
Update: The source code is on Github http://github.com/andrew/hellococoa
