Nearly everyone close to the tech industry has now heard of programming frameworks — thanks to the Rails part of Ruby on Rails. Every scripting language - PHP, Python, etc. - now has a framework; or fifty. This is a good, logical growing-up of the web. These languages needed the more structured Model-View-Controller (MVC) environment that their *established* compiled programming language brethren have had forever.
While I have extensively studied programming frameworks, especially around Ruby & PHP, I have somehow completely missed another set of frameworks being developed: CSS Frameworks. I hadn’t even heard of CSS frameworks until I stumbled across the following talk on An Event Apart’s presentation schedule:
If you are an interface wiz who has been keeping up with the CSS framework developments, please post additional links worth checking out in the comments. Thanks!
Man, it has been quite a while since I have seen new web hacks that have completely blown me away. Today I get two! No sooner had I posed about Niall Kennedy’s Browser Sniffer magic than Ian Kennedy (no relation) sends me another really slick hack.
Ian pointed me to the Intense Debate website. I first met the Intense Debate guys last Summer when Eric & I were mentors at TechStars. They are a great group of guys. Since I only recently re-launched my blog, I haven’t have much of a need for a comments service. As such, I hadn’t seen their site in quite some time. (I have since agreed to try out the Disqus comment system as soon as they integrate OpenID; but that is beside the point.)
When I first pulled up the site, I didn’t even notice the feature. Then it jumped out at me:
The site had auto-detected my blog. How cool is that!
So, how does it work? Like most great things, it is actually quite simple. Not only that, it uses MyBlogLog!!
When you first land on IntenseDebate.com, the site uses JavaScript to open MyBlogLog.com in an invisible Div.
The MyBlogLog website automatically redirects logged-in users to their MyBlogLog member page. (e.g. When I go to www.mybloglog.com I am redirected to http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/toddsampson/)
The script looks at the URL of the site shown in the invisible Div. If the URL is www.mybloglog.com, the script does nothing. If the URL has changed, it means that the person is a MyBlogLog member. The script then grabs the member name from the URL. (e.g. In my example above, it would grab “toddsampson”.)
The member name is then passed to a PHP script. While I can’t see the PHP source code, the script must open the page for the selected user and determine which blog to push into the signup box.
Like I said — simple. Simple, but brilliant. Doing this kind of thing will become much easier and much more powerful once the MyBlogLog API comes out of Beta very soon. But, in the mean time, thanks for making my day guys.
I was totally blown away by a new web hack I saw today by Niall Kennedy.
I have known Niall for a little while now — having met him at several events after moving to San Francisco last year. I always knew that Niall was incredibly smart. But I didn’t realize what an evil-genius he was until I read his new Sniff Browser History for Improved User Experience post. So many possibilities, including dramatically cleaning up the Profile Services page on MyBlogLog. Niall is a great writer and does a fantastic job explaining the technique. He even has a nice demo page you can play with.
Yes, there are a lot of ways to abuse this hack; but there are some amazingly useful things you can do as well. So if you are for good, or for awesome, I highly recommend checking it out.
A few days ago I posed about the trend I noticed at Google of using APIs as a way to release new products — the API-as-Product-Launch I have started calling it.
As I wrote in the previous post, I think that the API-as-Product-Launch is a very promising strategy for tech companies to look into. It allows for the launch of product ideas faster than the “Agile” model and with very minimal infrastructure.
Since this seems so promising to me, I started thinking about what it would take to succeed in this new model. Here is my (incredibly) quick shot at the requirements to kick off the discussion:
Buzz worthy service API — preferably with lots of data. Make sure that developers can play with and push data into the API at the time of launch. An invite-only beta to build buzz and get the bugs out can’t hurt.
Launch video of the API developers talking about what it is and why they are excited about it.
A great story and vision for the future using the new technology.
A pretty logo, stylish diagrams and content-as-packaged-meme for people to re-blog. This is essential to make sure everyone gets the message about why your service is genius in just the right way.
Dead simple API test console so biz dev guys can play with the new API to understand what it is all about and feel involved enough to talk about it at parties.
Follow-up the launch video with video screencasts showing all the cool things that you can do and how to do them. Bonus points of the community does their own screencasts.
Double geek-bonus points if you can get mentioned in the same sentence as (or are one of) the following people new geekerati:
And dozens of other new elite geeks that the public-at-large has never heard of and for some unknown reason I am forgetting right now…
Chris Saad wants to be on the list above really bad; but needs to stop asking people how their working applications fit into his theory of Data Portability. (Just kidding man… keep herding cats.)
Google’s launch of the Social Graph has confirmed it for me — the API is becoming the product; or service as the case may be. And, if not the full product, at least the first wave of a product’s release.
Back in the day, and still today at many overly-large companies, there was the massive software application. Ideas were sold up the chain (or pushed down it) and appropriately massive budgets were allocated. Hundreds of beautiful interface mockups and user flow diagrams were constructed. Each artifact the team made was hung on the wall of the project War Room in a giant John Nashian nightmare. People on high made the call for what “the users” wanted in an [insert latests software buzzword here] application. Every contingency thought of and planned for — or so they thought. The classic, “Ready… Aim… Fire.”
Next came open source projects and Web (2.0) applications. Take a few months putting together the basic ideas, flesh out the user interface and release. Listen to what the users want and iterate frequently to give it to them. As they have been called, “Ready… Fire… Aim.” or the more extreme, “Fire… Fire… Fire.”
While I am a fan of launch & iterate, I think that Google is quietly perfecting the next-generation application development model. Forget the product guys. User interface — who needs one?!? We want the data. If our API offers enough value, everyone will use it. Developers get to build their *open* “standards-based” applications faster. Users get exactly what they want. After all, having a few dozen teams or more building on the infrastructure is sure to create something closer to each user’s ideal offering, right? Besides, as everyone know, there are always more smart people working outside your company than in it.
The new model as I see it, “Ready… Point to a Vision of the Future… Let others fight the war with you as the ammo supplier.”
I think it is brilliant. Let’s keep an eye on Google’s OpenSocial, Android, and Social Graph to see if it works as well as I am expecting.
Mike “Grissy” Grishaver, former Yahoo! and programming wiz extraordinaire, told Eric and I over coffee at Philz yesterday that he was taking his new app Thingfo live next week. When pressed for a release time, he committed to 1pm on Tuesday.
Congrats Grissy. Can’t wait to see Thingfo running in the wild.
I know, I know. I probably should have known this — somehow. But you just figure, it is 2007 2008 and it uses disks that at least resemble DVDs. I also know that the Wii doesn’t cost anywhere close to the XBox 360 or Playstation 3; so I am sure that it doesn’t use Blu-Ray or HD DVD disks. Is it a proprietary disk format or did they just not worry about movies? I’m guessing it has to be the later.
Oh well… I just wish I had checked before I took down the old XBox. I was really looking forward to seeing Blade Runner for the first time too. I have no idea how I have haven’t seen what is, by all accounts, one of the classic sci-fi movies of all time.
The blogosphere is abuzz with talk about the stock market tanking tomorrow. Outside the usual credit crunch, real estate, and weak dollar people are pointing to Monday’s largest one-day drop in many markets since 9/11:
Bombay’s Sensex -7.4%
Frankfurt’s DAX -7.2%
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng -5.5%
London’s FTSE -5.5%
Shanghai’s Shanghai Composite -5.1%
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 -3.9%
So, what do you think? Are we headed for a crash? If you didn’t jump out of the market last week, is it too late to do so? How can you play this market to win?
P.S. Those looking for a hedge against the crash, the BlackTuesday.com domain name is already taken. Too bad. John suggested 000tuesday.com, but that is a bit too geeky.
P.P.S. Rafer, let me know when you are done with your crystal ball… You are just scary man.
Writing the TechStars 2008 post earlier today reminded me about the video the team shot of Eric and I while we were there last year. As Eric mentions in the video, this was really the first time since selling MyBlogLog to Yahoo! that the two of us discussed the whirlwind adventure. It was a great time.
Warning: The video is a bit long. So hit the bathroom, pop some popcorn and enjoy.
While I have extensively studied programming frameworks, especially around Ruby & PHP, I have somehow completely missed another set of frameworks being developed: CSS Frameworks. I hadn’t even heard of CSS frameworks until I stumbled across the following talk on An Event Apart’s presentation schedule:
I was totally blown away by a new web hack I saw today by 
Google’s launch of the 
