http://labnotes.blogsome.com Notes from the guy in the lab Fri, 12 May 2006 00:00:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Dave Winer, summarizing Jim Moore: “RSS is more than a format, it’s an approach to creating systems.” This isn’t news to me- surprised to see that Dave wasn’t thinking along this line previously. And me quoting Randy Holloway and nodding with agreement … thanks Randy, I missed this gem when fast reading ... http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/07/14/rss-is-an-approach/ Today’s announcement is strictly about adding DB2 connectivity to PHP 4/5, but you can see from the page that three other P languages are covered. More interesting is the comparison of J2EE and Ruby on Rails,, published on Developer Works. http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/07/14/ibm-putting-some-weight-behind-the-p-languages/ The Google Maps API lets developers embed Google Maps in their own web pages with JavaScript. You can add overlays to the map (including markers and polylines) and display shadowed “info windows” just like Google Maps. Link http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/06/29/google-maps-api/ Scoble links to a variety of feedback on the MS announcements. Me? I want to start using it. Yesterday. Technically, RSS w/Lists is a simple extension slapped onto an existing specification. And it’s not even a big extension at that. But think of all the possible applications, and all of a sudden ... http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/06/27/rss-wlists-2/ Philipp Keller tackles tags and MySQL again, this time running a benchmark against four different schemas, one of which uses fulltext search. My conclusion was slightly different, though: fulltext search is quick (and simple) on the insert, and mysterious on the select. I just couldn’t make it scale consistently, but ... http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/06/21/fulltext-search-redux/ A few more days of playing with the fulltext search engine landed me in performance dead-end. The test case consists of three tables. The primary table holds most of the information and decides on the tag of each record. It’s the biggest table with the largest number of records. The secondary ... http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/06/06/lab-notes-5-fulltext-not-so-fast/ I’ve been looking at different schemas that can support tagging, which I realized that full text search is the perfect application for tagging. A scheme where each tag (applied to an object by a user) occupies a row in the database is simple and efficient in terms of storage size and ... http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/05/30/fulltext-for-tag-searches/ Alex Bosworth lists his ten top AJAX mistakes. I couldn’t agree more. There are too many choices in AJAX and DHTML that work great in principle, but not in practice. The big challange, and it’s not an easy one, is how not to repeat any of them. http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/05/24/ajax-mistakes/ The previous post left all of my two readers wondering what AJAX is. Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path sums it up well in this post. Which incidentally is one of the top links on del.icio.us, at least according to populicio.us. And subtly, I’ve just linked tagging with AJAX. http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/05/15/ajax/ Not exactly a newsbite that will change your day, but Flickr has just switched from using Flash to DHTML/AJAX on some of their pages. And they got to talk about it during the AJAX summitt. For those of you out of the loop, AJAX is Web Buzzword of The Month(tm). Personally, ... http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/05/13/flickr-switches-from-flash-to-dhtml/ Drag & Drop Sortable Lists Using JavaScript and CSS to allow the user to re-arrange a list of items by dragging & dropping them. Showing & Hiding a DIV I’ve used a similar script in a different blog to show and hide the comments in-line. Each post would have a comment link at ... http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/05/10/dynamic-html-goodies/ Lifehacker pointed me in the direction of the Firefox Web Developer extension. Developed by Chris Pederick, this extension adds a menu and toolbar to Firefox with a whole slew of features: view and edit CSS stylesheets, validate content, change forms, resize to specific screen size, and so much more. The ... http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/05/10/firefox-web-developer-extension/ A Consuming Experience has a well written introduction to Technorati tags, tags in general and a bunch of good references. “This is a introductory guide to “tags” on Technorati, the blogosphere search engine, which started using them in mid-January 2005. It’s a practical introduction rather than a tutorial (ending with some ... http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/05/07/technorati-tags/ Christian has a cool trick for creating XML buttons using HTML content and CSS styling. It’s really that simple, see: Lab Notes http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/05/04/css-xml-buttons/ ILoveJackDaniels has nice cheat sheets for PHP, CSS and RGB colors. The cheat sheets are provided as PNG images that print nicely on A4 at 600dpi.     http://labnotes.blogsome.com/2005/05/04/cheat-sheets/