Alan Blaine Whitney

I find it useful to spend about a half hour to an hour every month reviewing my delicious bookmarks.  I have found some good stuff on the internet in the past, only to forget when I need it.  In my experience, it is a fruitful use of time to search my delicious for cool stuff.

If you do any web 2.0 style rich internet application stuff, a good JavaScript frameworks is a must. There are two frameworks that I have used a bunch. Prototype with Scriptaculous and jQuery. Before I get to far into this, let me say, I really like both. Both are powerful, both are extremely good libraries.

I started with Scriptaculous (with means prototype as well).  This worked very well.  I was so impressed with the utility methods in prototype and the way ajax calls were wrapped.  Scriptaculous/Prototype has powered many websites that I have put together.

Lately I have been using jQuery.  I have only done one large project with jQuery.  I found jQuery very powerful as well.

So which one is better, well, it depends.  Here are my opinions.  Documentation for all three (prototype, scriptaculous, jQuery) is good.  Prototype and jQuery’s documentation is the best.  Scriptaculous has many more visual effects than jQuery.  jQuery’s selector (”$” function) is way more powerful then prototype’s.  jQuery’s syntax is better, more efficient.  jQuery plugins simply rock.

I would recommend both.  In the future, I will use jQuery.

Has twitter, or micro-blogging, killed the normal format of blogging. It seems that people are blogging less and micro-blogging more. Just from thinking about the people that I follow. I don’t know if this is a good thing.

Full blogs are good because they force you to think out were thoughts better, explain yourself more, and better express opinion. Full blogging, both reading and writing requires more attention, but I think you learn more.

Twitter, or micro blogging, requires little thought, littler effort. But it’s a great way to publish one liner thoughts.

Twitter has it’s place, I hope people don’t became too lazy and abandon blogging though.  One thing I would like to see, is for feedburner to provide daily digest of twitter into their feed.  Just exactly how they do delicious now.

So twitter was down, nothing too new there, but amazon, what happen to amazon today.

In most of the 37 signals apps, like campfire, and most of the google apps, like gmail, reader, etc, scrolling is almost inside the div.  I like this for web app, I think it’s silly for content sites, but makes lots of sense for apps.  It’s nice to never have to scroll to reach your controls, always have the controls reachable.  That really helps make it more app like.

So we all know of debian’s SSL woes.

Here is the command that I used on boxes to fix it.

rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_*
apt-get install openssl openssh-server
dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server

There are a few things that I want to do in the next few months.  I want to make a site/app based mostly on an api.  In general I just want to use an api extensively, like twistori, which is based on twitter, mostly.  Google gadget, igoogle, would like to make one of those.  Speaking of google, would not mind trying out google friend connect too.  JQuery is something I would like to try, to see how it compares to Prototype/Scriptaculous.

Thats about it for now.

Lately I have been using inline editing in web apps.  I really am falling in love with it.  By inline, I mean the user just clicks on an object in the interface.  Rather than a link, it changes a field into an edit able area, and then when you hit save, it updates the interface, all without updating the page.

General I use prototype’s form serialize and ajax updater to save the change.  I like to use an abouslutely positioned dive with a scriptaculous appear effect.

Maybe later I will give a more detailed technical explanation.

I was just looking through some Google Analytics things and thought I would share some stats that I see on the sites that I monitor.

Browsers

1. IE 7 (62%)
2. Firefox (18%, mostly 2)
3. IE 6 (15%)
4. Safari (4%)
5. Mozilla (1%)

I was surprized of how few IE6’s are still around

Screen Resolutions

92 to 98% (depending on site) of screen sizes are 1024×768 or bigger with the most common being 1024×768, 1280×768, and  1280×800

Connection

Around 5% to 10% are not connecting at high speed (DSL, Cable, T1, etc).  Cable is more popular than DSL.  Not surprisingly,  people spend the same amount of time on a site, but people with higher speeds see more pages per visit.