ajax

Jaiku Fixes Annoying Problem

http://www.jaiku.comFinally, Jaiku has fixed an annoying problem which I have been giving them hell about for quite some time. Twit actually has a channel on Jaku that I joined awhile back. Twit or (This Week In Tech) is administered by Leo Laporte and as you can imagine the channel became very popular very fast.

On the right hand side of the channel area is anumber which represents the amount of users who have joined that channel. Underneath that number, every user who is part of the channel also has their avatar displayed.

Once the channel member count reached about 1,000 it became apparent that something was wrong. The text that a member would type into the text area box would appear slowly while the images on the right hand side would load. All 1,000 images. I’m not sure if the amount of user avatars being displayed had something to do with the Ajax part of the page but it slowed everything to a crawl which became very annoying.

Only A Few Avatars Are Displayed

I am happy to say that Jaiku has fixed this problem. Now if you look at the right hand side of the Twit channel, you should see a list of member Avatars and then a MORE link which will provide you a page with even more avatars. Thank you Jaiku for fixing this annoying issue. Browsing and posting in popular channels has become fun again!

Web Script Labs – Ideas Into Scripts

Turning Ideas Into ScriptsWeb Script Labs takes an Ajax loader generator, Favicon generator and a Web 2.0 Domain Name Generator and places them into one, nice location for you to generate some Web 2.0 goodness.

 

The Ajax loading GIF generator provides users with a wealth of different indicators to use as their animation. Aside from the indicator, users can select the background color, whether or not the background will be transparent, the foreground color and finally the speed of the animation. Using the 3D rotation indicator, this is what I came up with.

3D Rotation Indicator

The Favicon generator does exactly that, generates favicons. This particular favicon generator will take any image you upload and turn it into a 16X16 or 32X32 favicon. If you want to create a transparent favicon, make sure you use a .PNG file or a .GIF file. While Photoshop requires you to install a .ICO plugin in order to save images as .ICO files, this generator automatically saves the images in .ICO format. Here is what I created using the 16X16 and 32X32 settings respectively.

16X16 Favicon 32X32 Icon File

Last but not least is the Web 2.0 Domain Generator. This one is fairly simple. Click the Generate button and after watching the flashy ajax loader animation you’ll receive what could be the name of your next startup. On the first try, I ended up with the result of Blognation. However, it appears as though Blognation.com and Blognation.net is taken. My second attempt landed me the name Skita. Skita.com is taken but Skita.net is available. Not sure I like that name anyways.

TAKEN!

There are quite a few generators out on the web if you look hard enough but what I would love to see is Web Script Lab take all of those other Web 2.0 specific generators and lump them into a single page/product. That would be pretty cool. Although most of the generators were created as a joke, some of them are actually quite useful such as the striped background generator and the Web 2.0 color palette generator. Head on over to http://www.webscriptlab.com and start generating stuff!

MASHup Of Problems

http://devcentral.f5.com
DevCentral has published their first in a four part series of articles related to Web 2.0 security. DevCentral has come up with a mnemonic, MASH, that describes which each article will be about. MASH stands for:

  • More of everything.
  • Asymmetric data formats
  • Scripting based
  • Hidden URLs and code

The first article highlights the letter ‘M’ more of everything.

So what’s that mean, “more of everything”? Well, Web 2.0, whether we’re talking about applications (blogs, wikis, forums, video) or the technologies that enable the applications (AJAX, XML, RSS, RDF, etc…), simply contains more of everything than its legacy predecessors.

I encourage you to read the following article HERE as it begins to describe just how difficult it is to secure Web 2.0 applications. Securing one particular script is no big deal. Securing a plethora of scripts combined into one application is apparently another problem.