April 2010
April 26, 2010
The new Facebook API exposes the events you attend to anyone on the Internet. I’m generally impressed by the new set of Facebook APIs—they’re a whole lot easier to work with than the older stuff—but they’re also clearly a bit half-baked and the privacy model needs some urgent work. The Graph API allows to to see all “open” events that any user has attended or is attending, which can exposes things like their friend’s home addresses. Yes, this means you can stalk Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer’s Perspective. Best explanation I’ve seen yet of what the Open Graph protocol actually does. Add the RDFa-inspired metadata and a Like button to a standard web page representing a place, group, product, website or one of another limited set of object types and people can “Like” it just like they might join a fan page within Facebook itself. You can then send news feed updates to all of that page’s subscribers. The bootstrapped metadata can then benefit other services as well.
Good design in computer programming consists of inventing abstractions that don’t leak. Good programming consists of implementing those abstractions in such a way that they don’t leak.
April 27, 2010
Google Charts release notes, February 2010. More new Google Charts Image API features I hadn’t noticed before: charts of large data sets can now be generated using a POST request, but the killer feature is the ability to add ?chof=validate to see useful error messages. ?chof=json is interesting too—it gives you back a JSON object detailing the coordinates of various interesting shapes on the associated chart, which you can then use to create your own image maps or JavaScript tooltips. It’s a shame it doesn’t support JSON-P.
April 28, 2010
A HTTP Proxy Server in 20 Lines of node.js. Proxying is definitely a sweet spot for Node.js. Peteris Krummins takes it a step further, adding host blacklists and an IP whitelist as configuration files and using Node’s watchFile method to automatically reload changes to them.
April 29, 2010
Breakfast Instapaper. Handy tool for selecting and bulk-submitting stories from today’s Guardian and NYTimes to your Instapaper account, by Daniel Vydra.
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.