Items in Jan, 2011
Filters: Year: 2011 × Month: Jan × Sorted by date
What are the most recent Y Combinator startup companies as of 2011?
We (Lanyrd) are a YC startup! We’ve just announced our participation: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/31...
[... 31 words]How do you stay up to date with Open Source products and technologies?
Lots of blogs and RSS feeds—in particular, I subscribe to the feed of the authors of the software that I’m using, if I can find them.
[... 61 words]Is Node.js a strong platform to use to build a RESTful API platform?
Yes. It’s very, very good at speaking HTTP.
[... 27 words]How we made an API for BoingBoing in an evening. Fluidinfo really is a fascinating piece of software. The team loaded in 11 years of BoingBoing content, allowing you to run structured queries against the data using their standard API, but also allowing users to attach their own information to the same corpus using Fluidinfo tags. Writable APIs are much less common than read-only APIs—Fluidinfo instantly provides both. # 28th January 2011, 10:56 pm
Who is attending Webstock 2011 in Wellington, New Zealand?
We have a list of 46 Twitter users who are attending Webstock 2011 here:
[... 44 words]Get Lanyrd conference recommendations by email. This is the first time I’ve built a custom email subscription feature, and it’s been a very interesting ride. We’re trying to find the right balance between keeping people informed in a timely fashion with useful information while not overloading their inbox with too many messages. You can opt for daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly emails and we’ll try to ensure you only hear about events you haven’t seen before. # 28th January 2011, 11:28 am
Google APIs & Developer Products. Presented as a sort-of-periodic table. There’s quite a bit of stuff on here I didn’t know about. # 28th January 2011, 11:25 am
What are the must visit web conferences in the UK for 2011?
We’ve pretty much hit critical mass in the UK web scene with Lanyrd now, so there are very few notable UK web conferences in 2011 that aren’t listed. Here are some useful starting points:
[... 112 words]What are the best design conferences or meetups in Switzerland?
I haven’t been myself, but Lift has an excellent reputation:
[... 30 words]37signals Product Blog: We’ll be retiring our support of OpenID on May 1. The support costs far outweighed the benefits to customers, especially now that 37signals have their own single sign in mechanism that works across all of their products. # 25th January 2011, 4:17 pm
What are some of the wackiest panel discussion formats?
There’s a format called a fish bowl which is pretty fascinating:
[... 120 words]Which web server suits Django best? Apache, Nginx or something else?
I’m still a big fan of a stripped down Apache+mod_wsgi running behind nginx.
[... 98 words]Tip: Flickr standard photo response as slideshow. Neat trick—you can construct a URL to Flickr’s slideshow widget that includes the results of any API method, including the all-powerful flickr.photos.search. It’s a shame you can’t embed the resulting slideshow in an iframe. # 25th January 2011, 3:51 am
The code injected to steal passwords in Tunisia. Here’s the JavaScript that (presumably) the Tunisian government were injecting in to login pages that were served over HTTP. # 24th January 2011, 6:45 pm
National politics of snoopiness vs corporate ethic of not being evil aren’t directly compatible, and the solution here only works because (let’s face it) Tunisia is not a rising economic force. If you’re selling ads in China, you don’t get to pretend that the Great Firewall of China is a security issue.
— Nat Torkington # 24th January 2011, 6:11 pm
The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks (via) “By January 5, it was clear that an entire country’s worth of passwords were in the process of being stolen right in the midst of the greatest political upheaval in two decades.”—which is why you shouldn’t serve your login form over HTTP even though it POSTs over HTTPS. # 24th January 2011, 6:06 pm
Why exactly isn’t TextMate available for other platforms like Ubuntu?
Because it was written in Objective-C using the Cocoa framework, which is only available on OS X. Porting it would not be at all easy.
[... 41 words]Why would someone browse the web with JavaScript disabled?
Security conscious users (who understand the implications of XSS and CSRF attacks) sometimes disable JavaScript completely, or use a tool like the NoScript extension to disable it for all sites and only re-enable it on a small whitelist of sites that they trust.
[... 67 words]Are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs taking less risk than 8-9 yrs ago?
I’d guess internet startups today are taking advantage of the fact that there’s a LOT more knowledge now of what works online and what doesn’t. 9 years ago people were still figuring out what the internet is useful for. Today it’s easier to figure out a product that people are likely to want, based on nearly 20 years of experience of how people use the Web.
[... 83 words]How does FriendFeed work, and what programming languages are used?
It was written in Python, using the Tornado asynchronous web server (which the FriendFeed team developed themselves). They used their own schemaless NoSQL-style store based on keeping serialized objects in MySQL.
[... 51 words]What are some great stories about Steve Jobs?
The stories on folklore.org are fantastic—here’s their collection about Steve Jobs: http://www.folklore.org/ProjectV...
[... 30 words]What programming conferences are in Romania in 2011?
How To Web looked like an excellent conference last year. They haven’t announced dates for 2011 yet but I’d keep an eye on their Twitter account:
[... 79 words]Is there a way of tracking shortened URLs with Twitter streaming API?
Think about it like this: the whole point of the Twitter streaming API is to get you the tweets as soon after they are posted as possible. If the API were to provide access to the lengthened URLs, it would have to delay emitting a Tweet on to the stream until a resolver had gone through each shortened URL in the tweet and checked to find what it redirects to. This would mean that the speed with which the streaming API could deal out tweets would be dependent on the speed of the third party servers that serve up the redirects. I doubt Twitter would ever want to implement this.
[... 159 words]How do you find conferences that interest you?
We had this exact same problem, which is why we created http://lanyrd.com/—it’s a wiki-style conference listing site (currently listing over 1,000 upcoming events) which lets you sign in with Twitter and uses the people you follow on Twitter to suggest events you might want to go to.
[... 144 words]What are some other conferences/expos similar to BlogWorld and Internet Retailer?
SOBCon Chicago has four speakers this year who spoke at BlogWorld last year: http://www.sobevent.com/chicago-... / http://lanyrd.com/2011/sobcon-ch...
[... 35 words]Simon Willison: What are new interesting technologies in your radar as of January 2011?
I’ve been head down building Lanyrd for the past 4 months, so not much time to check out new stuff. I’m still very excited by Node.js and Redis, but I was excited about those last year. ElasticSearch looks very interesting (we’re currently using Solr but I’d contemplate a switch). I’m looking forward to giving CoffeeScript another go now that it’s matured a bit. Other than those I’m too busy learning operations software (syslog-ng is next on my list) to play with much other new stuff.
[... 105 words]Why do so many web developers hate Microsoft?
It’s because by far the least enjoyable part of web development is dealing with bugs in IE.
[... 31 words]What conferences should a programmer working in the industry follow?
If I had to pick just one programming-related conference a year, it would probably be OSCON. The maintainers of pretty much every piece of software I use on a daily basis go there.
[... 49 words]What are some recommendations for good social media and/or digital marketing conferences to attend in 2011?
Our list of social media conferences on Lanyrd currently shows 46 upcoming events: http://lanyrd.com/topics/social-...
[... 62 words]What is the best way to debug a Django app?
The Django Debug Toolbar is essential: http://robhudson.github.com/djan...
[... 95 words]