Justplain

Since spring is hanging in the air i thought i might as well pump some new life into this blog!

Whole lot of things going on in the scriptingsphere. Ajax-websites are popping up all over the place and it looks like if you want to be hot you need to dhtml-alize your userinterface bigtime and tag it - Ajax - . Have you seen AjaxWrite? A wordprocessor in a browser! You’ll need firefox to use it, so probably they developed it using xul (whats the status of XMAL??), and i wonder if there is any ‘Asynchronous JavaScript and XML’ going on at all, but i might be wrong.

Last week i ordered ‘The Javascript Anthology‘ from Sitepoint.com, a book i can recommend if your are looking for a book that goes a little bit deeper the most books on this subject (learn anything in 24 hours…). Also a very good start if you want to take your first steps on the ajax-path. Btw, the other books on programming-subjects by sitepoint are also very good!

I also did some tinkering arround with the Yahoo! UI Library, a javascript-library that will help you build rich user-interfaces quick and cross-browser. I combined the connection-manager and the treeview to make an opml-tree: demo with Alex Barnett’s file from opmlmanager. It needs some work, would be nice if it handled opml includes correctly i.e.

Talking about opml and ajax. I’ve added Grazr, a opml-mini-browser that you can include within your webpages, to opmlmanager.com so you can ‘graze’ the opml-files from all opmlmanager-users.

The number of accounts on opmlmanager.com is growing slowly towards allmost a 1000 users. A large portion of those are probably very inactive, but from the statistics i can see that there is a core of users that login on a regular basis to update there opml-file. Since the introduction of opmlmanager, last october, i have not found much time to add extra functionalities to the site. Things still on the todo-list are: - making it possible to manage multiple files with one account and - adding ping-functionality to opmlsearch.com. And of course, when the opml 2.0 spec becomes final, update opmlmanager so it generates valid opml 2.0 files.

Another application i’ve been using for a week now is sdidesk, a personal desktop wiki developed by Phil Jones. I’m very enthousiastic, it’s such a small and simple application, but yet so very powerfull. Besides using wikipedia, i’ve never been very interested in the wiki-culture, but the wiki-code makes editing pages so simple and creating new pages by just typing a CamelCase string is such a powerfull thing which gives you so much freedom to create your own cloud of information. On the sdidesk websites there are some great screencasts that will show you the ease and strength of the application!

I’ve been doing some experimenting in php with wiki-code and ‘discovered’ that there is a great pear-package ‘Text_Wiki’ that takes care of encoding wikicode to xhtml (and some other formats like rtf and latex).
Right now i’m thinking about something that is a cross between a blog, the old-school homepage with a wiki-based cms, sprinkled with some rss and opml sauce. I’ll have to add some ajax of course to get some attention

tags: ajax opml javascript wiki php

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.