Gravatar - Globally Recognized Avatars

Gravatar - Globally Recognized Avatars

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?

                    

Stay up to date with The Gravatar blog

How do I get a gravatar?

Signing up for a gravatar.com account is FREE, and all that's required is your email address. Once you've signed up you can upload your avatar image and soon after you'll start seeing it on gravatar enabled sites!

Clickpass

Clickpass: Another log in system

or use OpenID

DISQUS | Turn Blog Comments into a Webwide Discussion with a Powerful Comment System

DISQUS | Turn Blog Comments into a Webwide Discussion with a Powerful Comment System: "Disqus is a powerful comment system that easily enhances the discussion on websites.

In minutes, connect your community with those of thousands of other websites.

Track conversations across the web, plus bridge discussions with your favorite services such as FriendFeed and Plaxo."

This system is popular and seems to be well recommended. It also has an API

Google Custom Search: Enabling Rich Snippets in Custom Search

Google Custom Search: Enabling Rich Snippets in Custom Search

Today, we announced Rich Snippets for Google web search, a new presentation of snippets that highlight structured data embedded in web pages. Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help you quickly identify the relevance of your results. Experiments on Google have shown that people find this additional data valuable -- if they see useful and relevant information from a webpage, they are more likely to click through to it. Our web search team is currently experimenting with a limited set of attributes for reviews and user profiles that webmasters can provide through in-line markup in their web pages by using open standards such as microformats or RDFa.

Since Custom Search sits on top of the Google web search platform, we're enabling Rich Snippets for custom search engines too. In fact, Custom Search provides support for richersnippets; you can define your own custom attributes that we'll index and return with your custom search results. In addition to microformats and RDFa, you can also provide custom metadata within your web pages via special markup called page maps. A page map identifies specific attributes that are recognized and preserved by Google at index time, and returned along with search results for presentation.

So, if you're using Custom Search or Site Search on your website, you can now control further how your content appears in search results. You can showcase key information -- such as image thumbnails, summaries, ratings, and prices -- in your result snippets if you provide the appropriate markup on your pages. As in the example shown below, displaying specific attributes can make the snippet more useful for shoppers.

Google Search and more

Google Custom Search Engine - Site search and more

With Google Custom Search, you can harness the power of Google to create a customized search experience for your own website. 

Google Site Search

Let your users search your website with Google Site Search.

What is Get Satisfaction?

What is Get Satisfaction?: "Get Satisfaction is a community that helps people to get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers." 

Google Groups

Google Groups: "Choose an Access level
Public - Anyone can read the archives. Anyone can join, but only members can post messages, view the members list, create pages and upload files.

  Announcement-only - Anyone can read the archives. Anyone can join, but only managers can post messages, view the members list, create pages and upload files.

Restricted - People must be invited to join the group. Only members can post messages, read the archives, view the members list, create pages and upload files. Your group and its archives do not appear in public Google search results or the directory."

RPX: Instant OpenID and Data Portability

RPX: Instant OpenID and Data Portability: "Simple connection to your website

Working as a proxy between third party identity providers and your website, RPX helps you effortlessly add single sign-on from providers like AOL, Google, Yahoo! and even Facebook. The hosted service runs in the cloud and is accessed via simple RESTful API calls."

Open Font Library Download fonts, upload typefaces, branch and merge designs!

Open Font Library Download fonts, upload typefaces, branch and merge designs!: "The Open Font Library is a sister project of the Open Clip Art Library. The goal of this project is to collect free software fonts - those that may be used, changed and shared freely."

Manager for Amazon CloudFront - Release: Release 1.5

Manager for Amazon CloudFront - Release: Release 1.5: "Manager for Amazon CloudFront"

Similar to s3Fox but for Windows only.

Java client libraries

JetS3t - Downloads: "JetS3t
An open source Java toolkit for Amazon S3 and CloudFront"

also a more basic one
Amazon s3 Library for REST in Java

S3 is just for storage, to present objects to the web you also need the CloudFront service.

Prices for s3

United States

Storage

• $0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.140 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.130 per GB – next 400 TB /month of storage used
• $0.120 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB

Data Transfer

• $0.030 per GB – all data transfer in April 1, 2009 through June 30, 2009 – 3rd Anniversary Celebration!
  (Note: data transfer in will return to its normal price of $0.100 per GB on July 1)

---

• $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
  
• $0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
  
• $0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
  
• $0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Requests

• $0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
  
• $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

* No charge for delete requests

There are also prices for Europe which are slightly higher

Prices for CloudFront

United States Edge Locations

Data Transfer

$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.120 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.090 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.080 per GB – next 250 TB / month data transfer out
$0.070 per GB – next 250 TB / month data transfer out
$0.060 per GB – next 250 TB / month data transfer out
$0.050 per GB – data transfer out / month over 1,000 TB

Requests

$0.010 per 10,000 GET requests

There are also prices for Europe, Hong Kong and Japan.

Features of S3Fox

Features of S3Fox: "S3Fox shows the files in Amazon S3 in a nice and convenient graphical interface. It has the popular FTP layout for transferring files between your Local PC and Amazon S3."

Google Analytics Data API - Java - Google Analytics - Google Code

Google Analytics Data API - Java - Google Analytics - Google Code: "In addition to providing some background on the capabilities of the Analytics Data Export API, this document provides examples of basic Data API interactions using the Java client library. If you're interested in understanding more about the underlying protocol that the library uses, see the Protocol section of this developer's guide."

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Google's SEO Starter Guide

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Google's SEO Starter Guide

"Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current."

Install multiple versions of IE on your PC | TredoSoft

Install multiple versions of IE on your PC | TredoSoft: "It is not difficult to follow the instructions and get any version of IE running in standalone along side other versions. Most of you probably know of evolt's archive of Internet Explorer which has them readily packaged in ZIP files."

Dive into history, 2009 edition [dive into mark]

Dive into history, 2009 edition [dive into mark]

Mark Pilgrim makes some interesting observations about why he's not using DocBook for his next edition of Dive in to Python. 

He's using plain ol' HTML.

Related to the previous point, html is not an output format. html is The Format. NotThe Format Of Forever, but damn if it isn’t The Format Of The Now. Looking back on it now, the html output from DocBook was atrociously inefficient. Tables-for-layout for callouts and tips, empty anchors everywhere, and lots of other markup cruft everywhere. Writing my own html, I can put in only the markup I need — and it turns out I need very little. Callouts are now ordered lists, tips are now blockquotes, etc. Putting an entire chapter on one page sounds bloated, but consider this: my longest chapter so far would be 75 printed pages, and it loads in under 5 seconds. On dialup.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He's the King of the Worlds: "Anathem documents a civilization split between two cultures: an indulgent Saecular general population (hooked on casinos, shopping in megastores, trashing the environment—sound familiar?) and the super-educated cohort known as the avout, who live a monastic existence defined by intellectual activity and circumscribed rituals called 'auts.' Freed from the pressures of pedestrian life, the avout view time differently. Their society—the 'mathic' world—is clustered in walled-off areas known as concents built around giant clocks designed to last for centuries. The avout are separated into four groups, distinguished by the amount of time they are isolated from the outside world and each other"

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Google lifts its skirts

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Google lifts its skirts

Google Study Shows Use of XML Sitemaps Helps Index Fresh Content Quicker

Google Study Shows Use of XML Sitemaps Helps Index Fresh Content Quicker

Search engines use programs to crawl the web, and identify new pages and newly updated pages to include in their index. These are often referred to as robots, or crawlers, or spiders. But there are other ways that the search engine gets information about pages that it might include in search results.

A whitepaper from Google, Sitemaps: Above and Beyond the Crawl of Duty (pdf), examines the effectiveness of XML sitemaps, which Google announced as an experiment called Google Sitemaps in 2005. The experiment seems to have been a success.

XML sitemaps are a way for web site owners to help the search engine index pages on their web sites, through the use of an xml Sitemap. Yahoo and Microsoft joined Google in adding support for XML sitemaps not long after, and a set of pages explaining the sitemaps protocolwas launched.

Getting Started: Java - Google App Engine - Google Code

Getting Started: Java - Google App Engine - Google Code

At last! Java on the Google App Engine

Write Google App Engine applications in Groovy

SpringSource Team Blog - Write your Google App Engine applications in Groovy: "Google just announced that their Google App Engine cloud hosting platform now supports other languages than Python: namely Java and Groovy!"

Google App Engine Java

App Engine Java Overview - Google App Engine - Google Code: "Welcome to Google App Engine for Java! With App Engine, you can build web applications using standard Java technologies and run them on Google's scalable infrastructure. The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache."

Transparent background shows WHITE??? [Archive] - Dynamic Drive Forums

Transparent IFrames

Bloggers – Apture.com

Bloggers – Apture.com: "Add Multimedia to Your Website With One Click

Integrate text, images, video, maps, music and more from 20 sources. Keep visitors on your site, instead of sending them away. Embed media with a single click — no more urls or codes."

Here is an interview with Apture CEO Tristan Harris. I must try integrating this service sometime with the Lagado Notebook.

Working with the new Linux file system - ext4

Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem | Thoughts by Ted: "ext3 performs very poorly if applications use fsync a lot; the ordering constraints can mean that if you fsync one file, then large numbers of other files may need to be committed to disk as well." - see first comment

The trick to getting optimum performance seems to be using fsync or fdatasync. We need to implement that, but not before the transition to ext4, otherwise there may be performance penalties.

This article and others on Ted's blog explain the issues well. He is a key architect of these filing systems.

HowTo: EC2 for Poets

HowTo: EC2 for Poets: "EC2 for Poets�

I've been calling this doc, while I was writing it, 'EC2 for Poets.'

The goal is to make cloud computing less mysterious by helping people through the process of setting up a server on Amazon EC2. The title derives from a class that was offered at the University of Wisconsin, when I was a grad student there, called Computer Science for Poets.

I loved the idea then, and still do. Engineers sometimes mystify what they do, as a form of job security. I prefer to make light of it, so more people will be tempted to give it a try. It was easy for me, why shouldn't it be easy for everyone? :-)"

ongoing � The Sun Cloud

Tim Bray talks about Sun's new cloud services offering, announced this week:

ongoing � The Sun Cloud: "We’re going to be rolling out a Sun Cloud offering later this year. It’s going to have a storage service that’ll offer WebDAV and something S3-flavored. Also, there’ll be a compute service, based partly on the Q-layer technology.��

And it’s got an API."

appscale -

Google Code: "AppScale is an open-source implementation of the Google AppEngine (GAE) cloud computing interface. AppScale enables execution of GAE applications on virtualized cluster systems. In particular, AppScale enables users to execute GAE applications using their own clusters with greater scalability and reliability than the GAE SDK provides. Moreover, AppScale executes automatically and transparently over cloud infrastructures such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Eucalyptus, the open-source implementation of the AWS interfaces"

Above the Clouds

Above the Clouds: This Berkeley whitepaper has more depth than previously written on cloud computing and has valuable insights.