Building Scalable Databases: Denormalization, the NoSQL Movement and Digg: "
Interesting but short summing up of current database practises in large scale internet sites
Further Reading
"SVG Web is a JavaScript library which provides SVG support on many browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Using the library plus native SVG support you can instantly target ~95% of the existing installed web base.
Once dropped in you get partial support for SVG 1.1, SVG Animation (SMIL), Fonts, Video and Audio, DOM and style scripting through JavaScript, and more in about a 60K library. Your SVG content can be embedded directly into normal HTML 5 or through the OBJECT tag. If native SVG support is already present in the browser than that is used, though you can override this and have the SVG Web toolkit handle things instead. No downloads or plugins are necessary other than Flash which is used for the actual rendering, so its very easy to use and incorporate into an existing web site.
SitePen Blog � JSON Namespacing
Raphaël 1.0 RC; Get your graphics on: "
Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will make drawing vector art compatible cross-browser and easy.
Raphaël currently supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+.
Forms : Creating forms - Google Docs Help
This is a pretty neat feature I just became a ware of. Google Docs has a form designer and publisher
webforms2 -
Project Hosting on Google Code: "A cross-browser implementation of the WHATWG Web Forms 2.0 specification. This specification is currently a mature working draft and has been adopted by the W3C HTML Working Group to serve as a starting point for the next version of HTML. This implementation will follow the HTML 5 specification that evolves from the W3C process."
A very worthwhile article on Web form usability and validation.
A List Apart: Articles: Inline Validation in Web Forms: "You can blame most forms’ poor etiquette on the way they’re built. Web forms that use a basic submit-and-refresh model of interactivity don’t respond until you hit the “submit” button—but it doesn’t have to be this way. Real-time inline validation can help people complete web forms more quickly and with less effort, fewer errors, and (surprise!) more satisfaction.
To better understand the design considerations behind inline validation, I worked with Etre, a London-based usability firm, to test 22 average users on six variations of a typical web registration form. Aramys Miranda developed the form we used with our users, who ranged in age from 21 to 49.
Of our six forms, the control version validated input only when someone clicked its “create account” button. The other five versions used different methods of inline validation. We measured success rates, error rates, completion times, satisfaction ratings, and standard eye-tracking metrics for each variation. We presented each form randomly to minimize familiarity bias."
Web OS? Web VM? Value in both?:
The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine: "The attributes that now matter most all fall under the rubric of accessibility. Thanks to the speed and connectivity of the digital age, we've stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists. Instead, we're now focused on three things: ease of use, continuous availability, and low price."
Pingdom Goes Free (For 1 Site): "
Pingdom (from Sweden) is a neat website uptime monitoring service. Up until now, if you registered an account with them you had to pay for it after the initial trial ended, or else lose your Pingdom service. Now, they say they start offering an account that won’t time out... the only difference to a full, paid account being that you can only track a single website.
OpenID: the unseen branded revenue opportunity: "
But today I came across a truly inspirational approach to brand-mediated identity that portends great potential for OpenID and for brands generally — especially those with eager and adoring fans:
What better way to both support Creative Commons and show off your patronage than by identifying yourself across the web with your very own unique, secure, privacy-protecting creativecommons.net OpenID (just like Zach Beauvais)?
For a mere $50 minimum donation ($25 for students), you can own a limited edition URL and profile from Creative Commons that identifies you to the world and provides a compelling revenue opportunity for the non-profit foundation.
While companies like SAP become OpenID providers for pedestrian reasons like simplifying authentication across their many different distributed web properties, Creative Commons is redistributing the brand equity and social capital their members have accrued over the last several years by letting people show and verify their affiliation to the organization.
With this simple example, we can start to see the symbiosis of making an intentional choice about identity: Creative Commons finds a new revenue opportunity and members of the community have a way to express their affiliation and promote the brand. This is exactly the kind of thing that I could see the NYTimes doing for its writers (as an extension to its Times People platform) — providing them both a home on the web and a way to validate their association with a more well-known entity. This of course is just a small experiment for Creative Commons — but a very exciting one in terms of what it means for identity on the web."
Software Pricing: Are We Doing It Wrong?:
Valve co-founder Gabe Newell announced during a DICE keynote today that last weekend's half-price sale of Left 4 Dead resulted in a 3000% increase in sales of the game, posting overall sales (in dollar amount) that beat the title's original launch performance.It's sobering to think that cutting the price in half, months later, made more money for Valve in total than launching the game at its original $49.95 price point. (And, incidentally, that's the price I paid for it. No worries, I got my fifty bucks worth of gameplay out of this excellent game months ago.)
The massive Steam holiday sale was also a big win for Valve and its partners. The following holiday sales data was released, showing the sales breakdown organized by price reduction:Note that these are total dollar sale amounts! Let's use some fake numbers to illustrate how dramatic the difference really is. Let's say our hypothetical game costs $40, and we sold 100 copies of it at that price."
- 10% sale = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
- 25% sale = 245% increase in sales
- 50% sale = 320% increase in sales
- 75% sale = 1470% increase in sales
Timefire: On Reducing the Size of Compressed Javascript (by up to 20%): "That leaves us with the built in GZIP compression that most web browsers include support for. The question is, can we improve compression while remaining compatible with the browser's decoder? There is an existing example of improving GZIP by injecting a reversible transform: bzip2 and the Burrows-Wheeler Transform.
Which brings up an interesting idea, can we do something like BWT's sort but for Javascript, in a way that doesn't require an extra pass to 'undo' the sorting?"
EricLaw's IEInternals : Bugs in IE8's Lookahead Downloader: "Unfortunately, since shipping IE8, we've discovered two problems in the lookahead downloader code that cause Internet Explorer to make speculative requests for incorrect URLs."
HTML�5 differences from HTML�4: "The style element has a new scoped attribute which can be used to enable scoped style sheets. Style rules within such a style element only apply to the local tree."
Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess: "Newmark's claim of almost total disinterest in wealth dovetails with the way craigslist does business. Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals. The glory of the site is its size and its price. But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview."
Clashing With the Laws of YouTube:
Ron explains: “This is a visualization of the first 5,000 videos submitted to Totlol. Bright Red = removed from YouTube. Pink = no longer API Player accessible. Purple = Good.” The oldest video is shown at the top left, time progresses downwards. “Generally speaking, red appears over time as videos are taken down (obviously). It is reasonable to assume that earlier submissions were probably easier to find as they were on average more ’established’ in YouTube, hence they apparently were also less likely to be removed.”
As far back as 1998, CSS2 provided a way to link to real fonts from your style sheet:
@font-face {
font-family: 'Watusi';
src: url('http://www.example.com/fonts/watusi.ttf')
format('truetype');
}
h1 {
font-family: 'Watusi', sans-serif;
}
Instead of static pictures of fonts, linked font files can be retrieved from the web and used to display HTML text. And not just for headlines, but for body copy, too. It’s brilliant! It’s magnificent! There are just two problems...
Coding A HTML 5 Layout From Scratch | How-To, Tutorials | Smashing Magazine This is a really great article with practical details on how to implement solid HTML5 and CSS3 features in websites that are viewable in today's browsers and still gracefully degrade all the way back to IE6.
On2 Flix Cloud | On-Demand Video Transcoding Powered by On2 Flix Engine and Zencoder: "On2 Flix Cloud is a web-based transcoding service that reduces the cost and complexity of converting digital video for the web, IPTV, HD and devices."
Ajaxian � Google buying On2; New twist in the hope for Open Video
A short history of btrfs [LWN.net]: "Btrfs will be the default file system on Linux within two years."