Blog posts

Facebook appear to have given in to pressure over the debacle I wrote about a few days ago. According to their announcement: Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice. ...

Practical Rails Projects is a weighty tome, coming in just shy of 600 pages, which led to this review taking a little longer than it otherwise might: not just because the book took a while to get through, but also because it wasn’t quite so practical to lug it on the bus as some of the others I’ve recently covered. A result of that heft is a fairly comprehensive volume, but one that doesn’t feel quite so consistent as it perhaps should. ...

24 ways: Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6 Great. I’ve used Drew’s previous sleight script numerous times, so the new Super Sleight seems like a great addition to the toolkit (tags: 24ways internetexplorer png) Mediamatic Lab releases PHP OAuth server and client « OAuth (tags: api oauth php) Acquia, my Drupal startup | Dries Buytaert With his studies coming to an end Dries Buytaert is forming a company that will let him work on drupal core professionally. Good to hear discussion of drupal 7 becoming more of a data repository with APIs a plenty. ...

WorldChanging: Meet Me in Grand Rapids WorldChanging seem quite taken with our former home (tags: grandrapids greenbuilding worldchanging) Nativity scene recast with security barrier for ‘Kitschmas’ | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited Covering Amos Trust’s “walled nativity set” (tags: amostrust nativityset)

Agile RSS Aggregator in Ruby - igvita.com Very light weight feed aggregation (tags: aggregation atom rss ruby) Home | Email Standards Project “The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.” - good to see this launching (tags: email htmlemail webstandards)

OAuth Consumer for Tiger and Leopard available « OAuth A nice addition to the toolkit (tags: macosx oauth) Doonesbury for November 27th 2007 Pandora.com gets some doonesbury attention (tags: cartoon doonesbury futureofmusic musicpromotion pandora) php 5.3 | Gergely Hodicska Good overviews of what’s new in the forthcoming PHP 5.3 (due early next year). Some nice looking features but on first viewing I’m far from thrilled with the syntax around namespaces. XSLT profiling looks nice though. (tags: namespaces php php5.3 xslt) Social networking . . . all in a good cause | Media | The Guardian ...

Having blogged in a way that might have been interpreted as enthusiastic (it came out less cautious than I had intended) about facebook’s social ads system when it was first announced it seems only appropriate to wade into the furore surrounding the actual implementation. It seems facebook have caused a considerable amount of upset with the way they implemented their system. Technically it’s very interesting, using some clever javascript tricks ( as I link blogged last night) to report your activity on various sites back to facebook. But practically it’s far less impressive as you’ll have to really keep on your toes to even notice what is being reported, and there’s no easy way to opt out of having your activity on participating websites reported to your facebook network. ...

赖洪礼的 blog » Rails 2.0, cookie session store and security Looking at the security implications of the new session storage which becomes the default in Rails 2.0 (tags: cookies rubyonrails security sessions) Radiant Core: Blog: Deconstructing Facebook Beacon JavaScript Facebook Beacon is the technique facebook is using to allow partner sites to report your activity back to facebook. It’s an interesting approach, but the approach to privacy is woefully lacking. (tags: beacon crossdomain facebook javascript privacy) Steve Lawson: Facebook for musicians - a jumbled mess? ...

Headstar E-Government Blog » Bristol adds to its e-democracy toolkit A video interview with Carol Hayward, Bristol City Council’s “Corporate Consultation Manager.” Some of their online strategies aimed at engaging young people are actually attracting an older demographic than expected. The internet’s not just for (tags: bristol edemocracy localgovernment participationtools) ies4osx Install various versions of IE on OS X without windows. Useful for layouts, but not really fast enough for testing usability/javascript/etc. (tags: browsertesting ie4osx internetexplorer osx) Headstar E-Government Blog » Why innovators and local authorities may not get on ...

DSL Book WIP Martin Fowler’s working on a book about Domain Specific Languages, and sharing some insights into the process as he goes (tags: book dsl martinfowler writing) howshouldivote.com.au Helping Australians analyse their candidates (tags: australia edemocracy participationtools) No Limits With RETS (Yahoo! Developer Network blog) An XML standard for distributing real estate data. I’ve worked enough with such systems to know it’s much needed, but can’t imaging I’ll be using it in the near future as I don’t work with them any more. ...