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Amazon ‘CloudFront’ Promises Cheaper, Faster Downloads

By Scott Gilbertson November 18th, 2008 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming, Software & Tools

Amazon Web ServicesAmazon has announced its new content delivery network service, dubbed CloudFront, which will help even small websites vastly improve their file download speeds. Like its other services, S3 storage, EC2 hosting and more, CloudFront is pay-as-you-go, offering a much cheaper alternative for small sites.

CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) and just might completely change the way your favorite sites deliver files and could make for a significantly faster web. CDNs are what very large sites (like the iTunes Store) use to make downloads much faster.

CDNs work by routing your browser’s file request from a central server to an edge server — generally located near you — which means your request encounters fewer server hops, resulting in lower latency and increased delivery speed (see our earlier write up for more details on how CNS work).

If you’re wondering why every site doesn’t use a CDN, the answer is that they aren’t cheap. Or at least they weren’t until CloudFront came along.

Because Amazon is using the same pay-as-you-go model it pioneered with S3, E2 and other services, even small startups with little cash can use CloudFront and offer visitors much faster downloads at a faction of the cost. That’s good news for startups that want to launch their own iTunes competitors or offer an online software service like Zoho or Basecamp.

While Amazon’s CloudFront may bring the cost of CDNs down to something small sites can afford, it does have its limitations. CloudFront is, at the moment, only offering 14 edge servers. For comparison, competitors like Akamai have edge servers in the tens of thousands.

Still, while the network is small at the moment, look for Amazon to continue expanding it — especially if CloudFront catches on with developers.

If you’re curious, have a look at the developer guide and be sure to check out the full documentation for the details on how you can integrate CloudFront into your site.

[via Simon Willison

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Google Adds Protection From Robots, Zombies

By Scott Loganbill October 31st, 2008 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming, Software & Tools

For this Halloween, Google modified its robots.txt file to prevent zombies from accessing the company’s brains. The protection is the same used against internet robots, or bots, for years.

The robots.txt file at the top level any site’s domain is used to maintain protection from various robots or automated processes. Today, Google’s is being used to ward off the undead from the site. Google’s concern for brain-eating zombies is warranted. Google is known for its braintrust, and Halloween is known for its surprising recurrence of zombies. The robots.txt edit represents a smart defensive move by Google and a devastating blow to zombie-kind.

It’s not known if this robots.txt modification will one day be accepted in Google’s robots-exclusion protocol, but I suppose it depends on how effective the internet’s zombie killing efforts are. The dream is to one day purge the internet of this virus once and for all.

The slight modification (easter egg) doesn’t affect normal humans or browsers from accessing and using Google services. To add your own robots.txt file and control site access to robots and zombies check out the Webmonkey Robots.txt tutorial.

[via Matt Cutts]

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PDC 2008: Boku for Xbox Teaches Programming to Kids

By Michael Calore October 29th, 2008 Categories: Events, Programming

Los Angeles — Boku, a simple game which teaches kids the basics of computer programming, will be released in early 2009, Microsoft has announced. It will be available for both Windows and the Xbox.

The simple interface is designed to make it as easy as possible for kids to learn how to program, but hidden under the hood is a powerful gaming engine. Using only an Xbox controller, kids can creating complex, interactive games within custom-built worlds.

Matt MacLaurin, who leads the Boku team at Microsoft Research, showed the latest build of the game on stage at PDC 2008 Wednesday morning. We first took a look at Boku about a year and a half ago (here are some older screenshots and a video demo of Boku I shot last year). The game is much more detailed and rich now. Players can create multiple characters, each with separate programs, then execute the code and watch the characters interact.

There are complicated collision rules, and character behaviors can be tied to vision, hearing and time.

The characters can shoot at each other now, too. Since the audience is for kids ages 7 and up, MacLaurin said he wrestled with the decision to introduce violence into the game. But play-testers — mostly 7-12 year old girls in a study at UCSB — made it very clear early on that the ability for characters to shoot at each other and blow stuff up was absolutely mandatory.

The game is genius. Kids use the Xbox controller to build programs — there is no keyboard. Also, it uses a very simple language to construct the programs. Even though kids are creating variables, constants, loops and routines, there’s no tech speak. Everything is presented in a vernacular that children can understand and grasp immediately.

There are some great videos on the press site at Microsoft Research. I’d embed them here, but they are only in downloadable Windows Media format. I’ll update this post once somebody puts them on YouTube.


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Yahoo’s New Application Platform Is Heavy On Social Features

By Scott Loganbill October 24th, 2008 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming, Software & Tools

Yahoo announced more details around its new application platform at a press event in San Francisco on Friday.

The new platform, dubbed Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS), represents an attempt to unify all of the company’s services using the same technology. The end result is a massive overhaul of its user-facing services, many of which are modeled after the most popular features of social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

New system-wide features include Twitter-like status updates, widgets and plenty of of APIs third-party developers can use to access Yahoo social sharing services.

In other words, think of what Yahoo would look like if you added all of Facebook’s famous features. Still, Yahoo spokesmen were eager to brush off any similarities to Facebook. In essence, the YOS strategy is what you’d get if Yahoo took all of its killer features — search, mail, calendar, photo sharing and a customizable start page — and added Facebook’s killer features — status updates, rich profiles, contact management, the Facebook Connect login apparatus and various APIs.

In many ways, its as if Yahoo is catching up with Facebook. In doing so, it might give Facebook, a company mired in aimlessness, incentive to carve out some clear direction. Considering the amount of development resources Yahoo has thrown behind Flickr, Yahoo messenger, Yahoo mail, web search and the rest of its empire, if the company can build a social network that’s actually successful, it will be in a position to truly compete, giving Facebook and MySpace a run for their money.

Yahoo is touting YOS’ infrastructure benefits as a more robust and scalable computing cloud than what its competitors have to offer. There are a staggering number of features packaged with the new platform. Below is the boiled-down feature list:

Platform Feature What Does it Do? Sounds like?
Accounts Unified Yahoo accounts, this time with light registration. For example, you can register with a Hotmail email address. Yahoo Accounts, Google Accounts, Windows Live ID
Administrative Interface A rich administrative application to carefully allow or disallow application access to your profile data. You’ll be able to individually administer any particular data point an app is requesting OAuth (in fact, it uses OAuth), Facebook’s application installation process
Profiles It’s a pretty straightforward address book, but unified over all Yahoo properties. No need to enter profile information twice. Plaxo, Google Contacts, Windows Live ID
Activator Suggests contacts based on who you email or contact most. Gmail & Google Talk contact sorting, Facebook Recommendations
Updates Status updates via an API. For example, you could
see messages like “Scott just uploaded a Flickr photo.”		 Facebook, Facebook BUZZ, Twitter, FriendFeed
Application Platform Gadgets, widgets, and other web applications integrated into Yahoo properties — including OpenSocial apps. Facebook applications, iGoogle widgets, Yahoo front page feeds
Data (YQL) and API Access Application programming interfaces for all of the features listed here plus mainstream Yahoo products. Want to download your Yahoo profile? You could write a script to do that. SQL, Yahoo Pipes, Web 2.0 API’s

The downside? If you want to play, you’ll need a Yahoo user account. Despite Yahoo granting full access to all of its data and applications through APIs, to utilize any of these “open” features, you and your friends will need to move what is on your Facebook or MySpace account and add it to your Yahoo account, too. Yahoo sees this as a way to get more users, and get them using more Yahoo products.

Yahoo’s Ash Patel says the success of the new platform will be measured purely by how much traffic it generates across Yahoo properties.

“For instance,” he says, “the average user using two or three things is now using four or five things. From the point of view of being the biggest publisher on the web, this will really increase the amount of users we have.”

Patel also touched on the attraction for third party developers to get cracking on its APIs. “We can sit here at Yahoo and we can guess all these applications [that users want], or we can get all this information out and let developers build it themselves.”

Furthermore, Yahoo’s Application Platform allows developers access to Yahoo applications in innovative new ways. For instance, the ability to build applications (complete with ads) for integration on Yahoo’s front page, which, according to Patel, is the most-used starting point on the web. Building an app for these pages gives software companies an opportunity to tap Yahoo’s audience for both users and advertising money. Also, Yahoo’s upcoming OpenMail feature will allow users to build applications on top of Yahoo Mail — similar to Google’s Gmail Labs, except at the hands of third-party developers.

Yahoo is rolling out these features over time. Users saw the first wave with SearchMonkey, BOSS and FireEagle earlier this summer. Last week’s refresh of Yahoo Profiles, complete with its new Update application, was the first consumer-end piece of the platform. Sometime next week, Yahoo’s Application Platform (including OpenSocial integration), YQL database and Yahoo APIs will see a first-stage release.

Further in the future, we’ll see the rest of Yahoo’s many properties begin to utilize all of the new features of the platform.

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Tags: , fireeagle, Yahoo, yahoo open strategy
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Take Your Geo-Mashups Beyond Google Maps

By Scott Gilbertson October 17th, 2008 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming

old mapWhen most people think of online maps they think of Google, Yahoo, MapQuest and other big name geo services, but those aren’t the only options for developers working with geodata on the web. Andrew Turner, CTO of GeoCommons, recently gave a talk at the Future of Web Apps Conference in London entitled “Beyond Google Maps.”

Turner’s main point isn’t that Google Maps is somehow bad (and while Turner focuses on Google the comments apply to the other two big map providers as well), but rather that there are a plethora of options out there for developers to explore.

In a post on his blog, Turner writes, “my goal with the talk was to inspire developers and designers to play with new tools, and for managers to realize what is possible and appropriate and spur their teams into creating compelling applications with geospatial capabilities.”

In other words, just because plotting data on Google Maps is pretty easy, doesn’t mean it’s the best answer for every site.

I haven’t been able to find a video of Turner’s talk, but slides embedded below highlight numerous geodata services and mapping options, many of which I’d never heard of but look quite useful (mapstraction in particular looks awesome). If you’re developing an application that uses a lot of geodata Turner’s slides are definitely worth exploring.

While I still think Google, Yahoo and Mapquest all make for fine mapping mashups, I’ve noticed a trend where some of the more interesting geodata-related sites are moving away from the big three in favor of more customized maps.

For instance, local news site EveryBlock uses its own custom maps which fit very nicely with the site’s design and are tailored more to EveryBlock’s needs (the maps split into neighborhoods, something that Google Maps aren’t very good at). The result is that EveryBlock doesn’t seem like just another mapping mashup.

Of course not every project will have the resources to use custom mapping and geo service tools, but if yours does have a look Turner’s talk and check out some of the other mapping tools on the web.

Beyond Google Maps - FOWA 2008 London
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: modestmaps mapstraction)

[via Simon Willison, photo from Flickr]

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Blackbird Tool Makes JavaScript Alert() Debugging Obsolete

By Scott Loganbill October 16th, 2008 Categories: Programming, Software & Tools, Web Basics

If you’re debugging JavaScript, you’ll probably be interested in something a little more comprehensive than alert(). Blackbird adds some control and specificity to the debugging messages you install into your code to see if it is working. It also makes the debugging window a little more controllable than the error message that pops up for an alert().

It does so by adding a floating black table (seen to the right) that you can use to log different errors and data points throughout your code. It makes debugging a cinch, and it helps you figure out what you’re doing wrong in a much more visible manner than adding alerts.

Blackbird is installed by adding a link in your page to some lightweight, downloadable JavaScript and CSS. Open the pop-up logging window using the F2 key. Other F2 variations will move the window, make it larger and close it.

The developers of blackbird promise you’ll never use alert() again. Check out the Blackbird webpage for code and live examples of the coding box and the kind of messages you can install in your page.

This isn’t a replacement for other debugging tools, like Firebug. However, unlike Firebug and like HTML design debugging tool XRAY or Firebug Lite, it works over any modern browser without a software installation.

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Tags: , Blackbird, debug, debugging, firebug
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Silverlight Update Aims for Greater Adoption Through Developers

By Scott Loganbill October 13th, 2008 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming, Software & Tools

Microsoft announced a new version of Silverlight Monday. The upgrade allows for more robust rich media experiences using the embedded Silverlight rich media plugin in most browsers.

The update has some features that allow more robust online applications, but for the most part, version 2.0 is focused on opening the platform for interoperability. The bulk of the release included programming tools targeted towards encouraging developers to build Silverlight into their pages.

Additionally, the Silverlight team announced partnerships with CBS college sports network, Blockbuster’s upcoming Movielink online rental application, Yahoo Japan, Toyota, Home Shopping Netwrok and Hard Rock Hotel and Cafe. If you visit these sites, consider yourself one of the few who will or have joined the rising legions of web users (and those Hewlett Packard PC owners) coerced into installing another rich media plugin.

Thanks to previous partnerships and events like NBC’s streamcasting of the Olympics, Microsoft now claims about one in four computers have Silverlight installed. This is still a far cry from Adobe Flash’s 99% adoption rate. Silverlight 2.0’s direction towards interoperability are obviously intended to solve this problem. The more developers who use and embed Silverlight, the more likely it will be for adoption to spread. User’s are far less concerned about downloading the plugin than we may suspect.

“People who download Silverlight, they’re not thinking ‘I want to download Silverlight,’” Microsoft corporate vice president Scott Guthrie surmised, “They’re thinking ‘I want to watch college sports on TV.’”

The bright side of Silverlight over its competitors (namely Flash) has got to be its bitrate., Silverlight is capable of bitrates of up to 1.5 mbits per second in high definition. For comparison, your typical YouTube video using Adobe Flash will stream at around 250-300 kbits per second. Along with quality video, the company really hopes version 2 will convince website developers of the platform’s strengths.

“It’s a really robust, really mature stack.” Guthrie gushed. “And there I also expect is where you will see us hold our own and compete very well.”

The developer-friendly runtime environment is now able to handle practically every widely available programming language out there. A host of tools were made available for developing rich media applications with Silverlight. The wide range of tools are built with Microsoft products like Visual Studios, but the release also announced a set of tools for those running the Eclipse integrated development environment — a popular programming editor for Java developers.

The software works across Firefox and Internet Explorer, and on Mac and PC. According to Guthrie, even the latest developer build of Google’s Chrome browser (for Windows) is able to install Silverlight.


Tags: adobe, flash, Microsoft, silverlight
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Sitemap Files Ensure Google Finds All Your Webpages

By Scott Gilbertson October 13th, 2008 Categories: Programming, Web Basics

Sample_xmlDeveloper Jeff Atwood has an inside look at the importance of using a sitemap.xml file to ensure that search engines are finding all of your website’s content. Atwood shows how, prior to setting up a sitemap.xml file, Google’s search bots were ignoring large portions of Atwood’s recently launched StackOverflow site.

The problem was that StackOverflow used a URL scheme which paginates content using the dynamic ?page=n format. Now you might assume, as Atwood did, that the Google bots could figure this out (after all, probably at least half the web is using the same format), but for whatever reason the Google bots weren’t following these URLs.

As a result less than half of StackOverflow was being indexed.

The solution, should your site be in a similar situation, is to create a sitemap.xml file and use it to explicitly tell Google and other search engine spiders what and where your pages are.

As the Google Webmaster Q and A says, Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

  • Your site has dynamic content.
  • Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process — for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
  • Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
  • Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

So, if you’re having trouble getting your website indexed by Google and other search engines, now is a good time to create and use a sitemap file. For more tips on optimizing your websites, be sure to check out our tutorial on Site Optimization.

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What’s On Your CSS Wishlist?

By Michael Calore October 10th, 2008 Categories: Programming, Visual Design, Web Basics

If you could determine the future of Cascading Style Sheets, what would that future look like?

The web design site CSS-tricks.com recently held a survey in which they asked 15 top designers what they’d like to see in the roadmap for the CSS spec. Jon Hicks, Wolfgang Bartelme, Mint’s Shaun Inman and Stuff and Nonsense’s Andy Clarke were among the participants.

Rounded corners comes up often. Other great ideas include cross-browser support for gradients and shadows, layer blending and styles a la Photoshop, more consistent syntax for writing declarations in shorthand and native support for conditionals.

Granted, some of what we’d like to see in CSS is already in the pipeline for CSS-3. But many of the desired features are more of a pipe dream. Like support for using non-standard fonts beyond sIFR and images, for one — David Walsh thought of that one.

We thought it would be fun to let the Webmonkey readership take a stab at generating its own CSS wishlist. So we’ve taken a few of the suggestions mentioned above and plugged them into a Reddit widget (attributing the original source, of course). Vote up your favorites. Vote down the entries that you find stupefyingly misguided. Scroll down to contribute your own item to the list.

Show wishlist items that are: hot | new | top-rated or submit your own item

Submit a wishlist item

While you can submit as many items as you want, you can only submit one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.

Back to top

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Greasemonkey Shows Off Political Colors

By Adam DuVander October 10th, 2008 Categories: Programming, Software & Tools

Memeorandum colored by Greasemonkey script

Andy Baio, a prominent blogger and creator of Upcoming.org, has released a Greasemonkey script to visualize the perceived political bias of linked content on the political news aggregation site Memeorandum. If a site tends to link to more left-leaning stories, it’s colored blue. Right-leaning linkers are red.

With the help of Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, Baio used a recommendation algorithm to analyze the last three months of linking behavior for each news source. With that data stored in a Google Spreadsheet, Baio used the Ajax support in Greasemonkey to grab a JSON feed and colorize the links. Those with Firefox’s Greasemonkey extension and Baio’s script installed will see the colorized links when viewing Memeorandum. Baio also released a full-fledged extension that does not require Greasemonkey.

This is a great example of how Greasemonkey can be used to change the way you view a page. In Baio’s case, he wanted to see the perceived bias of a site at a glance so he could choose a balanced view. The code from this project is available under the free and open-source GPL license. You could use it to create other ways of visualizing data on the web.

GreasemonkeyIf you’re brand new to Greasemonkey, be sure to read my new Greasemonkey tutorial on the versatile Firefox extension. If you’ve ever written JavaScript before, you’ll quickly learn the ways of Greasemonkey, which essentially gives you the ability to insert your code anywhere in someone else’s site, but only for your own use on your local machine.

You don’t need to bite off as much as Baio, who admits this is his first Greasemonkey script. One of the biggest benefits I’ve found is that I can write code to pull out the important stuff already in the page. My tutorial shows a simple example of that, where I create a floating menu of all <h2> tags on the page. It turns out this is useful for long Wikipedia entries… and Webmonkey tutorials.

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Tags: Greasemonkey, politics
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