Archive for the ‘Web Basics’ Category

File Under: APIs, Social, Web Basics
Aug
1
2012

One Foot on the Platform…

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There’s an old and wonderful Little Feat song.

Lowell George’s girlfriend can’t make up her mind. How he describes it is what’s so cool. “She’s got one foot on the platform, the other on the train.”

And that’s the best strategy, right now, for a reporter or blogger using Twitter.

You can’t get off the platform, that’s where everyone is. But you need a Plan B, just in case you have to get off the platform. That’s the train.

You need a tool that allows you to publish to Twitter, and at the same time publish to an open system that can be connected to other open systems. So users can create their own Twitter, the same way they use Twitter to follow many sources, without having to go through Twitter.

Twitter is the platform. The feed is the train.

It might sound complicated, but it’s not.

If Twitter were to cancel my account, I would keep posting, and people who followed me on the train (following the analogy) would continue to get my updates. The people on the platform, however — would not.

It’s how we develop strength, and the power to choose, without leaving Twitter.

If Twitter Corp plans on being nice to us, then they should not have a problem with this approach. Their API permits it. It’s consistent with Dick Costolo’s edict that we should put stuff into Twitter, but not take stuff out of it.

It’s a way to preserve journalistic integrity even if Twitter hasn’t yet figured out if it’s in the business of providing a platform for journalism.

This post first appeared on Scripting News.

Dave Winer, a former researcher at NYU and Harvard, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.
Follow @davewiner on Twitter.
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File Under: CSS, Programming, Web Basics
May
31
2012

Learn to Code by Watching Others Write It

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Stopwatch in CSS 3, no JavaScript necessary. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Five years ago the hotness in web development was showing what you could create without resorting to Flash. Now it seems the same is true of JavaScript. While we’ve nothing against JavaScript, the increasingly powerful tools in CSS 3 mean that JavaScript is no longer a necessity for building cool stuff on the web.

The latest JavaScript-free demo we’ve run across is this very cool stopwatch demo made using only CSS 3, no images or JavaScript necessary. Now before you dive into the code and get all Karl Van Hœt on us, yes, there is a script used to handle CSS prefixing, but the actual stopwatch doesn’t require it to work.

But what caught our eye even more than the JavaScript-free stopwatch demo is the tutorial that accompanies it. The tutorial — which is one part screencast and one part code dump — is part of Code Player, which helps you learn how to do things by showing you the code as it’s written. It’s an interesting tutorial method, one we haven’t seen before.

Watching code being written isn’t for everyone, especially beginners who might not be able to easily follow what’s happening, but it’s well suited to those that already understand the basics and just want to see how some particular function was written. It also provides an interesting look at how other developers work, which in turn might teach you a new trick or two.

The Code Player offers a variety of playback speeds depending on how fast you want to run through the tutorial, and there’s a timeline scrubber for pausing and rewinding any bits you miss. Our only complaint is that Code Player forces focus in the browser; when you try to click another tab or do something in the background Code Player steals focus back immediately.

If learning something new by watching someone else type sounds intriguing, head on over to the Code Player site. And don’t worry if the stopwatch demo has no appeal for you, there are plenty of other tutorials to choose from.

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File Under: JavaScript, Web Basics
May
30
2012

Twitter Declares Everything Old New Again

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Image: Twitter

Twitter is optimizing its web interface for speed, ditching several of the supposedly cutting-edge changes it made with the “new Twitter” revamp from 2010. The new Twitter redesign was controversial for its use of hashbang (#!) URLs and because it used JavaScript to build the entire page, content and all.

Now Twitter is returning to tried-and-true server-side methods of building webpages. It turns out using JavaScript to do everything is not such a good idea, at least not if you want your website to be fast.

Twitter says that returning to traditional means of serving webpages “dropped the time to first Tweet to one-fifth of what it was.”

Even better news for those concerned about the future of the web and the longevity of URLs is the news that Twitter is getting rid of its hashbang URLs. The hashbang syntax was originally designed to allow Google’s spiders to crawl Ajax content — content loaded dynamically — but sometime in 2010 hashbang URLs started popping up all over the web, including at Twitter.

The hashbang syntax works well if you use it as it was designed, to surface Ajax content that would otherwise be missed by Google. But it was always an awkward hack, not a cornerstone on which to build a well-designed URL, and extending it beyond its intended use often proves disastrous (as sites like Gawker can attest).

Twitter will begin phasing out hashbang URLs in the coming weeks, starting with its tweet permalink URLs.

Much of the write-up about the new speed enhancements on Twitter’s engineering blog reads like a web development best-practices tutorial from 2001, but there are some new ideas lurking toward the end, where Twitter Engineering Manager Dan Webb outlines Twitter’s new module-based JavaScript loading methods, built around CommonJS.

“We opted to arrange all our code as CommonJS modules,” writes Webb, “This means that each piece of our code explicitly declares what it needs to execute.” In other words, each piece of code is aware of what other pieces it needs to work. That means Twitter can tune how it bundles its code, “lazily load parts of it, download pieces in parallel, separate it into any number of files, and more — all without the author of the code having to know or care about this.”

Webb doesn’t mention Twitter’s front-end toolkit BootStrap in his post, but rolling together CommonJS and Twitter’s own dependency builder — which Webb says is similar to the RequireJS optimizer — sounds like a great addition for BootStrap 3.0.

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Basics, Web Services
May
29
2012

The ‘Internet Underground Music Archive’ Rides Again

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Quick, install Shockwave! Screenshot: The IUMA homepage in 1996.

The origins of the online music revolution are back, thanks to internet archivist extraordinaire Jason Scott. Scott, who works for the internet preservation group Archive.org, has resurrected the Internet Underground Music Archive, or IUMA as the kids called it back in 1992, when they were uploading songs via Gopher.

Started at the University of California at Santa Cruz by Jeff Patterson, Jon Luini and Rob Lord, the IUMA’s goal was to create an online music archive for unsigned musicians and bands. The idea was simple: Bands uploaded files and sent them out to fans over Usenet or e-mail. And just like that, the internet music revolution was born.

The IUMA site eventually came to host thousands of bands and hundreds of thousands of songs, many in MP2 and other long-since-abandoned audio formats.

Like so many other sites of that era, IUMA was eventually sold off during the dot-com boom years to a series of clueless owners who let the site die a slow death of neglect until it was shut down completely in 2006 (hmm, why does that sound so familiar?). Fortunately John Gilmore — perhaps best known for helping to start the Electronic Frontier Foundation — had the foresight to grab a copy of the site shortly before it disappeared.

Now Scott has used Gilmore’s tape archives to resurrect the IUMA site. As Scott says, “you are in for a treat and a hell of a lot of modern musical history just got saved.” The rescued archive doesn’t have everything that ever appeared on IUMA, but it does resurrect some 25,000 bands and artists and over 680,000 tracks of music. That’s 243 days worth of music for those of you more accustomed to iTunes than IUMA.

Scott says this resurrected version of IUMA should be “considered 1.0” and has promised to make sure the original data is “stored safely away so the next set of folks can try better techniques to get it back.”

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File Under: Web Basics
May
23
2012

Mozilla Aims to Build a Better Web With ‘Webmakers’ Project [Updated]

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Mozilla Webmakers Summer Code Party, coming soon.

Mozilla has kicked off a new effort to do something that’s very near and dear to Webmonkey’s heart — helping people create cool stuff on the web. Mozilla Webmaker, as the new initiative is known, wants to create “a new generation of webmakers, and a more web literate world.”

Mark Surman, Mozilla’s Executive Director, calls web literacy “the world’s second language,” and goes on to say Mozilla believes web literacy is “a vital 21st century skill — as important as reading, writing and arithmetic.”

To help bring that literacy to more people around the world Mozilla’s Webmaker will offer a variety of different things to try, each aimed at different interests:

  • 1) Tools. Authoring tools and software, designed and built with our community. From supercharging web video with Popcorn, to remixing with Hackasaurus, to making your own web pages with Thimble.
  • 2) Projects. Practical starter projects, how-tos and recipes, designed to help people at all levels make something amazing with the web. From tweaking your blog template to building apps that change the world.
  • 3) Community. Bringing people with diverse skills and backgrounds together. Teachers, filmmakers, journalists, youth. From web ninjas to newbies. All making and learning together at events, meet-ups and hack jams everywhere.

Webmaker isn’t just Mozilla, either; the company has partnered with the likes of Tumblr, Creative Commons, Code for America, and dozens of others.

To get things started, Mozilla will kick off what it calls a “Summer Code Party” on June 23. And yes, it sounds a lot like Google’s Summer of Code, but with a focus on building the open web. Head over to the Webmaker site to search for something near you or start your own event.

For more info about Summer Code Party and other aspects of the Webmaker initiative head over to the new site, or check out the intro video below.

[Update: Several readers have asked about Thimble, mentioned in the Mozilla quote above. A Mozilla spokeperson tells Webmonkey, "Mozilla Thimble is the name of a web app we're building that provides a live side-by-side code editor for webmakers -- code on the left, live preview on the right." Thimble will also provide error checking and code tips find and fix mistakes quickly. Mozilla says the goal is to "give webmakers a tool to build and share web pages and also allows them to load in our pre-made project templates with guided content." Mozilla Thimble will launch as a beta in early June, in time for the Summer Code Party campaign.]

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