tOMPSON’s blog

MountainGrafix.at verlost einen iPod touch 32GB unter allen die sich ihren RSS Feed abonnieren. Es müssen mindestens 150 Abonnenten sein am 3.8.2008 - also mitmachen!

Ich muss jetzt mal eine Frage stellen die mich schon länger beschäftigt:

Nutzen die Besucher meines Blogs Web 2.0?

Und damit meine ich nicht (nur) die “lustigen” social-networking Seiten wie facebook, Xing, StudiVZ und wie sie noch alle heißen. Natürlich haben diese Seiten auch einen Nutzen und ich hab dort auch Accounts aber es gibt ja noch so viel mehr.

Verwendet ihr RSS Feeds? Wenn nein, wie bekommt ihr neue Informationen auf euren Liebliengseiten mit? Wenn ja, welchen Feed-Reader verwendet ihr? Ich habs ja schon mal gepostet, aber es sei nochmals gesagt: Ich liebe Google Reader:

Damit kann ich auf jedem PC sofort die aktuellesten Einträge auf meinen Lieblingsseiten sehen und lesen. Ausserdem verwende ich den Shared-Items-Mechanismus um Posts die mir besonders gut gefallen anderen mitzuteilen - siehe grüne Box in der rechten Sidebar meines Blogs oder meine Shared Items Seite.

Also nutzt Google Reader und gebt mir Bescheid, denn ich würde gerne die Shared Items Seite von Kollegen und Freunden abonnieren!

Nutzt ihr social bookmarking sites wie del.icio.us? Auch da wär es interessant mal bei Bekannten ein paar gute URLs zu finden.

Verwendet ihr Online-Foto Seiten wie flickr oder Picasa?

Relativ wenige von euch werden Twitter verwenden - ich bin dabei es ein wenig zu probieren Aber gerade Twitter ist ein Dienst der nur wirklich Sinn macht wenn ein paar Leute aus dem Bekanntenkreis ihn verwenden.

Eine sehr geniale neue Seite ist friendfeed.com - dort kann man alle zuvor genannten Web 2.0 Services die man nutzt zusammenfassen und so über einen einzigen RSS Feed Aktivitäten verfolgen die einen interessieren. Funktioniert so ähnlich wie auf der facebook Profil Seite.

Ich weiß nicht an was es liegt das sich diese ganzen Services und Seiten in unseren Breitengraden nicht so verbreiten wie man das anderswo beobachten kann. Natürlich hat das alles mit Privatsphäre zu tun. Allerdings kann ja jeder selbst entscheiden was er online stellt und weitergeben möchte.

Ich würde gerne ein paar RSS Feeds von meinen Freunden, Kollegen und Bekannten abonnieren anstatt die von irgendwelchen Unbekannten (auch wenn es darunter ein paar interessante gibt).

Help us to set a Guinness World Record: most software downloaded in 24 hours. The version 3 of Firefox, the best browser in the world, is released today.

UPDATE: Seems like the Mozilla servers are hit hard by the traffic - they seem to be down. Still waiting for the final version (20:48 CEST)

Today Opera Mini 4.1 was released. This version comes with the following new features:

• up to 50% faster
• Find text within a Web page
• Auto-completion of URLs
• Download and upload files
• Save pages for offline viewing

As every former version of Opera Mini I already downloaded and installed it on my BlackBerry - go to www.operamini.com and grap it there.

Lately there a lot of people are experimenting what is possible wiht JavaScript. Libraries like prototype and scriptaculous are building the base für writing extensive object oriented JavaScript code. Some weeks ago the nihilogic blog presented a Super Mario implemented in 14kB of code playable in the browser. It even includes music

Today I found ProtoRPG an RPG engine written in JavaScript based on prototype and scriptaculous. There is also a playable demo online.

The last example is very interesting: A japanese user group managed to port parts of the Java VM to JavaScript. It allows to convert Java into byte code and embed it into the document. They created a cool Tetris clone.

Lately the amount of JavaScript in web applications has grown a lot. JavaScript has always been there but with the need of AJAX and more and more dynamical features modern web developers can not avoid it.

Luckily there are a lot of good concepts arising and libraries available (e.g. prototype, yui, …) that show how to control the JavaScript monster. Something that always bothered me was that I was not able to find a good editor for JavaScript. Since about six months I am using JSEclipse from Adobe which is a free Eclipse plugin that provides a lot support for writing JavaScript (code-completion, syntac check, …).

The JSEclipse editor allows me to edit standalone JS files and script code included in JSPs but many times I ran into the problem that I needed to mix JavaScript and Java code. For example to define an URL for an AJAX request or to get a message from a resource bundle that has to be displayed in a JavaScript dialog. The JSEclipse editor does not understand this “mixed” code parts. Additionally it is not possible to externalize the JavaScript code into external files and the code looks ugly.

Yesterday I found this article about how to do I18N in JavaScript. I like the approach with the externalized constants very much because

• it allows me to create a central include containing all the information from Java needed for the JavaScript code -> only one place to change
• the main JavaScript code is “JavaScript only” -> editable by the JSEclipse editor
• the JavaScript only code may be externalized into separate files
• the appearance of the constants instantly makes their purpose clear and the JS code looks clean

Jeff Atwood posted a link to a site that sells T-shirts and stickers with the following image:

I am thinking of ordering some of them. Handling encodings is a very important part of programming and from my experience a lot of developers do not care enough about it. I encourage every developer to read “The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)” from Joel Spolsky. It describes the evolution of encodings in a very easy way.

Some months ago I wrote a post about how to deal with encodings when using Tomcat as web application container.

Microsoft now provides all of its Internet Explorer versions in separate downloadable virtual PC images. This is extremely useful for web developers because it allows them to test their applications for compatibility.

If you have got some time left (about an hour or so) I would recommend you to watch the interview Guy Kawasaki made with Steve Ballmer at Mix 08 this week. It is the best interview of Steve Ballmer I have ever seen. Although he said of PR sentences it shows a lot personality. It is really funny to see him talk about his competitors Google and Apple. He is truly enthusiastic about what he and his company does. The monkey dance for web developers is another highlight

PS: I decided to leave the embedded movie although it is based on MS Silverlight …

Today I found this post on problogger.net that made me aware of another Google tool I did not use until now that could be very helpful. I am talking about Google Webmasters Tools. Google Webmasters Tools allow you to see a website from the view of the Google crawlers. This means it is possible to check a lot of statistics like the top queries in specific months or to see what words went into the Google search index.

Another very interesting feature is to list all the external links to the specific page of your site and in total. This tells me I definitely have to get more links pointing to my blog

This tools is a nice addition to the other Google tools I use to manage my blog, which are Analytics, Alerts, AdSense and AdWords.