Posts from July 2006

Google has just launched project hosting inside of its Google Code effort. The Google Code Project Hosting center allows any developer to create and host a new project powered by Google management and hosting tools. The new service features a reworked backend for Subversion built on top of Google's Big Table file system. The robustness of Google's backend will power the code repository. The site features a new issue-tracking system utilizing AJAX techniques for quick and responsive feedback for its users. The issue-tracking interface is similar to Gmail's table layout, and allows customization through open tag fields. Developers on...

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Rasmus Lerdorf led OSCON attendees through a series of optimizations for modern web applications using PHP at O'Reilly's Open Source conference today. Most programmers use default installations and configurations for their web applications and never really dig deep within their stack or their own code to optimize page load and latency. The full slides from Rasmus's talk are available online and I recorded audio of the entire session from the front row. Rich web applications make better use of browser user interfaces through the use of less visible round-trips to the server (through AJAX or other methods). These new...

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Mac OS X open-source community site OpenDarwin announced it will shut down in the next couple months. The site was the center of discussion and development of WebKit (the code behind Apple's Safari browser and Nokia's Series 60 browser), DarwinPorts, and other projects. It's too bad the projects will now all disperse, and I can't help but wonder if the move was influenced by something to be announced at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in a few weeks....

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Summer is here, meaning it must be time for a new site design from Technorati. The four major Technorati redesigns have each tried to welcome a different type of crowd to the site without alienating existing users. When the site went online in November 2002 the target audience was alpha-bloggers and Linux Journal readers. The company was incorporated in May 2003 and saw its first big redesign in the summer of 2004 focused on the new users visiting the site for real-time information in the run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential elections. In 2005 the site redesigned again, aiming for...

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Saul Hansell of The New York Times examines Google's current product offerings and feature gaps and comes away a bit puzzled. According to quotes in the article Google goes for the wow factor with stand-alone products that do not integrate well with the work of others. Marissa Mayer says it's a lot easier to get engineers to spend time developing new features than fill in a feature gap. Sergey Brin says he is now encouraging engineers to develop their ideas as add-ons for existing Google products instead of as stand-alone products. Former Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider is quoted saying Yahoo!...

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DeWitt and I were chatting over breakfast yesterday about the future of search. What will be the big changes in search over the next 5 years? What are the growth markets in terms of index size, users, repeat visits, and new interfaces? The first thing that popped to mind was the international landscape of the Internet and the always-on world wide web taking hold in developing nations. According to comScore numbers from May, 14% of the world's total population age 15 or older are online. Bump that number up a bit if you include Internet cafes and mobile phones, a...

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The two Microsoft blogs discussing the upcoming Zune product suite, Zune Insider and Madison and Pine, are powered by Six Apart's TypePad blogging software. That's Apache on Linux using Perl and PostgreSQL. Microsoft is heavily into "dogfooding" everything, from Windows Mobile smartphones to the latest build of Vista. It's good to see the Xbox team step out and blaze their own path....

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Google Base now provides an RSS feed for its search results. Every search contains a link to the RSS feed and a feed icon on the top right portion of the page. A search for Pearl Jam is a good example. (via Search Engine Watch) I'm surprised the results are provided in RSS and not Atom, as Google seems to prefer the later. It's good that Google added the feed icon as well, drawing attention to the link....

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MySpace recently required all widgets upgrade to Flash Player 9 (ActionScript 3) and disable internal links.

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Search engine Ask.com now displays the last three feed items at the top of the search result page for strong title matches. A search for "BoingBoing" displays the popular blog's last three posts complete with a link to the individual item, a 98-character summary, and the publication date. There are a few bits of polish missing from the implementation. I'd like to be able to directly access the source feed and subscribe right away. It would also be cool if every feed title from my subscription list was part of my own personal smart answers, increasing the personal relevancy...

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