Rojo in MIT Technology Review
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MIT Technology Review has a nice piece  about Rojo   "These days it seems everyone's blogging. Combine this newest source of information with more traditional online news sources, and you could spend your whole day slogging through lists of bookmarked Web pages just to keep up. Rojo Networks is one of the latest of a bevy of startups trying to help Web users make better sense of this content explosion. The year-and-a-half-old startup's approach is to help users home in on the most relevant and interesting news and blogs by finding out what others in their online social networks are reading."  "Rojo exploits a recent and growing phenomenon called RSS, for Really Simple Syndication. With RSS,  ...
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Wednesday we pushed a new build of Rojo  which introduced a few new and important features:  * Tags *  Chris does a good job of explaining  tags so I'll start there:  "Feeling taggy? Some prominent bloggers have been talking about tags and there have been some fascinating discussions about how tags, also known as keywords, can facilitate the "merging of personal information architecture and public/shared/group/emergent information architecture." But if you have been using sites like del.icio.us or Flickr you don't need to read this high-brow stuff to know: tags are cool. They are an easy way to categorize your stuff and a great way to see what your friends are categorizing as well."  Tags ar ...
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The 'ImageJ Plugins' project is a source of custom plugins for the Image/J software. Image/J is a public domain image processing and analysis program developed in Java (http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/).   Version 1.2 of the core ij-plugins is available.    Improvements: * sRGB  XYZ  CIE L*a*b* conversion modified to use approach presented   at http://www.brucelindbloom.com/. * Improvements to maximum entropy threshold plugins.  Bug fixes: * BUG-1503298: MetaImage Reader did not support some of MetaImage tags. * BUG-1812587: FastMedian Exception for even kernel size. * BUG-1881444: k-means macro always showed animations.  There are 26 plugins in this release:  * 3D IO   -- MetaImage Reader   -- MetaImage Writer   -- VTK Reader   -- VTK Writer  * 3D Toolkit   -- Connected Threshold Grower   -- Auto Clip Volume   -- Morphological Dilate 3D   -- Morphological Erode 3D  * Color (and miltiband images)   -- RGB to CIE L*a*b* stack   -- CIE L*a*b* stack to RGB   -- RGB to YCbCr stack   -- YCbCr stack to RGB   -- Multiband Sobel edges   -- Multiband Difference edges   -- Multiband Gradient edges   -- Intensity shift  * Filters   -- Coherence Enhancing Diffusion   -- Directional Coherence   -- Fast Median   -- Perona-Malik Anisotropic Diffusion   -- Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion  * Segmentation   -- k-means Clustering   -- Maximum Entropy Threshold   -- Maximum Entropy Multi-Threshold  * Graphics   -- Image Quilter
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The results of the latest poll from the International PHP Magazine are in. The question this time asked which, of the options given, were your favorites in the Smyfony project's feature set. There was a clear winner above all of the others - the scaffolding that it makes so simple.   Some of the other options that were included but didn't get nearly as many votes were:  Simple templating and helpers Multilingualism and I18N support Object model and MVC separation Ajax support  Following at a distant second was the "Object model and MVC separation" choice (and to others, "Enterprise ready" and "Ajax support" nipping close at its heels).   Be sure to cast your vote in this week's poll that asks your opinion on some of the rules that the PHP Throwdown has set in place. Vote for the one that you think fits best with the spirit of the competition.
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Opera CTO HÃ¥kon Wium Lie gives us a video tour of his OLPC prototype. Can you guess which browser it's running? In Monkey Bites. In Monkey Bites.
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Raphael Stolt has posted a book review of one of Manning Publishing's PHP-related books, "PHP in Action: Modern Software Practices for PHP".   Over the last few days I got the chance to skim through the upcoming Manning release "PHP in Action: Modern Software Practices for PHP" by Dagfinn ReiersÃ¸l et al. The reviewed book is seperated into four main parts, covering lots of interesting topics in a good and fluent writing style.   Raphael outlines the book, mentioning the four parts the book is divided up into:  Basic PHP tools and concepts Developing applications via Test Driven Development Web presentation and user interfaces Object-oriented development including things like database abstraction  Raphael gives the book a positive rating and recommends it for anyone that has the basics down and is looking to extend their knowledge that much more.
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On the ProDevTips.com website, there's a new tutorial (part one of a series) that walks the developer through the integration of the Zend Framework, some Ajax functionality and Smarty to create a feed reader.   In this series I will walk you through the code of a site that uses only Ajax and Scriptaculous to handle it's completely windowed interface. Making an interface like this is not really good design, it's only done here for the sake of teaching. It is kinda cool though. Especially if you have a big screen.   The source code is available for download and having it makes the installation and setup of the system much simpler. With it, you're only about fifteen steps away from getting the application up and running.
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Over on the Zend Developer Zone today, Akash Mehta has written up  a review of a book from Packt Publishing, "PHP Web 2.0 Mashups" (by Shu-Wai Chow):    As it's title suggests, PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects is a demonstration of the various techniques available for developing mashups in PHP. Through a highly practical format, Shu-Wai takes the reader through a series of projects utilising different web services and APIs, while carefully exposing the reader to a wide variety of technologies and data formats.   With careful selection and shaping of language, the book is an extremely effective introduction to the world of mashup development with PHP.    Akash talks about the contents of the book (the different projects it covers) and how the book provides a version useful resource to those just getting into the mashup world - a reference guide to some of the popular data transfer methods/formats out there.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... It's with much anticipation that I say this. I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.  The idea is simple.  There's a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you'll understand the vision. Some of the work I've done is technical, some is user interface, and some is working with media organizations to try to create a comfort level, or at least a spirit of Let's Give This A Try. In the latter case, it's much like working with the NY Times to get their news headlines and summaries to flow through Radio's RSS aggregator in 2002. Only this time we're working with photographs, and we think, the best news photographers in the world. And the pictures are beautifully high-def, they look really great when displayed on LCD and plasma screens. I use it with my 52-inch Samsung and 46-inch Sony. Of course what looks great on a wall, also looks great on a 15-inch Macbook or 24-inch iMac.   And while we connect those pros with your TV, it's equally important that we connect your friends and families too. One of the early testers found the pictures that Doc Searls uploads to Flickr a great revelation. Me too. That's because Doc is not only a great photographer, he's also a great story-teller. I find that I can follow the lives of far more friends visually than I can through text messages (which I love to do too!). Viewing great photos on bigscreen TVs, desktops and laptops -- that's one focus, but not the only one.  I wanted to provide a complete two-way tool for people who love Flickr, as I do.  Why Flickr? Well, they've got this great thing called an API. It makes it possible for people like me to make software that runs on a desktop computer that does things like automatically backing up your new photos every night, and providing a drop-folder on your desktop for quick uploads. (It understands tags too, it's incredibly simple.) We also made it easy to post pictures you like to Twitter. Why Twitter? It's that API thing again. They made it easy for us to love them. I wish more network service developers understood how powerful this outstretched hand is.  But that's not all! Not by a long shot. The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004. So I've been working on other tools to drop into this base platform and once we have a good-sized base of people using it for "really simple photos" on the desktop, there will be other tools. And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can.  Anyway, I'm in the last stages, preparing the download site, and a FAQ, and tweaking the installer. One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That's because I'm doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.  It should be ready before the sun goes down today.
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What do you think of the new design?  For those of you reading via RSS just click on the permalink.   Fixed layout.  Blue background.  Nice clean sidebar.  No more obsolete links. Updated content.  All to give the appearance that I'm a professional!  This is part of my new effort to blog more now that I have Rojo  launched.  Anyway.  If anything looks strange please let me know!  I'll also be making some additional layout tweaks in the next couple of days.  In the meantime this will do...
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Over on the Rojo blog  Chris writes:  "Thanks very much to Steve Gillmor for alerting us to a bug in how we, and other aggregators, were parsing New York Times RSS feeds. In short, stories older than 7 days or so were linking to abstracts of the articles, not the full articles themselves. This is something we will fix. Steve speculated that perhaps the "Times doesn't want server-based aggregators such as Bloglines and Rojo to consistently allow permalink access beyond seven days." Fortunately we don't see any evidence of that and in fact believe NYT has done a great job in making their content available via RSS, particularly by including a specific "partner" parameter on the URL for RSS aggr ...
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The future kitchen gadgets that could make life easier in the kitchen, say MIT researchers.
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Darren Barefoot takes Rojo to task ...  "I can kind of see what they're getting at, but I'm not sure it's the right approach. Has the market demonstrated that it wants all-in-one info-sharing, social networking solutions? I don't think so."  Rojo is the first service of its kind to integrate weblog aggregation (info-sharing) and social networking - of course the market hasn't prove itself -  the market is still growing!  The entire social networking, weblog aggregation, and wiki space is going to be opening up wide this year.  We're seeing a lot of new web services being deployed on an almost daily basis.  "Their generalist predecessors--Friendster, Orkut, Tribe--were nifty to play with, but ...
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Matthew Turland has mentioned his article in the latest issue of php|architect magazine (the December 2007 issue) covering web scraping.   Just a quick post to announce (albeit a little late) that the December 2007 issue of php|architect, which includes my article on web scraping. Please buy a copy, give it a read, and feel free to post comments on the forum thread for the article. I'd love to hear some reader feedback!   Other articles in the issue include "Writing an Object/Relational Mapper in PHP", "Understanding CLI" and the cover story "Going native with mysqlnd".
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The International PHP Magazine has posted the results from their latest poll conducted over the week. This time they asked developers what they looked for in a framework.   The options this time were:  An O-O MVC structure ORM / Active Record Good Controller Structure Ajax Interoperability Ability to Incorporate Testing Open Source/Free License Security Good Helpers Scaffolding  With the first option "an OO MVC structure" leading the pack with almost twenty percent. Next in line was (in order of votes): having an Open Source/fre license, bundled with good helpers, good security, and a good controller structure.   Be sure to check out their latest poll too. It asks about security architectures and what developers out there think they should contain.
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(InfoWorld) - Looking to bolster AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and development of Web 2.0 applications, the OpenAjax Alliance on Wednesday plans to introduce a project that addresses AJAX interoperability issues. The alliance, which features vendors such as IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, will roll out its OpenAjax Hub project. This effort involves developing a standard set of JavaScript functionality to tackle problems with interoperability arising when multiple AJAX libraries are used within the same Web page. With the hub, multiple AJAX run-time libraries would be able to coexist on a page. Version 1.0 of the OpenAjax Hub is planned for completion by the end of this calendar year; integration of the hub into AJAX toolkits expected in early 2007. "[In] today's world, AJAX libraries in general believe they own the entire browser [and] JavaScript environment, that they're the first one and the last one, so they assume a consequence-free environment where they can do whatever they want to do," said Jon Ferraiolo, acting director of the alliance and a Web architect in the emerging technologies group at IBM. What results, he said, are collisions of JavaScript objects and the toolkits managing HTML markup, and an inability to integrate functions such as drag and drop events. With development of the hub, the alliance is dealing with its top priority, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, in an e-mail response to questions. "There is a critical need for OpenAjax at this point in time, because each vendor's AJAX implementation is generally incompatible with the others," Bloomberg said. "Basically, even though each AJAX widget leverages XML and JavaScript, both of which are open standards, that doesn't mean that one widget from one toolkit will work with another widget from some other toolkit. The most important goal of OpenAjax is figuring out how to resolve this interoperability problem. Clearly, Ajax will be far more successful if any widget works with any other widget, toolkit, or platform." Support for the hub is expected in toolkits such as Dojo and script.aculo.us as well as in AJAX frameworks such as Tibco General Interface and offerings from Backbase, JackBe and Nexaweb. "No one has made any commitments [to use the hub yet] but generally, [the parties cited] are all active in the alliance," said Ferraiolo. The unveiling of the hub is part of an update on the alliance's activities that is being provided Wednesday. The group will announce a near-doubling of its membership since its formation in February. New members include The Ajaxian, American Greetings, Bling Software, Curl, edge IPK, eLink Business Innovations, ENOVIA, MatrixOne, Finetooth, The Front Side, Ikivo, ILOG, IN2, IT Mill, Javeline, JWAX, Merced Systems, Nexaweb, Nitobi, OpenLink Software, Seagull Software, Sitepen, Sun, Vertex Logic, Vircon, Webtide, and Zoho. Previously announced members of the alliance include: Adobe, Backbase, BEA Systems, Borland, the Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Fair Isaac, Google, IBM, ICEsoft, Innoopract, Intel, JackBe, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla Corporation, Novell, Openwave Systems, Opera, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, Scalix, Software AG, Tibco, XML11, Zend, and Zimbra. While the alliance already has an impressive list of members, one name remains conspicuously absent: Microsoft. "Yes, we have extended an invitation and attempted to recruit Microsoft to join," Ferraiolo said. "We would love to have Microsoft participate in the alliance." "The purpose of the alliance is to make interoperability successful such that you can take AJAX technologies from one source and use it with another vendor's. Microsoft is one of [those] vendors and an important vendor in the AJAX community and it would be to everybody's advantage, particularly customers, if Microsoft's products would interoperate well with other people's products," said Ferraiolo. He added he was not making a statement that Microsoft products currently do not interoperate. Although Microsoft has promoted AJAX via its Atlas technologies, Microsoft currently does not have plans to join. "Microsoft has no firm plans to join the OpenAjax Alliance. However, Microsoft is very committed to working with the developer community and is engaged in dialogue with the OpenAjax Alliance organizers to learn more about the initiative," Microsoft said in a prepared statement. The alliance seeks to serve as an industry catalyst to boost AJAX-enabled Web 2.0 applications. Ferraiolo defines Web 2.0 as a new generation of the Web focused on collaboration. OpenAjax technologies are intended to produce lower development costs, faster delivery of applications, vendor choice, interoperability, and a richer Web experience. Greater collaboration capabilities that can be added to existing HTML sites or used for new applications is another goal. Also being unveiled on Wednesday is the organization's Web site and a white paper covering a description of AJAX, the AJAX value proposition and a technical section on AJAX architectures. These architectures include single and dual DOMs (Document Object Model), in which the single model involves processing everything in HTML browsers, while the dual approach involves using an XML parser that holds the description of the UI. The dual model offers a richer set of functionality but requires a larger download, typically, Ferraiolo said. AJAX in the open source world also is being included in the alliance's list of issues to cover. One of the goals for the alliance is the ability to have a zero-cost option, but it's not trying to lock out vendors from making money at all," said Ferraiolo. A second meeting of the alliance is planned for Oct. 5-6 in Santa Clara, Calif. The alliance on Oct. 5 plans to announce it has moved to a formal governance model that includes a steering committee. Goals and procedural issues also will be discussed. Security of AJAX also will be on the agenda, Ferraiolo said.
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Matthew O'Phinney has a reminder for anyone in the Burlington, VT area tonight - there's a meeting of the Burlington PHP user group tonight at 5:30pm.   Bradley Holt will be giving a presentation on developing a web application using Zend Framework. Bradley Holt is founder and web developer for Found Line, a local design and development studio which has used Zend Framework in several recent projects.    You can get more information about the meetup from this event page on their Google Groups site (happening at the Brown & Jenkins Coffee Roasters).