Andy McKay's blog

Apigee is a new service from Sonoa systems that acts as proxy for API's. That provides:

Analytics and Protection for APIs and Mashups

It does this by creating a proxy that all your requests go through and doing work on those proxies. This is a really interesting idea since API's are the one area of technology that are essentially unmeasured. All other forms of web traffic are easily measured, but rarely API's.

But I'd hate to use a proxy simply because: when the proxy goes down, your API goes down. Everything goes down. There's of course added latency, security is not a huge concern, but SSL isn't an option. Unless of course the proxy get's taken over.

Ideally if I could install that proxy locally, I'd remove this problem - and perhaps this is Apigee's monetization plan. For example, I've pretty much assumed that in Arecibo, our servers can go down and that this will not leave your site in-operable.

Anyone got a recommendation for a wysiwyg editor that allows you to add code? Basically I have an application that developers will write snippets of code in text areas. No it's not to ever execute, it's for a bug tracker and pasting code in is very common.

But no wysiwyg editor's seem to support this, adding in a pre or code tag seems hard. In all except Plone and Kupu that is. Sadly I'm not using Plone and support in non-Plone kupu land seems to be dead these days - and I think (please tell me if I'm wrong) that getting Kupu working from nothing is a challenge. So I've looked at:

• jwysiwyg: doesn't work in a lightbox in Firefox, no pre, but it looks like it could be added
• tinymce: no pre or code and nightmare to add (from what I here in the forums)
• fckeditor: no pre or code, could be addable, but seems to hate me for wanting to serve html and js off a different domain
• yui: reading api now

Perhaps this why so many bug trackers just use mark up text instead of a wysiwyg.

Sorry just to have call this one as I see it. The Ajaxian blog is cool, I read it and like it. But have you ever tried to post a comment there? Here's an abbreviated version of the form. That's right, my phone number and post code etc to leave a comment. OpenID would be perfect but something simple would be better, please sign your name at Demand OpenID.

One thing that's holding me back from using Google Apps is that they are generally damn ugly. You can use Mail.app to pull mail in Gmail down and get a nicer UI. I can pull my calendar down into iCal and get a nice UI as well. But in the end those web UI's are full of far too many buttons and links and just don't thrill me.

I've been using Fluid for my Google Reader and it rocks. I can now just hit RSS in Quicksilver and get my RSS feeds. Using the scripts from userscripts.org I now get: Growl notifications of new posts and a count in the dock of new posts. Today I grabbed this script: http://flingmedia.com/articles/making-google-reader-for-fluid/ and that applies a custom stylesheet. It makes the reader look like the screenshot below. Weeee!

After faffing around with many RSS readers over the year, I was watching Duncan Booth use Google Reader one day and said, dammit I get it. It's the keyboard accelerators, pressing space to hop through your posts is easy.

I've now got far too many RSS feeds in it.

Over at Montreal Tech Watch there's an article on Vancouver: Canada’s Greatest Start-Up City?. I've been a huge Vancouver fan for many years, there's so much potential there. All the companies mentioned I know and makes me feel sad I'm not there. It's a prime location for pulling in talent, the lifestyle there is way better than say San Jose.

I'll keep saying it to Google people, open an office in Vancouver to suck in all the talent who can't get US visas. Microsoft have just done it.

The one ommision of this article is probably the greatest Web 2.0 success, Flickr

I met Andre Charland for lunch about a year ago when his company was called eBusiness Applications and mine was called Enfold. A nice, exceedingly bright chap - building a company out of providing quality Ajax tools. At the time he told me he was writing a book whilst building a company. My reply was something like "poor you, you'll be glad when the book is out". It is now out congratulations Andre Charland.

My wife and friends have started using Facebook and every time I see here I make some sort of semi-superior sigh and comment under my breath about Facebook. Partly because I've been through at least two sites including Orkut and each new site never cares about the lasts data. On some level it annoys me the attention these sites get since I don't understand why they get so much attention. Anything that is pitched to me as "MySpace for grown ups" (as it was on the radio) is just on a loser.

In the end Facebook has this problem, eloquently expressed in a post:

I feel very strongly that we already have the world's best public social networking tool right in front of us: it's called the internet

Jeff Atwood

So in the Plone, Zope and Python communities, there are a large number of people putting together web sites. In a total of 6 years I've done one Web Service and that was for a company trying to be an expert in Web Services. So lets just clarify term's here... I've always been annoyed by the term web services because I often get into my rant that a web service is something on the web that returns a service. Be it via XML-RPC, REST or any other thing you can mention. In this case I'm referring to that bundle of technology that is (usually) SOAP, over HTTP with WSDL and all that jazz behind it. There are a few modules for web services for Python and Ben Saller even worked one for Plone. From what I can see they aren't used that much and from where I sit the whole thing has slipped into obscurity? Why?

• It's pretty darn complicated. Getting into the WSDL specification is not for the faint of heart.
• SOAP will if I can paraphrase a talk Paul gave... "SOAP is a terrible acronym. It's not simple, it's sort of about objects, it has no access control and its not a protocol."
• There are a few high level tools.

Perhaps things are changing slowly, but from where I sit for the last 5 years it's dying. Look at these Google trends ("web services, ajax", and just to be sure "apples, oranges"). Where's the future here? Well I'm betting that Ajax will provide a huge boost to the Web Services model of having remote services handling transactions and outputting XML. Not some big fancy model, but just some XML. Once people start to pull these things in through Ajax, you can pull them in anything. Ajax will be the driving force and it will start to pull services up out of the dust. And it will be spotty, unspecified, quick hacks that just work ignoring all the formalisation of what was Web Services. Perhaps I've listened to Paul Prescod a little to much.

The one key missing component from Google maps has just been filled in, you can now get geoencoding of addresses in the Google maps API. Yay! http://www.developer.com/lang/jscript/article.php/3615681

SQL on Rails. The screencast is worth watching:

Rails is a short-stack framework for developing database-contained web applications according to the Model-Model-Model pattern. From the Ajax in the model, to the request and response in the model, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-SQL development environment. Finally!

Didn't hear about this one until recently, but there's a Google Calendar and a matching API. At the moment I use iCal with my wife and you are going to have to work hard to get me out of that, we love it. So what I'm looking for is a nice simple way to get my iCal online in a readable HTML format ... without installing any software. So I'm not going to use Google Calendar in a while, but I was working on a Google Maps mashup last Friday. Doing things on a Friday is bad, because then they fester in my brain for a weekend. In Google Maps I pull in a map into an iframe and populate it. So why can't I pull in a calendar through Javascript and then populate it with my public ical feed? Someone's already got ical into RSS, so now we have to find a way to pull in calendar through a simple Javascript call. If I can do that, i can mashup the RSS of my iCal feed with the calendar. Searching for Javascript calendar is fruitless, pointing to almost endless popup calendars. Google Calendar API seems dedicated to adding and editing items. Sounds like a quick science project one evening.

Absolutely totally rocks. Does exactly what it should. Kudos to the creators and Jon Stahl who mentioned it to me. Yes, this site is using it.

Via whits blog:

Why are people still afraid of JavaScript

Here's my go:

1. Unless you are new to the web, everyone has been bitten by Javascript implementation hell in the early 2000's when very few people knew what or why they were doing things, other than "well its cool".
2. It's a nightmare to debug if you aren't familiar with it.
3. Testing is hard and loops back into point 2.

Am I scared of writing Javascript? No.

1. Go use dojo or another fine toolkit like scriptalicious, they remove much of the cross browser hell.
2. Have you seen the Venkman debugger? There are many other fine tools out there.
3. Selenium and other fine testing products are now available.

In the end though number 1 is the killer. It's had such a bad rap for so many years it takes time to get over this. Get over it, go do something interesting and you'll see it's not as bad as it was.

Jon Udell posts on web presentations, pointing to S5 and HTML Slidy. Both of these are excellent systems and I think the time has truly come to seperate the world from their PowerPoint dependencies.

There's an option in HTML Slidy to make each slide's title the HTML doctitle, and of course I turned that on because I'm always looking for ways to make my stuff more coherent and useful in search results contexts. But to no avail.

Good question, as I'm doing quite a bit of plotting and planning around presentations right now. The simplest solution is a publish process to publish pages individually. In a slightly different arena, this problem has also cropped up at Enfold recently where I've been addressing a complete Ajax front end for Plone. In this scenario Enfold Entransit writes out a complete set of xml to the filesystem, it screams Ajax to pull it together. But then how do bots index the site? No idea. But then this does beg the question, how valuable to a search engine is a multi page view of a topic? Does that truly represent how the data should be presented? I would argue its not that important. For me the breaking down of a slide into multiple pages is an act of logical planning through my topic. Individually each slide taken out of context, is only partially useful in comparison to the whole. Breaking down of the talk into slides is purely a representation of the time frame for the talk and the limit of only being able to fit one set of things onto a screen. The fact that all that content can be shown in one HTML page (as below) is to me good enough. For the record a couple of interesting things. I've been using S5 for about 2 years and its great. I added S5 support to Plone then, mainly out of frustration dealing with Powerpoint and OpenOffice. It's really nice to be able to write a presentation in any format Plone can handle: Structured text, Restructured text, HTML via Kupu or Epoz gui editors or just plain HTML. Then its output as a presentation, for example: Plain page: http://www.enfoldsystems.com/About/Talks/overview S5 presentation: http://www.enfoldsystems.com/About/Talks/overview/s5_document Aas with many things, it was Jon Udell who started me down this path about 5 years ago by complaining to me about having to open one of my presentations in PowerPoint.

This is the obligatory first post.