Category: Linkcollection

Weekend Link Roundup

As we’re starting a new week I’m just going to round up a few of the links I’ve been having around in my browsers for quite some time now:

  • Gravatar Implementation Details – I’m currently looking into using gravatars as default avatars for a smallish site I’m writing a few lines of code for every now and then. This page details which parameters you can submit to gravatar to control the image returned from their servers.
  • The BOSS Mashable Challenge is a contest hosted by mashable and Yahoo! Search about building a site or resource on top of the BOSS API from Yahoo! BOSS stands for “Build your Own Search Service“, and is an open API to access Yahoo’s search service from your own applications. It’s very interesting and I have several ideas about how to incorporate this into our own sites.
  • NRKbeta just had a notice about a very nice site containing biaural recordings. I listened to a few of these a couple of years back without being very impressed at the time, but these recordings are at a whole new level. Great stuff. Still have a bit of trouble about determining if something is in front of me or behind me, other than the usual context clues (people cutting your hair is usually behind you, not in front of you, etc).
  • The Open Social Specification – Just had to look this up again today. Wondering if I should attempt to implement Open Social for social networking and for your friends graph in the sites I’m currently hacking around with. Could be a good experience anyways.
  • I want this.

Small Collection of Useful Reading Material

I’ve finally gotten through the 600+ unread items in my RSS reader after getting back from my vacation! To celebrate I’ve decided to share a few useful items with my own comments included:

  • Matasano Chargen has a writeup of Dowd’s Inhuman Flash Exploit. This exploit for flash was detailed back in April, but I never got around to reading the very good and concise writeup before now. Amazing exploit vector.
  • Jeff Atwood is getting frustrated by tagsoups. Even though we’re only working with our presentation layer, templates (regardless of which language/platform they’re written in) tend to get very soupish fast. I’ve given the issue some thought, but I’ve been unable to think of any revolutionizing way to do this just yet. I currently use a good syntax highlighter which is able to show the different sections in a good way, and do of course use proper indenting. It’s still noisy and unreadable from time to time, so yes. Someone needs to get something better on the road. Now.
  • Posterous is a simple web application where everyone can create their own little site / (micro)blog, simply by emailing stuff to a predefined e-mail address. I’ve lately became fascinated with services that do not require you to register and create an account, but are still able to provide personal experiences. This is one of those services.
  • XMPP has been on the horizon for a long time, but I’ve never gotten around to really digging into it. If anyone have any experiences with using XMPP as an RPC platform, I’d be happy to hear about any experiences. This also includes looking at OAuth and how we might use it for future services. Have a look at Beyond REST for a useful introduction.

Then we also have drizzle, but I’ll detail that in another post.