Category Archives: web

rel=”me” - really interesting use of XFN microformat to provide security

It turns out that you can claim your blog on Technorati by creating a post (such as this one) and including a link to the claim on Technorati, like so: Technorati Profile
This link’s HTML is a XFN microformat, in that it contains the attribute rel=”me”:

<a rel="me" href="http://technorati.com/claim/uqv8b6pg22">Technorati Profile</a>

This seems like a genius method of proving [...]

Screen-scraping. What have I learnt?

The system is not the enemy, the system is the beaten, broken and smothered dumb creature you are poking at through the gaps in its kerosene memory. It has glutinous feelers that react to your touch in unexpected ways until you conquer the chaos by learning to read patterns and see the standing waves and [...]

China is a big f*cking deal

In late July, the China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) released figures claiming there are more than 250m Internet users in China, making China the most connected country in the world by volume. Given China’s sheer size and economic growth, this had been widely predicted; however, the most intriguing thing, as discussed in an article in [...]

A new face for the bowels of big BT

I got back from holiday at the beginning of last week and, since then, I’ve been working for a meeting we had yesterday with some folks in HR Systems. We have, er, a certain dislike for the interface to our internal expenses system, so we’d decided to make a better one and show it to [...]

Chunks chunks chunks

If you happen to use cURL to fetch a remote webpage and return the data to a client, watch out for content-chunking (aka “chunked transfer-encoding“). cURL deals with the chunking seamlessly to return a single response to your php script, wherein lies the potential problem.
If you do what I did and pass all the response [...]

Now I can use Dopplr like a pro - the importance of data on-ramps

Dopplr - great idea, lots of hype, beautiful website, just impossible for me to use. Why? I’ll tell you why. Who can be bothered to go updating another website? Not me, even with Dopplr’s slick, slick interface. It’s enough hassle sorting everything else out when you’re going travelling.
Enter Twitter and the miracle of smart data [...]

Twitter is becoming the new IM, and is this a bad thing?

I have noticed that a lot of people who start following me on Twitter also follow thousands of other people. I have to ask, how does Twitter remain useful if you are following such a high number of people. What’s the limit? Of the people that I see tweeting and frequently interacting with other people, [...]

The outer limits of scaling - how decentralized can your infrastructure be?

I’m a big Twitter fan. So it’s painful to see that Twitter is down so often. This problem with scaling from niche service to Internet starlet has plagued a good number of other young (and not so young) websites. The scaling problem itself (growing without experiencing significant performance issues) goes right back to the earliest [...]

Yahoo! Fire Eagle and location deduping

Fire Eagle launched to developers yesterday. I’ve been keeping my fingers crossed that it is going to provide the location deduping I want for the mobile city review service I’ve been building. The idea behind this is to get people reviewing bars or restaurants by sending mini-reviews via text, which include their location. The downside [...]

Revenge o’ the bagpipes (aka the gentle art of DabbleDB)

They say revenge is a dish best served cold. The thought did cross my mind when my neighbour threatened to call the police to stop us playing the bagpipes and doing the highland fling in our garden ON BURNS NIGHT.
So large was the umbrage taken at this impertinence, that I determined to see fit that [...]