Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

Speaking at Jazoon next week

2008-06-19T08:05:51+00:00

If you are following dev.day.com you have probably seen it already: I will speak next Wednesday at Jazoon conference in Zürich about REST, AJAX and WebForms 2.0. If you are interested in building interactive and standards-compliant web sites and web applications, I would be happy to meet you there.

Btw. I originally planned to call this post "Ten reasons why you will hate not being in Zürich next week", but I decided one uber-catchy headline per week is enough.

Seven reasons why FriendFeed sucks

2008-06-15T21:37:37+00:00

Well, FriendFeed does not really suck, it has managed to convert me from a naysayer to fanboy (I think writing userscripts and user-css qualifies me as a fanboy) by giving me a communication platform that allows me to interact with my peers, but now that I have your attention, I would like to tell you five things where FriendFeed actually needs improvements. If you are on FriendFeed, feel free to like or comment this post to bring it to the attention of FriendFeed's product managers.

no feed for daily, weekly and monthly toplinks: Friendfeed introduced a new feature, daily toplinks only few days ago and while it is insanely cool to have use your FriendFeed contacts as a personal attention filter and aggregator, I do not like the fact that there is no Atom or RSS feed for it. Come on, this thing is called FriendFeed, so you must be aware that there is a thing called feeds in the interwebs.
no link-based aggregation: if one person posts a link twice in separate services, for instance directly on FriendFeed via Mento and later to del.icio.us, it will show up twice in the Feed, leading to clutter and noise (not the smart noise we are looking for at FriendFeed) in the feed and finally to a fragmentation of the discussion, as I have to chose which entry I like or comment. As a second example, if someone in my network posts a link that someone else posted as well, we have the same situation: two links, two discussions, two sets of likes. An easy solution would be a add a "also posted at ..., also posted by ..." line next to the list of people that liked a post. This way you could reduce clutter and join conversations that spread across multiple postings.
bad recommendations for contacts: FriendFeed is a superb implementation of the "Activity feed" pattern of social networking, but its social networking capabilities are mediocre at best. Example number one: FriendFeed's recommended friends dialog suggests that I should subscribe to Dave Winer, Jason Calacanis, Leo Laporte, Loic Le Meur, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and some of the FriendFeed founders. While I think they are surely great people and I could learn a lot from them, it is too much information to handle (I tried to follow these suggestions, and removed them one by one later). Additionally as soon as they write something that is interesting for someone in my network, it will appear in my feed as well, which is a great feature. The only problem is: the recommended friends page does not make any sense if it is just a list of the top-users at FriendFeed. What I need are reasons to subscribe like: many of my important (measured in likes and comments) friends find them important (measured in likes and comments) as well.
not notifying me when friends join: I wish everyone I know would be on FriendFeed. Unfortunately this will not happen and I will also not send an email requesting them to join yet another social network, because I know how distracting this would be for most of my contacts. However, I wish there were tools to make it a bit easier for me: If someone joins who has an e-mail address that was found in my address book before, please inform me. If someone adds a feed or a service that matches an imaginary friend that I created, please inform me. If you can read my address book, why can't you offer me to automatically create imaginary friends for my flickr, twitter, etc. contacts?
bad Facebook integration: Like it or not, Facebook is popular. But FriendFeed's Facebook application is a joke. It is simply FriendFeed in an IFrame, but I cannot see which of my Facebook friends are on FriendFeed, I cannot invite them as it is possible with other social applications that offer Facebook integration. Probably the best example for this is dopplr.com which is a champion of social network interoperability. Another point in case that FriendFeed's social networking capabilities need some work.
bad customer service at getsatisfaction.com: FriendFeed managed to move conversations from the blog comments to FriendFeed. Some bloggers objected, but that's the way it works. Conversations move and if you would like to take part in the conversation, you have to follow. The best place for customer care (and conversations with users of your product) today is getsatisfaction.com. There is a room for ~FriendFeed at getsatisfaction.com, but FriendFeed is not listening. As I am sure these guys know that they have to take part in the conversation where it happens, and I am also sure they know that customer service is part of the product design, it looks like they do not want to listen, because it does not matter to them.
no search for URLs: Early adopters and developers are craving to integrate FriendFeed with their tools and services they use. The main integration point, the most important social object is content and content is identified by an URL in the web, yet FriendFeed's advanced search (and API) does not allow searches for URLs. This means, people looking to integrate FriendFeed with their blogs, using FriendFeed from Yahoo! Pipes or creating Mashups with FriendFeed are left out in the rain.

These are the most important changes and improvements I am looking forward at FriendFeed, not the addition of six (or sixty) more social networks. Improve the features you already have, improve search, improve social networking, improve aggregation and improve integration and I will be happy.

Black Friendfeed Widget with Fluid

2008-05-15T12:42:11+00:00

My Favorite SSB application Fluid got an update some days ago that allows you to fiddle with some window settings, namely the window opacity and the window decoration and the window placement (normal, above all windows, below all windows, above the dashboard). With the window decoration comes a black-window style with dark window borders and scroll bars that looks very cool. But using this style with Friendfeed for which I provided a custom userscript before yielded unpleasant results as the white background of friendfeed and the dark window borders do not match.

So I modified the user CSS file that is embedded in every Fluid SSB application (Right-click the application icon in Finder, select "Show package contents", browse to Contents/Resources) called default.css to give me a black background with white text and links (and I removed all the sidebar and clutter to make it a minimal interface)

The result looks like that and gives specialized desktop applications such as Twhirl or AlertThingy a run for it's money.

See something cool, learn something new, win something shiny

2008-05-14T22:24:50+00:00

I went to one of our customers today to demo our Digital Asset Management System (it seems to be DAM-week, see also my presentation at the Henry Stewart Show) and one of the projects managers told me that he started playing around with Sling and how impressed he was with the power that is hidden in Sling and JCR and how easy it was to build something interesting. So, if you would like to see something cool, just as he did, download CRX Quickstart Edition, which contains CRX (a commerial grade content repository) and Sling (a web application framework built around the concepts of JCR, REST, AJAX, OSGi and Scripting) and take a look at Michael Marth's screencast first steps with CRX Quickstart. (This was the see something cool part)

Having seen something cool, it is time to learn something new, namely building applications using Sling and JCR and CRX Quickstart is a great way of doing to. Aside to the aforementioned screencast, there is a second one: the serverside.com in 15 minutes and the rest of the CRX Quickstart documentation we have assembled.

If you now want to win something shiny, namely a brand new MacBook Pro, apply your newly won knowledge and take part in the Day JCR Cup '08, which is one of the reasons we released CRX Quickstart. We want more developers to learn something new, more developers to build something cool and thought that winning something shiny might be a good incentive to do so.

Teresa's DocBook vs. DITA article

2008-05-03T18:34:55+00:00

Scott Hudson points to DocBook versus DITA: Will the Real Standard Please Stand Up? (slides here at dev.day.com) wriiten by my colleague Teresa Mulvihill. Scott points out that DocBook can be used for single-sourcing out of the box, thanks to support for XInclude and I would like to add that we at Day are currently in the process of translating our documentation to DocBook (not DITA) and first results are looking very promising. We are using Wilfried Springer's DocBook Maven Plugin as the driver of the processing toolchain, which is powerful, because we can integrate documentation development tightly with software development, sharing the same repository, using the same branches and tags and using the same build process.

Creating Web Products: Do's and Don'ts

2008-05-02T17:02:31+00:00

Normally I do not use my blog as a linkdump, I have http://del.icio.us/trieloff, http://twitter.com/trieloff, http://www.friendfeed.com/trieloff and Mento for this, but today I am making an exception and the whole point of my post is read this blog post: Seven Do’s And Three Don’ts For Creating New Web Products. These tips are some essential rules every entrepreneur and product manager should learn by heart. You have to create value and find a way of sharing the created value with your customers (making profit) if you fail either of those goals, find a better idea.

Fluid userscript for Friendfeed and Mento

2008-04-25T22:07:27+00:00

Being alone this evening I had the opportunity to spend some time programming interesting stuff. As I am currently researching lifestreaming applications, in particular Friendfeed, which is an excellent implementation of this concept I wrote a plugin for Blogbridge that will automatically send "pinned" entries to Friendfeed, similar to "shared items" in Google reader. Secondly, I got an invite to Mento, a social link sharing application (not bookmarking) that is focused around finding interesting links and sending them to friends, services (like Twitter, Friendfeed or del.icio.us/trieloff) or channels, which lead to my third activity: Integrating Friendfeed and Mento.

As Friendfeed is giving me lots of input from interesting people, I would like to save some links directly from the Friendfeed interface. Additionally, I am using Fluid in order to create a site-specific browser (SSB) for Friendfeed, basically a small desktop application that does nothing but running Friendfeed. Aside from this interesting concept, which is also being implemented by Mozilla Prism for instance, Fluid is currently the best implementation of this concept. Todd, the developer is working hard to integrate it with Mac OS X and make it a seamless user experience and he is adding easy programmability as one of the core aspects to SSBs. With Fluid it is possible to run userscripts that not only change the appearance and behavior of the website, these userscripts are also able to invoke advanced desktop integration features like adding an "unread items" badge to the dock item or display Growl notifications.

The small user script you find below does two things: on the one hand it adds a "Share" button to all links posted on Friendfeed. Clicking the "Share" button will invoke the Mento bookmarklet which allows you to send the link to friends and colleagues. On the other hand, the script will track which links have been added to the feed while the Friendfeed window has been in the background. For each new, unread item, it will increase the counter in the badge and display a Growl notification.

Sharing a link on Mento

Growl showing an update notification. (In the background there is Dashcode, the IDE I have been using to write this userscript)

There is one unread item waiting for me in Friendfeed.

The user script that accomplishes this can be found here. You are free to use and modify and redistribute it of course.

// ==UserScript==
// @name        Share With Mento
// @namespace   http://fluidapp.com
// @description Adds a Share link to links listed on friendfeed.
// @include     *
// @author      Lars Trieloff http://weblogs.goshaky.com/weblogs/lars
// ==/UserScript==

(function () {
  var knownclusters = {};
  var unknownclusters = 0;

  function updateMento() {
    refreshMento(true);
  }
  
  function initMento() {
    refreshMento(false);
  }
  
  function refreshMento(background) {
    var infos = document.getElementsByClassName("info");
    for (var i=0;i<infos.length;i++) {
      var link = infos[i].previousSibling.previousSibling.firstChild;
      var parent = infos[i].parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode;
      var eventid = parent.getAttribute("eid");
      var header = 
      $(parent).find(".summary").get(0).innerHTML.replace(/<(.|\n)+?>/g, "");
      var description = 
      infos[i].previousSibling.previousSibling.innerHTML.replace(/<(.|\n)+?>/g, "");
      
      if (eventid in knownclusters) {
        
      } else {
        unknownclusters++;
        knownclusters[eventid] = "a";
        if (background) {
          window.fluid.showGrowlNotification({
            title: header, 
            description: description, 
            priority: 1, 
            sticky: false,
            identifier: eventid,
          });
        }
        if (link.href) {
        //alert(link.innerHTML);
        
        infos[i].innerHTML = infos[i].innerHTML + " - <a href=\"javascript:(" +
        "function(){o='location=0,width=515,height=375,resizable=1';u='http:" + 
        "//www.mento.info/qp/#v=bk&vn=1&';w=window;d=w.top.document;e=encode" +
        "URIComponent;u+='title='+'"+encodeURIComponent(link.innerHTML)+"'+'" +
        "&url='+'"+encodeURIComponent(link.href)+"'+'&via='+'"
        +encodeURIComponent("http://friendfeed.com/e/"
        +parent.getAttribute("eid"))+"';var%20mw=w.open(u,'_blank',o);if(mw)" +
        "setTimeout(function(){mw.focus()},%20250);else{alert('A%20popup%20b" + 
        "locker%20got%20in%20the%20way.%20Hold%20the%20CTRL%20key%20and%20tr" +
        "y%20again.');}})();\">Share</a>";
        }
      }
      if (background) {
        if (unknownclusters==0) {
          window.fluid.dockBadge = "";
        } else {
          window.fluid.dockBadge = unknownclusters;
        }
      } else {
        window.fluid.dockBadge = "";
        unknownclusters = 0;
      }
      
    }
  }

  function jquery_wait() {
    
    if(typeof window.jQuery == 'undefined') { 
      window.setTimeout(jquery_wait,100); 
    }
    else {
      $ = window.jQuery; initMento();
      window.setInterval(updateMento, 1000); 
    }
  }

    if (window.fluid) {
    window.onfocus = initMento;
    //initMento(true);
    jquery_wait();
    }
})();

No more daily link posting

2008-04-25T21:18:16+00:00

I disabled the daily del.icio.us link posting, because there are better ways keeping up to date with my postings: join my del.icio.us network or follow me at Friendfeed.

links for 2008-04-19

2008-04-19T00:45:33+00:00

ACM Queue - Why Writing Your Own Search Engine is Hard: So you have a grand idea; are you ready for the execution?

(tags: build development google hadoop lucene notes nutch performance tips scalability software search webdevelopment)

links for 2008-04-17

2008-04-17T00:40:29+00:00

My Weblog integrates FriendFeed now

2008-04-13T22:42:26+00:00

I created a small mashup that combines my weblog with the Friendfeed API. The first thing I did was replacing my Planet-generated Activity feed and activity index calculation with one based on the Friendfeed JSON API. The JSON provided by Friendfeed even allowed me to add additional information, so I am highlighting every piece of activity that has been commented or liked in bold type.

Additionally, I integrated the Friendfeed comment API with the footer of every weblog post. What I am doing here is using the search API to find the post you are watching on Friendfeed and listing the number of comments and likes in the footer of the blog. Given the ability of the Friendfeed API of specifing callback functions, this was really a piece of cake to implement.

Your attention is worth USD .34 and for sale

2008-04-13T15:41:39+00:00

Andrew Baron, founder of Rocketboom is selling his Twitter account on eBay. With the current bid of 510 USD, each of his 1481 followers is worth .34 USD to the buyer. That is little more than you would pay for a click in Google Ads, which bears some interesting implications for everbody interested in monetizing Twitter attention at a large scale (e.g. Twitter). So if you would find a way of grabbing the attention of all twitter users (TwitDir tracks almost a million twitter users), this collective attention would be worth 330435 USD, which is much less than the 21 million valuation estimated by Techcrunch.

Turning the calculation around, and taking this 21.88 USD per user valuation, however Andrew Baron's account would be worth 32411 USD.

RescueTime for the Console

2008-04-13T14:43:30+00:00

In some way, RescueTime can be seen as the graphical variant of this meme.

 $ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
   93	cd 
   80	sudo 
   71	ls 
   29	rm 
   17	ssh 
   16	less 
   14	export 
   11	mvn 
   10	./autogen.sh 
    9	tar

[via Bill]

links for 2008-04-12

2008-04-12T00:40:51+00:00

Go Big Always - Twitter: A two-way social computer?

(tags: twitter enterprise2.0 socialnetworking tips ideas cool)
mail-trends - Google Code

(tags: analysis chart code cool email google graph productivity statistics visualization)

links for 2008-04-09

2008-04-09T00:36:46+00:00

Fixing Blogbridge Annonyances

(tags: blogbridge tips macosx)
Yoxos Ondemand - Get your personalized Eclipse

Exteremely cool way of customizing your Eclipse installation. Select only the plugins you need and save the hassle of adding them later manually.

(tags: ajax eclipse java plugin software)
XQuery Pretty Printer - Martin Probst's weblog

(tags: xquery parser antlr)
Mapnik C++/Python GIS Toolkit | Welcome

(tags: opensource maps mashup python server web mapping gis)

links for 2008-04-07

2008-04-07T00:40:39+00:00

The Open Share Icon Project

Open Source alternative to the Share Icon

(tags: icons share webdesign icon web20 socialsoftware)

links for 2008-04-03

2008-04-03T00:50:36+00:00

JavaRanch FAQ : Accessing File Formats

(tags: api file java pdf windows word)
tagthe.net - Webservice that tags your resources

(tags: api categorization json metadata rest socialsoftware tags web20)
Open Calais - Overview

We want to make all the world's content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the semantic web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais.

(tags: textmining web20 ajax analysis api content data metadata ontology semanticweb service)

links for 2008-04-02

2008-04-02T00:49:00+00:00

Hi5 Developer Center

(tags: api container mashup opensocial opensource socialnetworking web20)

links for 2008-03-30

2008-03-30T00:34:13+00:00

Key Links | The Dojo Toolkit

(tags: dojo framework javascript widget)

links for 2008-03-29

2008-03-29T00:44:59+00:00

Category:OWASP AntiSamy Project - OWASP

Effectively prevent XSS attacks and still allow a reasonable amount of CSS and HTML.

(tags: xss security webdevelopment html java javascript ajax css)

links for 2008-03-21

2008-03-21T00:25:30+00:00

Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | RESTify DayTrader

(tags: api architecture rest reference tutorial)
Photoshop Disasters

(tags: blog cool culture design funny)

REST and AJAX slides are up

2008-03-20T00:34:29+00:00

As always, I've uploaded my slides of my REST and AJAX reconciled presentation to slideshare. AJAXWorld is a well-produced conference, with around 50 people in the audience, an interesting discussion emerged.

See you tomorrow at AJAX World East in New York

2008-03-17T08:31:46+00:00

Just a quick note: I will be speaking at AJAXWorld East Conference and Expo in New York. I will present techniques and frameworks for creating RESTful AJAX applications, among the frameworks discussed will be Sling, of couse. My talk is scheduled for wednesday morning, so if you are there, I would love to meet you.

links for 2008-03-15

2008-03-15T00:28:53+00:00

Analyze your code, errors, interface, and marketing effectiveness with dojox.analytics

(tags: dojo javascript analysis statistics usability)

links for 2008-03-11

2008-03-11T00:28:19+00:00

The Myth Of 'Web-Safe' Fonts

(tags: css fonts reference)
Javascript Dataflow Architecture: Software Ecosystem for Web Mash Ups

(tags: ajax architecture code javascript visual web20 workflow)
The JDA Revolution

(tags: javascript ajax data)

links for 2008-03-08

2008-03-08T00:27:07+00:00

How To Install Gnome-Do Plugins

(tags: gnome linux quicksilver gnomedo tutorial ubuntu)
The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air

Right. But will it really take 5 years?

(tags: socialsoftware socialnetworking trends web2.0 future identity network networking)
If Version Control Systems were Airlines - The Changelog

(tags: humor geek versioncontrol svn git vcs rcs mercurial tla subversion funny)

Sling Web Monday in Stockholm

2008-03-02T18:58:58+00:00

With an social activity index hitting a new all-time low, after weeks of failing to find time for blogging, I would like to give a short status update. I have been invited by Peter Svensson to speak about Apache Sling at the second Web Monday in Stockholm. As Peter is the sole organizer of Web Monday in Stockholm, he took the freedom of letting it happen tuesdays, but still it should not be confused with Web Tuesday (of Zurich). In preparation of Web Monday Stockholm I am spending every free minute with coding a Dojo+µsling integration that I want to showcase in two days, and that will eventually be a part of Peter's Bunkai project.

links for 2008-02-15

2008-02-15T00:33:20+00:00

Editable Select Box Test

Very close to a real combobox.

(tags: javascript widget gui html)

links for 2008-02-12

2008-02-12T00:25:24+00:00

Graffletopia - Business Process Modeling Notation

(tags: omnigraffle bpmn workflow model macosx business process)

links for 2008-02-07

2008-02-07T00:27:05+00:00

Collection: Search Patterns

Collection of patterns for web search.

(tags: design search usability pattern interface)

links for 2008-02-01

2008-02-01T00:26:17+00:00

Graffletopia - FMC

Fundamental Modeling Concept Stencils for OmniGraffle

(tags: fmc modeling macosx omnigraffle)

links for 2008-01-30

2008-01-30T00:41:00+00:00

Hubdub - Home

News Trend Prediction Market

(tags: web20 trends predictions)

MacBook Air - Paperweight

2008-01-28T22:46:35+00:00

MacBook Air - Paperweight
Originally uploaded by Lars Trieloff

I promise, I will quit posting MacBook Air fanboyism on my blog. When I am done playing with my new toy. You can even get your own.

Macbook Air Craft

2008-01-28T19:17:49+00:00

Macbook Air Craft
Originally uploaded by nybras.rodrigo

Did I say I want a MacBook Air? I was wrong. Actually I want a MacBook AirCraft. My last Dell laptop was denoted a "helicopter" by my colleagues due to its fan sound, but I hope this machine will be even louder.

Catching up with web technology

2008-01-27T18:34:57+00:00

I used this weekend to - practically - catch up with some web technology. All things I am familiar with in theory, but it took me ages to actually try them out:

Combining Amazon's REST API with Yahoo Pipes to get an RSS feed out of my wishlist
Getting a personal certificate from Thawte, registering for an OpenID at Certifi.ca and trying out Particls.

Web Monday comes to Stockholm, Sweden

2008-01-27T14:34:28+00:00

Now that I have the attention (uppmärksamhet) of my 15 readers from Stockholm - I would like to inform you that Peter Svensson is organizing a Web Monday in Stockholm. Web Monday is a tradition of the german Web 2.0 community, a

: Web Monday is a decentrally organized, informal meetup focused on Web 2.0 in the broadest of all definitions, that wants to connect users, developers, founders, entrepreneurs, scientists, web-pioneers, blogger, podcaster, designer and anyone else interested. Goal of Web Monday is one the one hand a better connection of the Web 2.0 crowd in Germany and on the other hand a deeping of the cross-atlantic exchange of ideas

(from the Web Montag Wiki) If you are interested in taking part in the first Web Monday in Stockholm, browse to the Wiki page, add your name to the list of participants and perhaps your presentation to the list of presentations and demos. In a regular Web Monday there are up to four presentations, everything that does not fit in this schedule will be covered on the next event.

Interestingly, the organization of the Web Montag is a good example of Web 2.0 communication. Peter picked up the idea from my twitter feed - and I got his announcement via twitter as well. I think this is an awesome idea and if you happen to be in Stockholm at Feb 05, 2008 (yes, it is a tuesday), you should consider being at the first Web Monday in Stockholm.

links for 2008-01-27

2008-01-27T00:33:08+00:00

The marketing ploy of Open Source | Boldly Open

(tags: opensource business tips marketing sales statistics)

Understanding art for geeks #40

2008-01-25T22:45:26+00:00

Understanding art for geeks #40
Originally uploaded by Paul The Wine Guy

Great. Simply great. There are lots more of this at Flickr.

Content Modeling for JCR

2008-01-25T20:39:38+00:00

If you are just reading this weblog, you might have been missing my post on Content Modeling for Java Content Repository (JCR) at dev.day.com.

In this entry I propose an alternative to content modeling with CND and ad-hoc notations based on combining aspects of UML and Fundamental Modeling Concepts.

links for 2008-01-25

2008-01-25T00:27:00+00:00

Q for Eclipse 0.4.0 released - Carlos Sanchez's Weblog

(tags: eclipse maven java opensource q4e)
Server-side JavaScript - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

List of server-side Javascript frameworks.

(tags: apache javascript server software webdevelopment)
Kill Statistics for four Rambo Movies

(tags: statistics rambo movie)

Goodbye, share.opml.org

2008-01-24T08:36:26+00:00

Dave Winer announces the end of share.opml.org. share.opml.org was a service that allowed you to upload your reading list in OPML format (or point to an OPML file in the web) in order to find out what people with similar reading habits were recommending, to find out the most read feeds and the people who subscribe to the highest number of feeds (I never made it to the top 10 in this list).

I was using the service in two ways: one the one hand, Blogbridge allows me to export my reading list as a shared OPML file available in the web, so I just pointed share.opml.org to the OPML file generated by Blogbridge service in order to get an always-up-to-date reading list. On the other hand, I subscribed to the top-100 feeds reading list generated by share.opml.org, which is the aggregation of the most relevant blogs according to their number of readers.

Needless to say, I really regret the end of this service as it provided a vendor-neutral way of attention aggregation.