"I've instrumented my RailsConf presentation (Making the Web Faster) with Google Analytics, where I'm tracking slide transitions and clicks via custom events and time on slide via the user timings API:"

covers both form-urlencoding (RFC2396) and regular encading

nice, simple tool

"Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for. In this article, we’ll show you how spending more time up front designing user flows leads to better results for both the user and business. Then we’ll look in depth at a common flow for e-commerce websites (the customer acquisition funnel), as well as provide tips on optimizing it to create a complete customer experience."

"Web actions are not "just" hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are nouns and they reference destinations (sometimes with an explicit relation) with an implied action of navigation. In contrast, web actions are verbs and are first and foremost about a specific action that often but not always does something with the current page or site.

"

"Web application security is an essential component of any successful project, whether open source PHP applications, web services such as straight through processing, or proprietary business web sites. Hosters (rightly) shun insecure code, and users shun insecure services that lead to fraud. The aim of this Development Guide is to allow businesses, developers, designers and solution architects to produce secure web applications. If done from the earliest stages, secure applications cost about the same to develop as insecure applications, but are far more cost effective in the long run.
Unlike other forms of security (such as firewalls and secure lockdowns), web applications have the ability to make a skilled attacker rich, or make the life of a victim a complete misery. At this highest level of the OSI software map, traditional firewalls and other controls simply do not help. The application itself must be self-defending. The Development Guide can help you get there. The Development Guide has been written to cover all forms of web application security issues, from old hoary chestnuts such as SQL Injection, through modern concerns such as AJAX, phishing, credit card handling, session fixation, cross-site request forgeries, compliance, and privacy issues."

2010: http://code.google.com/p/owasp-development-guide/wiki/Introduction

Strict-Transport-Security to force SSL on repeat visits, X-Frame-Options to prevent clickjacking through frame-busting, and the (early) X-Content-Security-Policy to compartmentalize XSS vulnerabilities

How compromises happen in pursuit of adoption. Sometimes the grand vision is realized and sometimes it is lost.

"Years ago, when developers such as myself started the transition away from OS-specific APIs to web APIs, we believed that doing so would empower our software and save it from the confines of the desktop.

And we were right.

But we've also learned that while web APIs enable us to tap into a wealth of data, they can only be relied upon in the short term. The expiration date of software we create has been shortened due to the whims of those who create the web APIs we rely on.

"

"In prototypes and HTML-based slide decks, it's pleasant to write in markdown sometimes and avoid all those angle brackets.

So the idea is you're operating in an HTML environment but a few shortcuts would help so use markdown here and there."

good place to start

"Our approach to embracing APIs is to provide a consistent interaction model. Mule Cloud Connect provides such a model. APIs are represented as simple objects with meta-data configured using annotations that handle the URI scheme, authentication, signing, hashing, session management and even streaming.
These Cloud Connectors can then be orchestrated in flows to allow you to do things like filter social media data to send updates to your phone, provide automated voice access to your billing account or back up your CRM data to a database.
Of course you need a place to run these flows. Mule iON is an integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) which allows developers to compose API functionality and publish the results to their own applications. Mule iON acts as the integration layer to your application, removing the integration logic from the application code."

"There is a new concept forming at the moment called Web Intents. The name is a reference to the Android feature which allows applications to register their “intent” to handle certain types of actions."

Whoa, it's hard to great free

The Web Intent API is simple to use. Service developers define the intent they intend to support and what to do with the data they receive. Client applications simply initiate a new action with the given parameters.

Intent Registration

<intent
action="http://webintents.org/share"
type="image/*"
href="share.html"
disposition="window|inline"
/>

"We’re work­ing on a fairly sub­stan­tial re­vi­sion of the Sun Cloud API, mo­ti­vated by this prob­lem: In a REST­ful con­text, how do you han­dle state-chang­ing op­er­a­tions (POST, PUT, DELETE) which have sub­stan­tial and un­pre­dictable la­tency?"

"Part of the appeal of mobile applications is that you can take your application and its data with you wherever you go. One reality of mobile is, at times, a mobile device does not have a working connection to the Internet. This might seem to be an insurmountable problem for mobile Web applications. However, Web applications have evolved and become capable of working offline. In this article, you will learn how to offline-enable your mobile Web application and learn to detect when your application goes from offline to online and vice versa."

git push web

Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"

"But what is an app really? It’s not just a bunch of code and a fancy UI. Apps are the new channel for delivering services and experiences in mobile devices, taking over from the old world of web pages, texting, ringtones, wallpapers, MMS, Mobile TV – and some would argue voice, too. What’s interesting all these technologies were agreed over 1,000s of meetings and years of standardisation work taking place across (mostly) network operators in the 80s and 90s. In the case of apps, none of this had to be ‘standardised’, just adopted by a critical mass of software developers and in turn a critical mass of users. Today the billions of downloads are indeed that success metric of de-facto standards like iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Java – even if the vast majority of downloads take place on a small fraction (5%) of the devices sold."

awesome music beatbox webapp

good summary

"GWT 2.0 was released today, and even though I've been using it for months and contributing to it, I didn't realize the significance of this release until I saw the Google Campfire event, because I've been exposed to each new feature incrementally, rather than all at once."

one persons experience working with wireframes through the years.

"Eye tracking studies have revealed valuable information about how people read and interact with websites. One study, Eyetrack III, published a summary of their eye tracking results for news sites. While this is just one eye tracking study focused on a particular type of site, I think there are instructive nuggets here for any informational website."

"Rule 1 - Make Fewer HTTP Requests Rule 2 - Use a Content Delivery Network Rule 3 - Add an Expires Header Rule 4 - Gzip Components Rule 5 - Put Stylesheets at the Top Rule 6 - Put Scripts at the Bottom Rule 7 - Avoid CSS Expressions Rule 8 - Make JavaScript and CSS External Rule 9 - Reduce DNS Lookups Rule 10 - Minify JavaScript Rule 11 - Avoid Redirects Rule 12 - Remove Duplicate Scripts Rule 13 - Configure ETags Rule 14 - Make AJAX Cacheable"

"offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs. People use RANDOM.ORG for holding draws, lotteries and sweepstakes, to drive games and gambling sites, for scientific applications and for art and music."

Awesome... "toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

Stephene Downes indulges his futurist-slash-scifi side. Some good stuff in here.

"I'd like to put out two guidelines for anyone adopting this "link to myself" strategy: 1. Ensure that no more than 50% of the links on any page are to yourself. (Even this number may be too high.) 2. Ensure that the pages you create at those destinations are truly more valuable to your readers than any other external link you might provide." Hear, hear!

fun tool to create tiled patterns for backgrounds

Jan 08 overview of music search tools

a censorship circumvention solution that allows users to access blocked sites in countries where the Internet is censored. psiphon turns a regular home computer into a personal, encrypted server capable of retrieving and displaying web pages anywhere

Awesome Highlighter lets you highlight text on web pages and then gives you a small link to the highlighted page.

free for 1 hour, can record sessions

In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer 32-bit DWORD: Name: NoInternetOpenWith Value: 1

Firefox extension which automatically switches an internet connection across one or more proxy servers based on URL patterns you define.

treating a website as a dynamic entity – a flowchart of motivations that both provides a continuously satisfying experience for the user… and helps the website grow.

The experience stack is a way of thinking about the different levels at which experience design operates. Experience design can be thought of as… * branding; * service design; * product design; * interaction design; * human factors.

"the web is having a profound impact on how we conceptualise, seek, evaluate and use information"

quote a part of a web page as an image with an image map. offers bookmarklet, can host on flickr or tumblr

need to come back to finish reading.

Nice intro to issues faced with designing pages for the web.

lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.

Use Click2Zap to remove elements from the page for printing (remove text/images to save paper/ink) or reading comfort purposes.

Soundbank, mixer, and sequencer

The web of things is built on the web of documents, which is built on the web of computers controlled by Domain Name owners, which itself is build on a set of interconnected cables. This is an architecture which provides a social backing to the names for

to see if the principle of user-centred design could lead to a new way of encouraging people to exercise.

an integrated development environment (IDE) for desktop gadget design that lets you quickly prototype or modify your gadget's UI and test its performance

an open community of chatrooms. You can chat about anything you want, in public or private rooms. No account is required

a system for capturing, sharing, and automating tasks on the Web. CoScripter scripts contain human-readable instructions for completing Web-based processes, such as changing your mailing address or searching for real estate.

good reverse phone number lookup tool. wish it had a query param though so I could quicksearch from Firefox!

three excellent Flash-based web photo galleries for Lightroom from Airtight Interactive

shows equivalencies

a free wiki driven project management tool written in php5. Freelancers and small teams can easily setup projects and keep track of tasks, issues, bugs, efforts etc.

When people need to call their "computer friend" in 2007 to install a program, scan a document, burn a CD or show a picture to a friend, there is a problem. Fixing it will take time and the patience to sit down with users and understand them.

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies

an open source data integration application to help join your desktop data with the web. Apatar effectively integrates data and applications, and provides visual job designer and mapping, joins, filtering, data cleansing and validation capabilities.

allows you to replay the actions of users to your site to understand where things break down.

allows you to experience Flex 2 for yourself, without needing to download or install anything.