What PNG to use

Cloud9 is a state-of-the-art IDE that runs in your browser and lives in the cloud, allowing you to run, debug and deploy applications from anywhere, anytime. A complete game-changer that will change the way we develop applications forever.

Opt-Out: Junk Mail, Yellow Pages Deliveries, Telemarketing, Online Ad-Tracking

Web Robots (also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders), are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Search engines such as Google use them to index the web content, spammers use them to scan for email addresses, and they have many other uses.

The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 35 best practices divided into 7 categories.

A link is the connection between one piece of hypertext and another.

Mac OS X Web Browser Automation and Webapp Testing Made Simple.

oohEmbed is an oEmbed compatible provider of HTML embed codes for various web sites.

Finding the right domain name is an important step in creating a successful website. Luckily there are tools out there to help you in this process by not only helping you find available domain names, but also helping you in the creative aspect by giving you suggestions. Here are 10 of these tools to help you find that perfect domain name.

Naturally, a lot of the people using Geocities would have been partial to using MIDI, just as they were partial to using backgrounds or flashing animated GIFs or, for that matter, anything striking that got their page to be unique and special. In the interim period of time, we’ve had lots of ‘designers’ and aesthetic princes declare what we “should” and “shouldn’t” do, but back when anything went, anything did.

On February 25, 1993, Marc Andreessen wrote:

OpenSocial defines an API for developing social apps and was designed in cooperation with multiple social networks right from the start. Amongst many others, companies like Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn and MySpace support the interface.

Google, Yahoo!, and MySpace have launched support for the OpenID OAuth Hybrid Protocol, which combines OpenID authentication (sign in) with OAuth authorization (access control) into a single interface. Websites that accept OpenID can now let the hundreds of millions of users who already have either a MySpace, Google, or Yahoo! account sign in and enable two-way data sharing of their profile, contacts, and activities, without having to register a new site-specific account or to share their password.

The reason I've been writing about existing forms is that I don't know what new forms will appear. But though I can't predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser.

In a recent interview Tim Berners-Lee pointed out that the infrastructure to power the Semantic Web is already here. ReadWriteWeb's founder, Richard MacManus, even picked it to be the number one trend in 2008. And rightly so. Not only are the bits of infrastructure now in place, but we are also seeing startups and larger corporations working hard to deliver end user value on top of this sophisticated set of technologies.

Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox add-on that lets you change the appearance and functionality of almost any page on the web. Most people don't know how to write JavaScript, though, so we end up using the Greasemonkey scripts developed by other people who do. There are lots and lots of scripts that have been written and they are fun, useful and easy to run.

Given how quickly the Social Web is coming together, I believe that HTML will need to support social elements someday soon. It's great to see this type of innovation by Facebook running in the wild, but the web itself ultimately evolves best when multiple competing approaches come together. Just as OAuth brought together the best practices from AOL, Flickr, Google, Yahoo! and others, there is a similar opportunity to bring together FBML, YML and OSML along with the client-side benefits of XFBML.

With all the recent buzz about real-time web, surely this is the year XMPP/AMQP Publish-Subscribe (PubSub) makes it to the big leagues! Or maybe not. Ejabberd (XMPP), RabbitMQ (AMQP) and other pubsub server implementations have come a long way but they remain cumbersome to setup and maintain, and perhaps more importantly, the clients require special libraries and a steep learning curve. That is not to say that either XMPP or AMQP are doomed for failure, in fact, they will continue to thrive, but there is a great case for a simplified PubSub implementation to cover the ad-hoc cases where a dedicated TCP channel might be an overkill: enter Webhooks.

XMPP stands for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. The xmpp.org site defines it as “a set of open XML technologies for presence and real-time communication.” In other words, this is a technology that allows you to send XML from one place to another almost instantly.

"What you might not have read about is how Wolfram Alpha works, and exactly what's going on behind the scenes of the rather unassuming web site. And we're just about to tell you."

"Rich snippets could be a turning point for the Semantic Web, since, for the first time, they create a powerful economic motivation for semantic markup. Google has told us that rich snippets significantly enhance click-through rates. That means that anyone who has been doing SEO is now going to have to add microformats and RDFa to their toolkit."

This post is for those wishing to understand the internal mechanism of the protocol, and go beyond the introductory Explaining OAuth post. This guide assumes you have already read Explaining OAuth but not necessarily the specification.

Apache's .htaccess configuration files have baffled countless developers. This tutorial aims to break through this confusion by focusing on examples and thorough descriptions. Among the benefits of learning .htaccess configuration is automatic gzipping of your content, providing friendlier URLs, preventing hotlinking, improving caching, and more. First, the basics.

"In the past five days or so I've seen three different posts on the web where somebody has either confused OpenID and OAuth or expressed confusion as to how they differ. I'm not going to name names or point to URLs. I'd prefer to try to fix the problem."

A popular explanation of the distinction between frontend versus backend engineers is that frontend engineers 1 require a broader range of technical skills and backend engineers necessitate a more focused skillset. This view of the frontend engineer as a technical generalist leads some to view the frontend engineer as a technician to the backend engineer's craftsman, but the frontend engineer's role as a generalist is not restricted to technical matters; they are a generalist in a broader sense as well.

A simple, open, web-hook-based pubsub protocol & open source reference implementation.

"Personally I firmly believe that widgets are the future of the mobile web. They are easy to create, they’re based on open standards, they save the end user quite a bit of network traffic, and many people around the world already know how to create them."

I’ve watched the proliferation of URL shortening services over the past year with a certain amount of dismay. I care about the health of the web and try to ensure that URLs I am responsible will last for as long as possible, and I think it’s very unlikely that all of these new services will still be around in twenty years time. Last month I suggested that the Internet Archive start mirroring redirect databases, and last week I was pleased to hear that Archiveteam, a different organisation, had already started crawling.

The argument for rev=canonical

Short URL auto-discovery is a simple way to link a long URL with a short URL.

The unbelievable speed of adoption of rev="canonical" shows that it fulfils a real need. If the HTML5 community ignore this development, not only would they not be paving a cowpath, they would be refusing to even acknowledge that a well-trodden cowpath even exists.

PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript.

"When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away."

A use case for Microformats, and the semantic web in general.

Ah, inline-block, that elusive and oh so tempting display declaration that promises so much, yet delivers so little.

Application Program Interfaces are, broadly speaking, tools for building software applications. An operating system API might help you build applications with a consistent interface, but Web APIs are mostly about giving you access to data.

We are going to rescue your shit.

Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

We're trying to ensure that users are only exposed to the safest way to disclose their location using OAuth.

Makes favicons.

It is suggested that XHTML delivered as text/html is broken and XHTML delivered as text/xml is risky, so authors intending their work for public consumption should stick to HTML 4.01, and authors who wish to use XHTML should deliver their markup as application/xhtml+xml.