Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

HTML5 splits into two standards

Just when web developers got a little bit of hope, Slashdot reports on the bad news.

Until now the two standards bodies working on HTML5 (WHATWG and W3C ) have cooperated. An announcement by WHATWG makes it clear that this is no longer true. WHATWG is going to work on a living standard for HTML which will continue to evolve as more technologies are added. W3C is going the traditional and much more time consuming route of creating a traditional standard which WHATWG refers to as a ‘snapshot’ of their living standard. Of course now being free of W3C’s slower methods WHATWG can accelerate the pace of introducing new technologies to HTML5. Whatever happens, the future has just become more complicated — now you have to ask yourself ‘Which HTML5?’

Even if it sounds good, it is actually really bad.  HTML5 is already complicated enough, and all major browsers support a different subset of it, and even those things which are supported do differ in the way of how.  Splitting the standard just complicated things further.  The fact that this is not exactly new, doesn’t really matter.  Saying that it won’t be harmful, is silly.  As is the whole point of a “living standard”.  Like a few people mentioned in Slashdot comments, “living standard” is an oxymoron. The whole point of standard is to provide a static point of reference.  Splitting is not a solution to the problem.  It’s quite the opposite.  Consider this xkcd comics for illustration, which is nothing but the truth.

The Secret Online Weapons Store That’ll Sell Anyone Anything

The Secret Online Weapons Store That’ll Sell Anyone Anything

The Bushmaster M4 is a 3-foot rifle capable of firing thirty 5.56×45mm NATO rounds, and used by spec ops forces throughout Afghanistan. It’s a serious weapon. But in the Internet’s darkest black market, it’s all yours. Who needs a background check? Nobody.

The Armory began as an offshoot of The Silk Road, notable as the Internet’s foremost open drug bazaar, where anything from heroin and meth to Vicodin and pot can be picked out and purchased like a criminal Amazon.com. It’s virtually impossible to trace, and entirely anonymous. But apparently guns were a little too hot for The Silk Road’s admins, who broke the site off from the main narcotics carnival. Now guns, ammo, explosives, and more have their own shadowy home online, far from the piles of Dutch coke and American meth. But the same rules apply: with nothing more than money and a little online savoir faire, you can buy extremely powerful, deadly weapons—Glocks, Berettas, PPKs, AK-47s, Bushmaster rifles, even a grenade—in secret, shipped anywhere in the world.

Why you shouldn’t write off Google+ just yet

Why you shouldn’t write off Google+ just yet

I do agree with this bit:

Google+ is technically better than its rivals in a number of key ways. The user interface is comfortable and friendly. It’s easy to maintain circles of contacts, and to segregate what you share with each group. Discussions of small-to-medium sizes are manageable and readable — even in real time. Facebook wins when it comes to the open graph and app ecosystem, but a lot of people don’t care about that stuff.

And I’ve also seen the same as this:

For me, however, it’s all about engagement. When I share something on Google+, I get an interesting discussion — replies from friends long lost. The discussions are far more cohesive than Twitter’s 140-character, scatter-shot approach. And they are more far flung than what I get on Facebook

And something that I didn’t know is that Google employees’ bonuses are related to their projects’ success on Google+.

WP Help – build a help system into your WordPress project

Mark Jaquith has updated his WP Help plugin to version 1.0.  This is very handy for those people who build WordPress-based projects for other people to use. Anything from your mother’s blog to a super-duper custom WordPress application could a few pages of help, explaining  how to do things.  And that’s just what this plugin helps you build.

One of the best features for those who build a lot of similar systems and give them away is the synchronization of help documents.  Here is how Mark describes it:

If you have a standard set of help documents you want to use on multiple sites, this lets you do that. Create the documents, grab the (secret) sync URL for that site, and then plug that URL in to other sites. Those other sites will automatically pull down those documents, and keep them up-to-date (even handling new documents, deleted documents, renamed documents, and re-parented documents). Any internal links in the original document will be rewritten to be local to the destination WP Help install. So go ahead and use the WP internal linking functionality on your source site and know that those links will work on all the destination sites!

boilerpipe – Boilerplate Removal and Fulltext Extraction from HTML pages

boilerpipe – Boilerplate Removal and Fulltext Extraction from HTML pages

The boilerpipe library provides algorithms to detect and remove the surplus “clutter” (boilerplate, templates) around the main textual content of a web page.

The library already provides specific strategies for common tasks (for example: news article extraction) and may also be easily extended for individual problem settings.

Extracting content is very fast (milliseconds), just needs the input document (no global or site-level information required) and is usually quite accurate.