So, I was paying my AMEX bill yesterday and i noticed that they had an “RSS Feeds” Beta trial. At first, I was like, “Oh cool! They’re going to do something innovative with the technology!”
Then, I signed up for the service and realized it’s all just a big marketing ploy to get you to buy products that they’re offering.
To sign up for their marketing gimmick, you can go here.
I’d like to point out that many of the “rich application frameworks” that are out there (many of which are described in my rich application frameworks page) have been at this for a while, working on their technology out of the limelight.
It’s just that several powerful trends have collided, and the naming of the beast has, well, given everyone a focusing point. Naming something like this gives everyone a common frame of reference. Not that “XMLHTTP” wasn’t a good name for the idea, it’s just that, well, it’s not as sexy as AJAX. The naming of the technology, the very prominent use of it in Google Maps, the already-breeding realm of rich application frameworks, well, all of them collided and produced this idea in everyone’s head that Javascript isn’t as bad as we had all thought, and that using “modern” javascript could really produce some highly functional, powerful web applications.
Part of it is that javascript left such a nasty taste in people’s mouths that it was relegated to the, “only use if it you have to” realm. I know that’s where I was, having beat myself over the head with the javascript stick back in the day when Netscape still had >50% marketshare. I think a lot of people are seeing this technology and are realizing that we’ve come a long way since then. Really, for the most part, now you *CAN* have one codepath (for most things), and you don’t have to hack, hack, and more hack your way to getting things working on various browsers. Part of it is that we don’t have to test on Netscape 3.0 anymore, and part of it is that the technology has matured enough to not give everyone headaches.
There’s more to this, for sure, but I think i’m hitting the key points.
Some of this was ‘researched’ at various places around the web, but i found the Wikipedia AJAX article very helpful
If you had massive amounts of bandwidth available in a datacenter, but for downstream-only, what could you use it for, commercially? Most providers of content have to buy large amounts of bandwidth, but it’s for outgoing traffic only. If there were a way to use the incoming bandwidth effectively, it would essentially be free.
You could provide backup service (where people backup over the net TO you), you could provide bandwidth to end-users (who download mostly), and, well, that’s all I can think of. What else is out there?
So I was browsing through flickr, and noticed that I had a new contact. Usually, whenever i get a new contact, i check ’em out to see what’s up. Usually, i’ll see that they have some other pug people there. Here’s what I found:
Sure enough, right below me is laserone, from Everybody Loves Riley. What i thought was even cooler was that Jeffrey Zeldman was right next to me. Now, he has nothing to do with this, anyone can just up and add him as a contact, and we’re only next to each other because our flickr id’s start with the letter J.
I still thought it was cool, seeing how I think “Designing with Web Standards
Are you too lazy to ssh into servers you’re monitoring? Do you not want to set up a slick page with SNMP and/or RRDTool? Or, do these solutions just not fit your needs?
TopJax might be for you.
TopJax is essentially the “top” unix utility ported to the web via Ajax using Sack of Ajax. It provides the ability to view system processes, sort processes by various fields, pause/unpause monitoring, and hide idle processes.
TopJax is released under the GPL.
Note: This is probably highly insecure. I don’t encourage you to run it on a public server.
The permanent address for TopJax is http://emergent.urbanpug.com/topjax
If you’d like to keep up-to-date on the progress of the project, you can subscribe to this site’s RSS feed – 
Notes: I’ve separated all styling information from the code, because I know I’m not the best person with CSS. If anyone wants to help by providing alternate stylesheets, I’d be very happy.
If you want to help out by making a small donation, that would be cool.
You could also buy a Threadless shirt using me as a referral.
