It uses other tags to place the images.

For example, i’ve tagged some of my images on flickr, which happen to be tagged with pug, ALSO with the keyword of neworleans. Mappr can then associate ‘neworleans’ with a location on the map. In essence, it’s inferring location from tags, which is neat.

To see it in action, check out this link

Tags: flickr, mappr, map, image, photo, geotagging

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

Tags: ie5.0, web3.0, xmlhttprequest, google, oddpost, ajax

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” was the last good book i’ve read (although that *WAS* a while ago now. I should read more paper)

Tags: zeldman, web, standards, flickr

1. Tony Soprano — How many times do you hear the mobsters mention the ‘RICO’ laws?
2. Rico….. Suave!

Now, I think Rico is exactly what the “Rich Web Application” community needs. Not because of what it is, but because of who is behind it. Sabre is a fairly large company, and they’ve been sponsoring Rico, finally releasing it into the wild. It’s nice that toolkits exist, but you really need an all-encompassing package that supports lots of functionality.

It’s hard to develop an application with lots of little pieces. Prototype is nice, but it doesn’t have all the pieces there. Backbase is great, but it’s not open source, and costs some real money. Dojo will be nice, when/if it gets here. I’m not criticizing, they’re new — they just need time to get everything put together.

For something as complicated as a rich web app framework, you really need some financial backing to put enough people on the project to make it worthwhile. Lone developers go so far, but we need more. I think that’s what we’ve got with Rico. Dojo might have it, i’m not sure how many people from Jot work on Dojo, and how much money Jot has / will have to develop with.

Anyway, I think Sabre’s shown some “enlightened self interest” with releasing Rico, and I think that it’s going to take the web app framework community to new, very good, places.

Oh yes — i’ve added Rico, Drag and Drop w/ Prototype, the Javascript Gamelib, and CPAINT to the ajax toolkits list.

Yes, google’s got em already, but the average joe doesn’t have the manpower to put all the pieces together himself. These toolkits are still very rough around the edges, and it’s going to take some time and some painful development of applications, some aborted projects, some cross-flow of ideas between projects, but we’ll see the browser be what microsoft feared it would be from the beginning — the browser is going to become the platform.

Why is this happening? We’re at a point now where the tools for web development, your databases and your server side scripting languages / application servers are already written, and they’re pretty good. me, as a developer, I can’t go out and hack together a PHP/FI version 1.0 and have it be of any use to anyone. What I’m saying is that because the tools are there, we’re now able to build tools on top of our tools, to make what we build even better.

I’ll give the Ajax toolkits another 6-9 months before they’re really mature, and the javascript widget-based toolkits, well, my guess is they’ll need at least another 12-18 months before there’s anything that’s highly polished and usable to a wide array of people.

Now, i haven’t actually played with the likes of Backbase, and they might be closer than anyone, I just don’t know. I think a project for tomorrow is to go download the backbase community edition and see what i can do.

Tags: ajax, backbase, php, qooxdoo, javascript

• Sajax — This one is really cool. Basically, it’s an Ajax client/server framework that includes backends written in ASP, ColdFusion, Io, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. That’s a mouthful. I haven’t had time to play with it, but looking at the html source for their examples (they have a calculator and a simple chat program on their website)
• Dojo Toolkit — Dojo holds lots of promise, and, to be fair, it’s still in early development. Right now, they’ve got their basic “io” package available, and that’s what does the Ajax. Besides that, they plan on releasing a full javascript library of ajax enabled widgets, which is really, really cool. Some of the developers work for Jot, which is sort of a wiki-meets-excel macros company aiming to do lots of cool things to get at the “long tail” of application development that’s currently filled by simple excel macros. Oh, and other devs worked on previous projects like nwidgets, prototype, and f(m).
• Prototype
• f(m) — This one is pretty neat, it’s a Javascript / Emcascript implementation of many of Microsoft’s .NET framework objects. I think you’d really have to whack yourself in the head to start using this, but once you did, it’d be pretty neat.
• Wick — Web Input Completion Kit — Basically, this is a simple Ajax toolkit for doing auto completion a la google suggest, but with your choice of data. That’s what’s there now. They plan on releasing quite a bit more than just this, though.
• Sack of Ajax — This one is pretty much the simplest Ajax kit out there. All it does is perform an ajax call (based on the URL you provide) and put the results in a div class you specify. Simple, but it might not do enough for your tastes.
• Ajaxing the Address Bar This is just a fairly straightforward discussion of how you can do more with ajax + search than google suggest. You can actually drive the search via ajax, which is interesting, though I’m not sure how usable it will be. It’s certainly interesting. Someone has to have come up with Google search results via API key driven by ajax by now. I can’t really think of how this would end up producing a better search experience for me — I mean, I’m pretty efficient w/ google searching, using firefox tabs, etc. Search rethought of as placing results in a “shopping cart” to be saved would be a neat idea.

  Actually, I’d like to see a greasemonkey plugin for posting things to delicious easier. That would be cool.

Tags: ajax, greasemonkey, google, api, f(m), ajaxian, wick, sajax, firefox, google, prototype, dojo

Anyway, I’ve been wanting to learn more about how it works, so when I ran across Dive Into Greasemonkey, I thought, “hey, cool”

So i’m off reading this crap about greasemonkey, now. What will i figure out first, Greasemonkey or Dojo/Ajax?

Ugh. I am too compelled to figure this shit out.

Tags: ajax, greasemonkey, dojo, firefox, plugin, customize, javascript

How to do this? It’s actually a fairly simple javascript function that does this:


function listAdd(input)
{
// Input mode
var list = document.getElementById('thelist');
var element = document.createElement("LI");
element.innerHTML=input;
list.appendChild(element);
}


First off, we get an element named ‘thelist’ — this is the OL or UL tag enclosing your list. Then, we create a new element. In this case, it’s a “LI” element. Next, we use the innerHTML property to set what goes inside the LI and /LI tags — in other words, innerHTML is what’s inside the tags. Finally, we use the appendChild function to add the element we created to the list.

The end result can be seen and tested here.

Overall, it’s a fairly simple but highly effective little technique that you can add to your bag of tricks.

Tags: javascript, li, ul, ol, list, createElement, appendChild, innerHTML, dynamic, html, dhtml,