links for 2007-10-29

I miss Kathy Sierra

There is huge hole in the Internet that Kathy Sierra filled. This morning, I looked again for some signs of what Kathy is doing now, but her site is still dormant.

We’ve lost such a eloquent voice for building businesses and products that people are passionate about. It’s been months now, and I don’t see anyone being able to fill the void.

I miss Kathy Sierra and still hold out hope that one day she will return to blogging.

links for 2007-10-23

Twitter Updates and Facebook Status

Twitter’s Facebook application has recently been updated to allow you to change your status whenever you post to Twitter. This sounds like a good idea in practice, but in reality, it turns out to be simply redundant.

Status updates is one of the few Facebook items that are available via RSS. Now that Twitter updates change the Facebook status, most of the RSS that Facebook provides is now full of updates that I’ve already read in Twitter.

The only updates I can get out of Facebook’s walled garden is something that both started outside of the garden and something that I’ve already read. It’s easy to see why everyone thinks Facebook is so useful. </sarcasm> :-)

links for 2007-10-21

Relative URLs for HTTP and HTTPs

Ajaxian pointed to a post by Ned Batchelder on relative urls. I almost didn’t click through to the post because I didn’t think there was anything new to learn about URL syntax. Boy was I wrong.

Have you ever seen a url that looks like this?

  • <img src=’//fast.cdn.net/pix/smiley.jpg’ />

We’ve also created links that started from the first slash and dropped the domain, but I’ve never seen links that dropped the http or the https from the link. Ned explains the benefits of this technique thusly:

Here, we’ve left off the protocol scheme, but included a host name. In this case, the protocol scheme from the displayed page will be used, but against the host in the URL. The relative URL system is still in play here: omitted portions of the URL at the beginning are taken from the base page, and the relative URL takes over whereever it starts. On an HTTPS page, this will be an HTTPS request to the CDN, on an HTTP page, it will be an HTTP request.

I love it when I learn something new about a piece of technology I’ve taken for granted for years.

Is the Mobile Web Finally Set to Take Off?

Read/WriteWeb asks readers, “Is the mobile web (or, rather, using mobile devices to access the web) finally coming of age?”

In a word: Yes.

For more details, on why:

The real question is when will it take off. Are we looking at a 6 to 9 month or a 12 to 15 month horizon before the groundswell takes off.

Web Analytics guru Eric Peterson recently came to a similar conclusion about the mobile web. I think Eric nailed it when he said that the coming mobile web is probably less like a wave and more like a incoming Tsunami.

Browser Client-Side Database Storage

One of the big features in HTML5 has been implemented by the Safari developers and it’s a doozy that I wasn’t aware of: client-side database storage.

From the Surfin’ Safari blog:

The client-side database storage API allows web applications to store structured data locally using a medium many web developers are already familiar with – SQL.

Like cookies, you can store the databases per domain. I’m struggling to determine if the persistent storage in Firefox is the same thing. Firefox’s implementation states clearly that it isn’t available to web pages (only “trusted callers”). IE seems to be (per usual) implementing something similar, but slightly different.

Niell Kennedy wrote a good summary of the different techniques for boosting Ajax performance using local storage and why this would be beneficial.

I’m starting to get excited about HTML5. This database feature could be very useful for web applications.