Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

The increasingly popular FriendFeed is proposing a new protocol known as Simple Update Protocol (SUP). The problem FriendFeed is encountering is noting new. They monitor a RSS feeds over a variety of services for each user. This can really add up. To keep things timely they poll them frequently. Generally [...]

The buzz around the web today was the outage of Amazon’s S3. It shows what websites are “doing it right”, and who fails. This is a great follow up to my “Reliability On The Grid” post the other day.
Amazon S3 is cloud based computing. Essentially when you send them a file using [...]

There’s been a lot of discussion lately (in particular NYTimes, Data Center Knowledge) regarding both reliability of web applications which users are becoming more and more reliant on, as well as the security of such applications. It’s a pretty interesting topic considering there are so many things that ultimately have an impact on these [...]

Google today released Protocol Buffers. Protocol Buffers is their “language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data”. In general it’s pretty interesting stuff, and looking over the docs, seems pretty well thought out.
I agree XML is bulky and wasteful for the task. There’s a reason why many web developers prefer JSON rather than [...]

Apple’s MobileMe will not support IE 6. Per an email to subscribers:

To use the new web applications, make sure you have one of these browsers: Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox 2 or later.

37signals is now doing the same, and will be dropping IE 6 support.
For most things that I’m in developing, IE [...]

John Resig has an interesting blog post on embedded JavaScript. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a little while.
It would be awesome to see a PHP extension to embed SpiderMonkey into PHP. As far as I’m aware Facebook is the only one that’s taken a step in that direction with FBJS, which [...]

As a frontend developer I’ve long argued the magic formula for a good website is:

Usefulness + Speed = Users

This is based on the fact that the best websites on the internet are pretty spartan in appearance. When you look at many of the successful ones (Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Facebook), they’ve all taken the approach [...]

It’s happening again. Once upon a time, browser vendors started adding their own features without consulting with each other and agreeing upon standards. What they created was a giant mess of inconsistencies across browsers and platforms that is still in effect today. Ask any web developer and they can tell you of [...]

As a heads up to developers, Cross Site XMLHttpRequest (XHR) has been removed from Firefox 3, despite being in earlier betas. To quote a draft relnote from Mike Beltzner:

Due to late changes in the Cross Site XMLHttpRequest specification which made our implementation incomplete, it was decided to remove support for this technology rather than [...]

There are still quite a few websites that use a Favicon on a white background. While this looked OK in older browsers, these day with browsers like Firefox 3.0, they don’t look so great. It’s about time to make them transparent. Here are a few examples:
Here’s a tab with a nice transparency:

buzilla.mozilla.org
Here’s [...]