AIM Pages Blog Widgets

Just finished the Blog sidebar widgets panel at Widgets Live!.  I was the only one foolish enough to try a live demo... which of course crashed and burned.  I'm so glad I made a backup animation to show instead.  I'm also told that I was nearly inaudible during most of the presentation.  Note to self: Lean into the mike! Also, I forgot my VGA converter cable and had to jump off the platform right as we started to go grab it. 

On the other hand, the panel discussion was fun.  We're certainly in early stages; we had four people on the panel, and four completely separate terms for essentially the same things (widgets, gadgets, modules, parts).

Link: Widgets Live! AIM Pages Blog Widgets Presentation (html).

At Widgets Live!

It's pretty packed and I'm in the back next to the power outlets.  It was great to see Alex Russell mention AOL's support for Dojo this morning.  I've been struggling a bit with the WiFi -- it's better than at some conferences, but something's definitely wrong when it takes 2 seconds to ping the router.  It's still a little slow even now but not horrible:

PING 172.17.0.1 (172.17.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 172.17.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=188.881 ms
64 bytes from 172.17.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=135.392 ms
64 bytes from 172.17.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=74.55 ms
64 bytes from 172.17.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=63.111 ms
64 bytes from 172.17.0.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=237.2 ms

REST Web Services: The Book

Something to look for on Amazon soon: REST Web Services.  The outline looks good; I would love to have a book to hand to people who want to find out about REST.

Especially Chapter 8: Resource-Oriented versus Service-Oriented Architectures:

The main event. We single-handledly take on the SOA, WSDL, and the WS-* stack: an enormous, multi-billion-dollar project that has alrady had about 25 books written about it. We believe this conglomorate will ultimately end up like CORBA, the OSI protocol suite, ATM, and other overengineered big-money flops; and that simpler, more flexible solutions will swallow anything good to come out of it.

In the spirit of comity and friendship, following the smackdown will be a section describing what REST services can learn from the SOA and take from the WS-* technologies.

Tags: REST, Web Services

Widgets Live!: Blog sidebar widgets

I'll be on a Blog sidebar widgets panel at Widgets Live! next week, doing a short demo and discussing the nuts and bolts of how to more easily hook up widgets and blogs.  Widgets are to web pages what feeds are to HTTP -- a technical shift that opens up new possibilities and is a potential game changer.  It should be fun, barring demo gremlins.

(Feed)

Tags: widgets, widgets live, blogs, panel

Journals R9 Update: Shiny!

Stephanie just blogged about our latest Journals R9 update, which has escaped from beta and is currently rampaging throughout our production servers on journals.aol.com.  The most visible change is the new, less blue color scheme.  There are a lot of less visible changes.  One of them is that we now support HTTP authentication for both RSS and Atom feeds -- so if you are a reader of someone's private Journal and use a feed reader that supports it, you can get their daily thoughts delivered to your computer automatically, just like you can for public Journals.  Does your feed reader support it?  If it's web based, probably not.  Otherwise, it probably does.

Here's a bonus Easter Egg, just for fun.  You can apply a theme to any Journals page by adding an argument "?skin=css url" to the page URL.  Like this.  Or this, or this... or anything over at the AIMPages themes directory.  It shows a direction we're headed; not the end of a journey, but the start of a trip.

We've also updated our whitelist to allow more cool widgets to be put in your posts and About Me box.  I just added one of the neater ones -- MyBlogLog's Recent Readers widget.  I've put it on my sidebar as an experiment; is it cool, or just weird, to see your visits being tracked and displayed?  (Hi Frank!)

Journal Beta update

We just pushed out some new updates to beta.journals.aol.com, so please go play with it.  A lot of the changes are for International Journals (beta.blogs.aol.fr, beta.tagebuch.aol.de, etc) but there's also one fairly visible change:  We've modernized the look and feel of the "owner" pages, mostly by changing colors and buttons.  Newly created Journals will also get a different "Silver" default color theme.  It's not a huge functional change but it helps spruce up the look of the place.

Tags: beta, aol journals, colors

Call me =john.panzer

Several Internet eons ago, I registered for a newfangled xri:=john.panzer universal identifier after listening to a conference presentation.  Didn't know if this system was going to go anywhere or not, but I did know that it was free to stake a claim in this potentially interesting namespace.

Well, after a while I did get a free i-name, a contact page, and now it turns out I can actually use it to log in to something useful, to wit, the new OpenID Wiki.  Turns out that the library used for the Wiki authentication automatically supports user IDs like =john.panzer; it just works.  Which is of course the goal of the technology, and a good demonstration that user centric identity can become ubiquitous.