Gyani . info

Found a new addon for firefox, FireScope. It extends Firebug with reference material for HTML and CSS. Look out for items in the context-menus, that say things like Look up “blah” attribute, or Show Code Example.

The add-on is being developed by SitePoint an online resource for Web professional market, specifically Web Developers and Designers.

World Domain Map

A new way of looking at world. It shows country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) with font size relative to population. It shows about 245 different codes.  It will be good to see a similar map with no. of registerd domains for that TLD as well. Source [bytelevel] :- you can buy a copy for you from their website.

I got some weird “Duplicate Entry” Exceptions on creating content after doing a database migration to Drupal. It comes after registration if you added few users to db directly, or will come on creating new content if you added nodes directly to db.

Actually there is no AUTO_INCREMENT set for db tables in drupal, instead there is a ’sequences’ table. So make sure you make appropiate changes to numerical values after migration.

BTW, if you came here looking for how to migrate to Drupal from other CMS (wordpress, geeklog etc.. ) read these articles on drupal handbook.

Since last 2 years I’ve been using and creating various web-services. I had very basic idea about these and never thought about going into the details. Y’day night I somehow got enthu to digg into it and findout what are best practices, when to use what, differences and other details.. so here are some pointers on what I read..

• SOAP – Simple Object Access Protocol
• REST – Represntational State Transfer
• RPC – Remote Procedure Call
• REST is not simply XML+HTTP, it is valid to anything which conforms to RESTFul principals.
• REST vs RPC = noun vs verb… i.e exchanging resources and concept vs exchaging methods : A good example.
• REST vs SOAP : With SOAP, data exchange takes place with a additional Soap layer. It contains a SoapEnevlop which further contains header and body. With REST the request or response could be in any format, just that it should have a unique resource(URL) and it should specify a valid http method (GET,POST,PUT,DELETE).
• REST : secure, easy to use and light weight.
• REST isn’t best for every case : Sending secured data as params or sending large amount of data could be a problem. In which case you might want to use SOAP.

Further these articles (other then wiki) are worth reading.

• RESTFul service : AjaxPatterns
• RPC Service : AjaxPatterns.
• SOAP specifications by W3C, if you really want to read it. Very detailed – I myself just had a look not yet read it .
• Giving SOAP a REST, i.e. why REST .
• A good tutorial by W3Schools on SOAP, this is definitely worth reading.

Work on HTML5 is still going ( joint effort by W3C and WHATWG ), but there’s a lot of buzz around about it.

Again googled and saw many articles on it, so no point writing about same again. I didn’t find wiki enough informative.. but liked these two posts on phpGuru and aListApart.

The idea of having a async attribute is cool, which means script can be executed asynchronously and won’t block loading rest of the page. Also something new will be tags like video, auido & canvas.. and a few interactive elements including menu and datagrid.

There’s a list of elements which will be dropped including frame, font, center, applet etc , make sure you don’t use them now.

I heard a lot about support of drag and drop API in HTML5, seems like its started with IE + safari and now firefox is also supporting it.  A post by Neil on how to use it and more info on developer docs.

Nice plugin I found today for eclipse. Its a script editor for Nullsoft Scriptable Install System(NSIS) – which is an open source system for creating Windows Installer.

Earlier we were using Venis for the same, which is ok too. But Its really helpful to have a plugin like this, if you are working with nsis and are addicted to eclipse like me .

If you are new to NSIS and want to know how to create windows installers, read this tutorial and few examples here.

Firebug, no doubt is the most important tool for web development. And firefox the coolest browser .

The only problem is with so many people using IE, you can’t just ignore it. Recently I’ve found a nice tool similar to firebug for IE, IEWatch. You can watch http traffic and inspect elements.  Its not free but you can use trial version for 30 days.

Also found this post on IEBlog, which has a good list of tools which can be used for web development.

Read a nice article on wierd magzine, which discusses why “free” is the future of business.

Just summarizing the stuff I liked, various business models in practice these days which work this way

• Freemium : Providing basic version free and charging for a premium/pro version. While applying this I think you better not compromize on quality of basic version, but restriction can be on quantity.
  
• Advertising : Providing services for free with ad support to monetize. This is most common business model of web-based services.
• Cross-subsidies : Providing one product for free or low cost in hope that you will buy another bigger product, which will cover the cost.
• Zero marginal cost : Things distributed without any applicable cost to anyone, like music. Thus it is mainly used now for promotion etc..
• Labor Exchange : You do some work and get free stuff in return.

BTW – if you have not yet heard about Beerware, have a look . So it’s free as in beer

If you are writing a tech blog, most likely you would need to write code in the blog posts.

Here is an article which lists plugins that can be used for writing code and syntax highlighting.

I’m using a very light weight plugin SemCodeFix, for this blog.