One click nirvana

We’re very much in the middle of the Syndication revolution - Everything out there on the web can be syndicated  - Be it the latest news, your friends’ photos and videos, your favorite TV Show episodes, and so on. Even sites lacking any technological platform for publishing can be subscribed to using online tools.

Now in all this - perhaps the most popular type of feeds that we syndicate to are blog posts. And typically, they support commenting. In fact, commenting is an integral part of the blogging experience. The discussion adds mass to the content of the original post, sometimes even surpassing it in meaningful content. Or, it can go completely haywire and spread out into several branches of context. Either ways, it’s something without which blogging won’t be blogging.

So my rue is this - I would like to participate in the discussions on a blog post right from my newsreader. That implies two things-

1. I want to view the stream of comments along with the post. This isn’t hard to achieve, given that almost all blogging platforms provide RSS feeds for comments to posts, and a couple of newsreaders that support the display of those comments.
2. I want to be able to comment right from my newsreader. This is important because it makes the whole process of ‘participating’ with the said blog or news site much more intuitive for me, and, the newsreader can then keep track of my comments and conversations in a more organized way than I do currently through coComment or commentful. They’re really good tools, both of them, but they sporadically don’t work. coComment, for instance, is a very nice tool that integrates with a lot of social sites apart from just blogging platforms, but somehow for me it isn’t able to update the latest comments on a lot of them.

The second feature requires the website to publish an XML-RPC API (Here’s what XML-RPC means) similar to the ones that allow people to be able to post to their blog from desktop applications. Wordpress is the only blogging platform that I’ve worked with, and I’ve checked - it doesn’t have one. There is an XMLRPC for traceback, but nothing for commenting.

Is this something that just hasn’t been implemented because no one thought of it, or is it just that no one wants to have this - for fear for people not coming to the blog’s website for commenting? Or is the concern related to additional spam?

I think lack of visitors is a self-countering argument - While there may be lesser people visiting to comment on the site’s interface, there would actually be more people commenting and being active on the site - and the positive effect of that should balance out the concerns. I’m not sure if spam is a factor either - sure, the spammer now has one URL to attack - but the post id (That I suppose would be a parameter in the call to such a service) is still dynamic. And in any case, the interface just as secure as the rest of the site is to spammers. I’m not sure how captchas can be implemented in such a service - but I’m sure they can be.

Reading this on a newsreader? Click the post title, wait for the page to load, scroll to the bottom for my cute little commenting interface, and fill in your thoughts!

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Ever asked yourself the question - “What was that awesome hit-the-boss game I played yesterday lunch break?” Well, Google just stepped forward to help you answer that very question.

Google just upgraded their Search History feature to Web history, allowing people to have a look at all the pages they’ve browsed in a timeline based format. It needs the Google Toolbar to be installed, and you have to allow web history collection here. More details on the installation over at the Google Operating System.

The web history display has a two-level nesting of your clickstream - letting you view the original page and the pages browsed to within that domain. It’s super-easy to bookmark pages in the Google bookmarking service from this display - just click on the star.

Now, obviously, this is a cool tool, it has the potential to save hours and hours of headache. However, there are no filters for specific sites to be excluded from your records and once you have a URL recorded, there is no way to delete it from your history. It’ll stay there forever, sitting on a server you don’t have any control over. Of course, you can delete your web history account, but that will remove your entire history, including your dear hit-the-boss games.

The tool does provide pause and resume features on the web page that you can use to disable the service temporarily. If you use Firefox, there is another easy way to disable Google from noting down your visits temporarily. You need to download the Stealther Addon, which is a really cool extension for those worried about their privacy. Once you install the add-on, right click on your Navigation Toolbar and choose ‘Customize…’. Scroll around to find the Stealther button and just drag it to wherever you’d like. From now on, all you need to do to disable Google from noting down the sites you’re just about to browse, is to enable Stealther by clicking this button. When you’re done, click it again to enable Web History. How it works: Web History is maintained through cookies, and Stealther disables them for you. But it disables all cookies, and some sites require cookies turned on for them to work properly, so those sites may not work out well with this technique.

Adobe’s recent announcement of the Apollo framework has had me excited for a while. This weekend, I plan to get my hands dirty with the SDK and see if I can build something. The really exciting thing about Apollo is that it’s going to bring Hybrid web applications into the limelight. Already, Adobe has announced a media player based on the platform, and eBay seems to have an Apollo application coming through soon. And yes, it has competition. Firefox 3 is going to have offline features built in, and we already have an open source Apollo competitor in Dekoh, and yes, there’s Slingshot.

Now, it’s not like hybrid applications never existed before. For one, desktop RSS readers and the several widget platforms out there have been with us for some time now. And they have existed in the “Flash” domain too. I remember playing a crazy flash desktop game during my college days that could actually store your scores and update their high scores server with them when you had connectivity. Of course, they used a stupid ASCII value modification algorithm that one could easily beat and register a high score of 465,232,000 points, but that is besides the point here. And I didn’t do it. Really.

What I love about (former) Macromedia’s core team, which I believe is still handling Flash product development, is that they have this beautiful and grand vision of the future of the web. Apart from Dreamweaver and Fireworks, which were the most innovative applications in their domains (Okay, maybe Fireworks loses out to Adobe’s Imageready… but it’s so damn easy!), they had Flash - which started off as an alternative to Java Applets for nifty text animations in the mid 90’s - and Macromedia pushed its envelope with every release. Flash 5 had powerful scripting features, with MX they started building on the RIA catchphrase and adding media capabilities with each release. These guys were out there evangelizing interactive applications and rich media (read “streaming video”) way before Web 2.0 was coined and TechCrunch sprang up.

Media-rich and interactive applications are everywhere today - in fact, one of the key ingredients of the Web 2.0 Universe are rich interfaces to applications. And some of these applications are ones that a lot of us are increasingly finding to be essential to our work. I, for example, can’t seem to get anything done without my Gmail, Google Notebook, Google calendar, and rememberthemilk task list. And the prospect of having all these available to me offline gets me, for the lack of a better expression, drooling. I’m waiting for the guys at scrybe to give me an account to have a look at their offline-ready application, and yes, I hope Google jumps on the bandwagon. How about integrating offline features within GWT?

The obvious question is - which Technology platform is going to take the honors away for such hybrid applications? Is Apollo going to wallop this domain as Flash did with streaming video? Or are websites going to have have offline features built right into their code, with some help from the next-gen browsers? I am not sure of the answers, but we’re sure to have some exciting times ahead.

Bring on the power cuts, Bangalore Electricity Supply Limited, we have hybrid power!

I started out with the Cake framework for PHP some time back, and it’s been a mixed ride so far. Cake is a very powerful, but still somewhat incipient framework built on the MVC pattern of Ruby on Rails. Among it’s several cool features is inbuilt support for AJAX based applications.

A good starter tutorial in that direction lies here. And another one, a Flickr Gallery.

However, if you belong to the population of web developers who are not psychic or lucky, you would probably have something like this staring your face when you try the above tutorials -

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in C:\cake\app\views\layouts\default.thtml on line 8

That’s because both the tutorials do not explicitly mention that you need to declare the AJAX helper in the controller file if you are going to use AJAX features. The best way to do that is to copy the app_controller.php file from your cake/ directory, put it in your app/ directory and add the following piece of code to it:

var $helpers = array('Html', 'Ajax', 'Javascript');

This declares the Helpers in the parent class of all the controllers, so that you don’t need to re-declare them later. If you do that, though, make sure to have all the helpers declared again.

If you came here looking for the icedlabs blog, well, the sad news is that it is dead. The reason behind that is obvious and rather bland - too much generalization killed the cat. So what’s this one about? My thoughts and observations on what is happening in Technology, and my learnings from what I do day in and day out.

My personal blog is still here, and older technology posts are here.