monkinetic weblog | redmonk.net

Interesting post from Alex Bosworth about the uses of scripting and AJAX in “modern” web apps, and what users have come to expect.

I’m playing around with FAlbum, a Wordpress plugin that pulls recent posts from my flickr account. It’s nicely done, though the documentation is somewhat lacking. I’ve added several recent pics to the top of the blog.

A while back I blogged about Mashuptown, the awesome site and podcast that has been showcasing mashups (two unrelated songs mixed together in some clever way) for the last, oh 8 mos, or so.

Recently Art announced that Mashuptown is closing it’s doors, and taking down all the music it’s been hosting. This is a real shame, and is probably due to some (heh - I first typed “sue” there - Freudian slip?) cease-and-desist letter from the usual suspects.

Art was kind enough to stop by a while back and wish Jodi and I well in our process to adopt Adelina. I wish Art the best of luck, and hope that there are more mashups in his future!

Quick idea for an OS X app/hack: How about something that would let me embed a terminal window in a splitview in any OS X application window? Then I could attach a terminal to, say, a Safari window where I have reference materials loaded up, or to the TextEdit document where I’m documenting some process.

Seth pointed me to prototype.js, a handy Javascript library for doing a variety of gee-wizzy things in webapps, one of which is performing a variety of useful AJAX functions. After fighting with it for way longer than necessary, I turned to:

tail -f /var/log/httpd/site_access_log

and after finding the request from my app I discovered that prototype.js was adding a parameter to the list I had provided for the remote call. The line in question is line 214(-ish) of the script, which looks like so:

if (parameters.length > 0) parameters += '&_=';

There are no comments explaining the additional parameter, or why it has no value, but FileMaker (collective groan) doesn’t like it one bit. I’ve commented out the line for now, at least until I’m given a very good reason for it being there.

Anyone have any ideas?

update: Markjuh had the answer - it was originally put there to work around a Safari bug, but is irrelevant now (so commenting it out is ok). Darn you Apple !

When using AJAX, remember that the A is for Asynchronous.

In case you haven’t noticed the Quick Links (or haven’t cared, as is likely with a large percentage of my reading demographic) I’ve been working on a rewrite of one of our apps at work, and part of that rewrite is some nifty AJAX-based stuff. I think it’s going to make the app quite a bit nicer to use. I’ve started calling this the “Frankenapp”: it’s a FileMaker Pro webapp where FMP’s template output is post-processed by PHP, and includes several hundred lines of JavaScript, plus the code that handles the XML back-and-forth (also crossing the FMP-PHP bridge) to make it act nice.