Tag Archives: general webdev

Note to Self

The much-beloved last.fm expose a “top albums” feed (here) that provides amazon URLs to images. It doesn’t change enough to be worth tying directly in to my weekly “top ten” list on ala.sda.ir but it might be a useful data source, to then build a personal weekly top ten albums.

I’m thinking about this because I’ve conculded that tracks doesn’t work well enough to be interesting, since I tend to listen to new albums two or three times in a row per day for several days on the trot, so for example, last weeks top 10 was entirely made up of Dresen Dolls, despite the fact the an album chart would have been a more comprehensive sampler of my listening habits.

(Edit: Damn. Their “top tracks” feed doesn’t carry album data, so matching the two isn’t currently feasibly. Although I note they’ve got a weekly top albums feed on their web services pages, although it doesn’t currently hold data…)

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Prototype

I’ve spent the last couple of days doing a bit of work involving tarmac AJAX, and while I’m sure everyone else in my line of work discovered them yonks ago, I’d just like to take a moment to sing the praises of both script.aculo.us and especially the Prototype javascript library that it uses. These are clearly the work of clever bastards, because even I, with my attrophied Javascript can knock together some fairly nice stuff with them. If you’re engaged in web development these days, then really you ought to be using this stuff. They’ve saved me so much work it’s untrue. (Which isn’t to say it was all painless, but it wasn’t the special torture it might’ve been.)

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Web dev malaise

So, I’m sitting here in the office, bored out of my mind, attempting to upgrade someone else’s stinkingly poor spaghetti-logic code, to make it do something it was explictly designed not to do, and really, just wishing I had the sort of job where I was developing interesting shit, rather than crap for a company that’s too scared to do anything interesting with the internet, despite being perfectly placed to try to do cutting-edge things. And then I run across the summary for next year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and frankly, I just get more depressed at what I’m missing.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Lesscode.org

This looks like it might be worth keeping up with: lesscode.org, a multi person blog about, basically, producing applications that actaully get something done, rather than getting lost in ciomplexity. I particularly like this article, outlining the benefits of in-house code and the management process by which is doesn’t happen. I, of course, have never worked anywhere like that. No.

Never.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.