Nov
1
2008

Peppy - CSS3 Selector

This blog is more about reflection of realization of how I think I can keep up with the world technologies rather than Peppy itself.

When I first read about Peppy, yet another CSS selector, I was very reluctant to accept it. I’ve just become a fan of jQuery and now there is something new. Nowadays everyone is trying to impress others and nobody can tell immediately whose work will last for a long time. However with a bunch serious unit test the author provided and solid benchmark results, certainly some great work is done here. So I’d like to check out how to integrate this new selector with some of my other JS frameworks and will use it in my next project.

I am always easily fed up by having too many options, but this is the case more and more often in nowadays technologies world. And this trend will continue for sure because of the massive buzz and evolution of SOA. CTOs, Software Architects, and Software Engineers all need to wade through that software jungle to find out which meet the needs of the company, the product, and the component respectively. I have to give up my satisfaction with current technologies and software I am now comfortable with, and embrace whatever I find to be promising along the way. I may be wrong sometimes by passing on the best solution and choosing another, but at least I won’t be trying to stay in my comfort zone with the software I use from a decade ago.

So I’d like to write to myself, don’t hold any prejudice on new stuff.

Oct
15
2006

My Blog — Hard to SEO

Complaints

Ack! Well, maybe I am too shy to SEO my blog entries…don’t wanna stand at the front of search engines.

No! It’s a lie. XD.

Right, I’ve learnt to dynamically load content, even posts, for reasons like minimizing bytes needed to transmit, such and such…then I found myself a victim of that “advantage”/”best practice”…

  • First of all, it’s impossible (yet for me) to keep accurate track of page clicks….because all the posts after the first load are via HTTPRequest Object;
  • Secondly, because of above, the page is not refreshed, and the permanent links are very rarely activiated…the consequencies are neither visitors can easily bookmark/reference the post, nor search engines would be able to detect permalinks;
  • And because of the above two, search engines can only find and index my blog index page, but almost never other pages, so literally I am pruned from search engines….

“…I am pruned from search engines…”

That’s the bloody lesson I’ve learnt from it….but…feeling lazy to rewrite the portion of the code…XD….

O well, maybe…I’ll not experiment abusing new things any more…

Solution?

What might be a solution to satisfy both “SEO-ability” and “Minimized Bytes”?

Dirty and Quick…Cookie all my js, header and footer templates..and on refreshing the page, load cookies to fill the skeleton…

…But I guess I will save the hassle by simply ignoring “minimized bytes” recommandation….how much does it cost to transmit a js file when it’s usually cached by browsers by default…

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Sep
12
2006

A thought on WebOS

Well, it seems that we’ve got into a real “No idea is too crazy” paradise. 3 weeks ago I post something about webware, and “imagined” a central OS that users can connect to from browser, and now it’s becoming reality! Anyhow, the webOS concept is still in discussion. Many people, including myself, have concerns about its application in the future, many issues have been raised. See the original post from the link below.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/…_vs_browser_apps.php

Downsides of a WebOS

  • Works at the mercy of the network and the server load.
  • While the many enabling capabilities of network-based storage architectures are of substantial value - issues of authentication, access control, and security/privacy of the stored data remain. Are you going to let someone else handle your data? Would you trust a startup to protect your critical data? [Ed: for an interesting side argument, see this discussion of IBM's SoulPad from a year ago]
  • The privacy, control, reliability and performance issues prevent the WebOS from being an alternative to the ever-more-affordable and easy-to-use desktop.
  • WebOS requires a fast and reliable (if not flawless) connection to work correctly.
  • Inability to operate peripheral devices.
  • Web applications rely on open source infrastructure and an array of technologies and formats - and these are constantly changing, often with no regard for being backwards compatible.

I quoted a section of it and would like to try to analyze a bit of the downsides we see from today’s point.

Analsis of the Downsides

  • This issue is not only imposed on WebOSs, indeed most of web services are based on this server and client model. Everything we do largely depend on the performance of the server, and potentially there could be a failure of the system and we cannot do anything about the service. Just like we use MSN so often and even though it occasionally fails or rejects us from logging in, we don’t feel as if it’s the end of the world. Fortunately accountablity and stability are something websites and web service providers cherished to have, presumably. The bottom line would be, if you find comfort to transmit or store some sensitive information through or in a public email system, you might not feel less comfort to store them in a WebOS;
  • Performance is the next big issue. According to today’s browser technology, relied on which even a smooth fading effect is not really “smooth”, it is such a turn down to imagine a graphic intense WebOS. Yet, the development of technology always turns out to be out of people’s expectation, in a relatively long term, say 20 years. Now step back from fictions, in the following few years, at least bandwidth won’t be a bottleneck at all. Internet access? Welcome to the “Wireless Matrix”, in which Neo doesn’t have an Ethernet port!
  • If you think WebOS as a complement or a backup of DeskOS (what’s the word again?), it would not need direct controls on the devices. How are you going to change your hard-drive? Buy one from eBay and fill in the address of your WebOS host company?
  • Web technology is still in its infant age, people are exploring the capabilities. It’s a bit too early to know what they will be like 5 years later. Before the Windows time, was it really clear what was going to come up and dominate the world? People are exploring, everyone is. Yet once people find out they’ve got enough to start with, backwards compatibility would be considered, or, it may not matter at all!
  • As I’ve mentioned above, WebOS, is a good partener of the DeskOS (still cannot remember its original name), not a step son of it. The idea of having a central WebOS, was largely derived from the trend that people are having more than one terminals in their household and are getting frustrated by the complication of synchronizing these dull computers. They are supposed to communicate with their buddies spontaneously, aren’t they? So will less people have multiple PCs at home? No. Then, the need and the market is big.
  • It’s evident that WebOS is not powerful in terms of performance. Admittedly, I don’t think installing a game on my WebOS and play the game using the server’s CPU would ever happen. My thought is, the DeskOS (again~) would retain the power to run games, play movies, make graphics and store downloaded data. While WebOS, stores my Calendar, my Address Book, my Notes, my Documents, my Pictures, and my Works etc.; basically things update frequently, containing non-sensitive information if you want.
Sep
9
2006

Some Cross-Browser and Simplification Functions

As I was writing this blog, I wrote a bunch of generic functions that I thought are short cuts of the tedious javascript and DOM functions. For example,document.getElementById(), one of the most often used functions, is definitely overwhelming.

Also, there are a lot of incompatible issues from browser to broswer, so there are functions attempting to overcome these and make them transparent, at least to me.

Download Script: (kunalu.js)

I am open to discussions. Many of them are very primative and need improvements. I have only addressed issues in Firefox and IE6+. I did NOT test them in Safari, Mozilla, Netscape, or Opera. Please feel free to leave your comments and suggestions.

I will post some code segment and talk about my initial design ideas.

Jul
21
2006

A few words on Cloud

I have been thinking of changing and customizing my blog, somehow, so that I can share my ideas and if possible, getting to know more people, interested in Web Development, or anything I like. A few weeks back I tried to come up with a brand new look and feel skin to tackle on the existing WordPress kernel. Yet I wasn’t quite satisfied with the result I had.

Last weekend when I was reading someone’s blog. Maybe ajaxian.com? Anyway, I found I became more and more reluctant to read on whenever I click “previous post”. Instead of blaming my own impatience, I figured out that it might be this chronological way of reading that bored readers. It’s not neccessarily 100% readers’ fault. So I sit back, and closed my eyes, attempting to find some revolutionary way of reading, or filtering. Yet this cloud concept, which I have seen many times, came into my mind. “Perfect, this could totally change the way people surfing on the web!”

There are infinite informations on Internet, yet you cannot read them all. There has to be some kind of filtering mechanism to facilitate accurate information seaching and reading. We then have more options to find and choose the material that we are interested, rather than being force to read from top to buttom, oldest to latest, which is a linear process. We can do much better than that! The guy who came up this cloud idea is a genius, and the concept can be applied in a much broader area.

Now what. The first thing appeared in my mind was this. Each individual has his/her own criteria in terms of interests. People might just care about the latest news, not the most popular news in last 50 years. So popularity is not the only criteria that a cloud should have, although it is an very important and default critiria for many existing clouds. So for this blog, I chose to have a cloud of popularity, one for comment counts, and one for dates. Even for date related orderings, I cannot bare to have only the power to view posts one day ealier before posts that are a week ealier.

Let’s look at another possible application of this concept. Say yahoo! music, they could have a cloud of songs or one for singers, it is a lot of better than what they are doing now, a list of all celebrities, which I could only name a few. I have no knowledge about their popularity based on this listing, but with a cloud, I will choose the biggest link and see what this chick’s got. So there are many more ways of using clouds which, once the cloud concept is well spreaded, will be invented by smart web designers.

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