Google announced on Wednesday that the company has added prefetching to some searches. Prefetching tells the Web browser to automatically start downloading the top result. Currently this feature is only available in Mozilla and Firefox, and can be optionally disabled.
NewsForge has an interesting article that explains how Open source helps Flickr share photos. A quote from the article states that:
The list of tools Flickr employs reads like a Top 40 of open source projects. When you upload that adorable picture of your cat, it is resized by ImageMagick. The EXIF and IPTC metadata tags are extracted with Perl. Java is used for processing daemons and for FlickrLive, a real-time chat application. The Web pages you see are generated from Smarty templates and PHP scripts.
With the recent release of the MySQL 5.0 beta, the people at MySQL have releases a series of four PDF documents outlining and explaining some of the great new features in this popular open-source database server:
The articles contain lots of code examples to get you started with this new version.
Veerle Pieters shows us how to create two level horizontal navigation in CSS with images. It’s a nice short tutorial with great results!
This is probably the most useful Firefox extension that I’ve come across in recent months! Resizeable Textarea is an extension that allows you to interactively resize any textarea on a web page. Simply drag your mouse over the bottom or right edge of the textarea and drag to resize.
You gotta check this out at FlickrBlog. Transparent Screens is a very cool Flickr group that has people making their computer screens appear as though they are transparent! Very cool.
Tabtastic is a library that provides a simple way to implement tabs on your page using CSS, a little JS, and semantic markup which degrades gracefully on browsers with CSS unavailable or disabled.
Bud Gibson is proposing a new xFolk: An xhtml microformat for folksonomy that hopefully will create a standard that will let users share and export their tagged data more easily. The article is a very interesting read and makes use of existing technologies like XHTML and XMDP.
Bud’s work is inspired by panels at SXSW 2005 by Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik that discussed emergent semantics and extending xhtml.
xFolk is an open xhtml microformat that allows users to publish their own folksonomy classifications for aggregation by the services they choose. As such, it starts to give back users control of their own data. A side benefit of xFolk is that users may designate explicit semantics for their folksonomy tags, providing a link to the more formal practices of information architects.
Firefox has just been updated to version 1.0.2 which features stability and security improvements.
You’ve heard of LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), now there’sMAMP! It is a single installer for OSX that installs Apache, MySQL, PHP onto your Mac.
