S3 Firefox Organizer is a Firefox extension that will let you transfer files to and from your Amazon S3 account. The UI is pretty simple and works quite well. My only beef with is that the extension does a poor job of representing folders on your S3 account. Otherwise, the extension works as promised. For those of you not familiar with the Amazon S3 service, it is a great and cheap way to store/backup your data offsite.
This is a bit older but interesting nonetheless. Niall Kennedy discovered that Google is about to release a Google Reader API. This is interesting in the fact that you can build your own RSS reader using Google’s API as the backed for your application. Niall has quite a few examples on how to use this API.
Fiftyfour Eleven has a great tutorial that will show you how to use two webservices to add tags to your content. The two part tutorial will show you how to access Yahoo!s and/or Tagyu’s tagging API’s. They are simple services that will recommend tags based on the content that you provide it. In Part 1 you will learn how to use the API’s while part 2 will show you how to retrotag some existing content in your CMS.
Michael Arrington from TechCrunch has a good summary of the new Amazon Grid Storage Web Service. In a nutshell this new service from the number one online bookseller, provides web developers with a very inexpensive ($.15/GB of storage) online storage system that can be accessed using both REST and SOAP. The idea is that Amazon provides the storage, bandwidth and scalablility any you the developer build applications on top of it.
Geo-Names provides free geo-data such as geographical names and postal codes. The database contains over 6 million entries for geographical names and the whereof 2.2 million cities and villages worldwide. The service can be accessed through an webservice API or you can download and use their data to host on your own database server.
The Yahoo! Developer Network has just added a JavaScript Developer Center with tonnes of great examples on how to consume Yahoo!s Web Services using JavaScript. Most noteable, is the ability to access these API’s using the REST protocol and have the results returned as JSON objects, effectively removing the need for a Web Proxy.
Via Ajaxian, XML.com has a good article titled Fixing AJAX: XmlHttpRequest Considered Harmful. The article states that the XMLHttpRequest object enables alot of the really cool stuff in today’s web applications, but asserts that the really cool stuff that can be done but is never talked about is using AJAX to consume third-party web services like those from Google, Yahoo and Flickr.
XMLHttpRequest has a basic security restriction prevents you from making XMLHttpRequests to any server except the server where your web page came from. To access third party web services, XMLHttpRequest needs to be fixed and those fixes are outlined as:
