Steve Rubel from Micro Persuasion shows how you can Become a Knowledge Management Ninja with Google Reader. In his article he explains how many under-utilized featrues in Google’s Reader product can help you sift through today’s information overload. Google Reader is - in my opinion - the best RSS reader I have used over the past 4 years. If you’re not yet using RSS, I would certainly suggest giving Reader a try.
AS3 E4X Rundown is a great introduction and reference to working with E4X in Flex. The author, Roger Braunstien is correct that 75% of E4X makes perfect sense, but it’s the remaining 25% that requires a bit of demystifying. This post covers the basics well then goes on to share some of the tips and tricks in working with E4X.
My colleague David Meeuwis showed me a most useful and non-intuitive tip that explains a subtle difference between using the @ axis and the attribute() axis in E4X. For example, given the following XML fragment…
<names>
<name salutation="Mr">Billy Bob Thorton</name>
<name salutation="Mrs">Angelina Jollie</name>
<name>Brad Pitt</name>
<name salutation="Ms">Jennifer Aniston</name>
<name salutation="Mr">Vince Vaugn</name>
</names>
The AS3 expression below…
myXml.name.(@salutation == 'Mr')
…will find all the names that have a salutation attribute equal to ‘Mr’. However, if there is any name in the xml that doesn’t have a salutation attribute, that query will throw an exception and die. However…
myXml.name.(attribute('salutation') == 'Mr')
Will give back all names that have a salutation attribute equal to ‘Mr’ and ignore any name elements without a salutation attribute.
So unless you are absolutely positive that the attribute you are selecting always exists, you should be using the attribute() axis over the @ axis.
Here is a quick Flex example with view source enabled that you can test with.
IBM Developer Works has a nice tutorial that will help you begin working with RSS using PHP. RSS Syndication has now become mainstream, so understanding how RSS works is very important to any developer. This article explains the basics of RSS, some of its uses, how to use PHP to create an RSS feed from a database, and how to use the XML_RSS module to read an existing RSS feed and translate it into HTML.
A new feature that was quietly added to Firefox was support for Microsummaries. Microsummaries are regularly-updated short summaries of web pages. They are compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, they provide more useful information about pages than static page titles. Microsummaries are represented using an XML document that could be created dynamically. They are associated with your page by adding a link element to your page and specifying the URI to your microsummary.
The Mapping Revolution: How Google Earth Is Changing Science explains how biologists, epidemiologists and disaster control experts are discovering Google Earth as a powerful tool in their work. In the CMS that we provide to our clients, each record can have GIS data stored along with it. We’ve recently started transforming this GIS data to Google Earth’s KML format and our clients are loving the way it allows them to visualize their data geographically.
DeWitt Clinton (Amazon A9 lead engineer) has an excellent article that discusses some important technical details of RSS and Atom. In fact he points out a technical shortcoming of RSS that is very important knowledge for any developer who works with syndicated content.
Jonah Bishop from Born Geek has an excellent tutorial that will help you create a Firefox Toolbar Extension using nothing but a bit of JavaScript, XML, CSS and a Zip utility!
I recently came across this interesting specification for XML User Profiles that suggests a new method for holding user account information for reuse by different web sites and applications. XUP summarizes meta data about persons to describe their online identity and also includes a specification for a centralized password service which immediately brings up the issue of privacy loss…
Anybody allowing meta data about himself to be put out machine-parseable, as with this format, obviously may suffer from complete privacy loss; but there are a few advantages in using it. You still have full control about how much information to give out, and you only need to write it once and then probably don’t have to sign up for accounts over and over again, because a centralized password and login service is part of this specification.
The IEBlog has a three part series on how to use IE7 Beta 2 as your feed reader.
If you’re a seasoned veteran of consuming RSS feeds, IE7 probably won’t offer you any compelling reasons to switch from you current reader. However, if you’re a newbie to the world of RSS IE7 might be good place to start.
It’s also important to mention that RSS feed reading could change by the time the final IE7 product is released, so hopefully there will be some changes.
