Monday, 26th April 2010
Lazy Load Plugin for jQuery. I’m using this jQuery plugin to save some bandwidth when people first view my Redis tutorial slides. It unobtrusively replaces images on a page with a placeholder graphic, then sets them to load automatically as the user scrolls down the page.
The new Facebook API exposes the events you attend to anyone on the Internet. I’m generally impressed by the new set of Facebook APIs—they’re a whole lot easier to work with than the older stuff—but they’re also clearly a bit half-baked and the privacy model needs some urgent work. The Graph API allows to to see all “open” events that any user has attended or is attending, which can exposes things like their friend’s home addresses. Yes, this means you can stalk Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer’s Perspective. Best explanation I’ve seen yet of what the Open Graph protocol actually does. Add the RDFa-inspired metadata and a Like button to a standard web page representing a place, group, product, website or one of another limited set of object types and people can “Like” it just like they might join a fan page within Facebook itself. You can then send news feed updates to all of that page’s subscribers. The bootstrapped metadata can then benefit other services as well.
Good design in computer programming consists of inventing abstractions that don’t leak. Good programming consists of implementing those abstractions in such a way that they don’t leak.