Monday, 10th January 2011
Why does Facebook chat use subdomains so aggressively?
Probably because it involves long-running connections. Browsers have a limit on the number of connections you can have open to the same domain at the same time (I think it’s 8 in most browsers these days). If Facebook chat opened a connection to www.facebook.com and you opened up 8 Facebook windows you would no longer be able to navigate to any more Facebook pages, since all 8 connections would be taken up by the long lived chat connections. By connecting to a different subdomain for each connection this problem can be avoided.
[... 107 words]Are there any wikis that allow the use of JavaScript on wiki pages?
Such a wiki would be grossly insecure. That said, take a look at TiddlyWiki—it’s implemented entirely in client-side JavaScript and allows plugins to be implemented by pasting JavaScript in to a textarea.
[... 53 words]Are there any large tech conferences in Sydney, Australia?
We have a list of conferences (tech and non-tech) in Sydney here:
[... 41 words]What are the most easy-to-use, effective event calendar websites?
Our site Lanyrd.com is shaping up quite nicely (in my opinion)—if you sign in with Twitter we’ll show you events your Twitter contacts are attending, tracking or speaking at. We also have a pretty powerful search interface, and you can browse the site by location and topic as well. Some examples:
[... 81 words]What’s a good web dev platform if I work in Python, but want something faster to set up than Django?
Sounds like the perfect use case for Google App Engine, with its offline task queues and one-click deployment.
[... 44 words]