“webapps”

It’s one of those moments when my head spins, twirls, swirls, and whirls. I’ve been seriously reading JS, CSS, and UI, since yesterday but it was just a couple of hours that it all came together. Let’s begin this Bushean trail with Ashley Pond V’s mindblowing, free web-book Developing Featherweight Web Services with Javascript. Then hop on to Sergio Pereira’s excellent Developer Notes for prototype.js. (Prototype.js, if you must know, is the JS framework.) Glen Murphy (recent googler) has a lot of interesting JS projects up his sleeve (say, this clock), and if you want clarity in this muddleheaded webworld, read everything you can find from Douglas Crockford (recent Yahoo)—all he’s written on JS is gobble-up-worthy, specially recommended are Prototypal Inheritance in JavaScript (it’s so short and yet it will change completely how you write JS) and Private Members in JavaScript (a wonderfully clear and short overview of JS object-orientedness). Did you know about JSON (Javascript Object Notation)? One last word on JS coding (and learning), please don’t do it without an HTML Real-Time Editor, a Javascript Shell, and a Javascript Development Environment—just don’t.

Yahoo! has a pretty nice UI blog going on (a couple of days ago, for instance, they did a nice post on the Patterns Behind the Yahoo! Home Page Beta) and they recently released an awesome Pattern Library (Yahoo! is becoming pretty cool lately… at least for developers). UI patterns seem to be all the rage these days and deservedly so. Jenifer Tidwell recent O’reilly, Designing Interfaces, looks set to become a classic (and some very worthwhile excerpts are available online). Out in the wild web, there’s even a pattern of how to build patterns, an interesting conversation on patterns here (intro, 1, 2, 3, 4), and Nine Tips for Designing Rich Internet Applications to which I wholeheartedly agree.

Doesn’t it just floor you how smart and fast things are becoming?

OK, back to work.

I’ve been looking for cool art lately (yup, there is a girl :) and I’m happily surprised to find there are lots of great stuff on the web. There are hundreds of web shops of amateur and independent artists out there (here’s one: boygirlsparty). DeviantArt was a first stop, of course; later followed by Etsy, a big place to find craftsy stuff which has some nice things going on and thru which I found Poketo, an artsy store specializing in wallets and apparel, where I finally found the gift (which will be perfect for her, I swear—had I had it custom-made it wouldn’t be this good).

And ogling through artist’s websites I found the perfect gift for, well, me: Io: Art of the Wired. I don’t know, I can simply feel it: this is a great book. Look at the rave reviews and the great art included:

But what really blew me away was Poketo’s flat worldwide shipping rate and Guu Media’s even bolder FREE global shipping. Nothing says one world louder than free shipping anyplace.

Grr… I hate looking for new domain names. Everything’s already taken and when it’s not, it’s because some arcane country code top level domain rules that won’t let you get it.

Case in point: my quest for a shorter domain for Imagery (elzr.com/imagery seems unfair now that it receives far, far more visits than this very blog). Sean was kind (and fast) enough the other day to grab imgry.com and imag3ry.com but, I don’t know, they are simply not that satisfying. So my first stab at it was trying to pull a ma.gnolia.com, to no avail (magery.com, agery.com, gery.com, ery.com, ery.com—all taken). Then I tried a del.icio.us, again to no avail (it turns out there’s no .ry code and .ru would have been nice but image.ru, which sounds pleasantly japanesy to me, is already taken). And then it hit me, straight from high above I swear: ima.ge/ry! It was free, it was cool, it was weird: my quest was over—it should have been over. But it turns out the damn .ge is only available to Georgian residents! Grr…

On a related domain pet-peeving note: since 1997 you can’t buy a something.mx domain (you have to get a second-level domain, like .com.mx, .gob.mx, etc). Why? Go figure. I can buy something.us (U.S.), something.am (Armenia), or something.tw (Taiwan) but not the one from my country. Grr…

2,151 persons visited Imagery 2 days ago, 6,790 visited yesterday, 3,655 have visited it today (as of this very moment). It made it to the del.icio.us homepage. It made it to LifeHacker. Blogs in 22 languages have talked about it.

It’s been overwhelming. I’m compulsively refreshing my stat counter every 20 seconds. I feel so tiny, so standalone everytime it hits me that as I go to the bathroom 30 more people, somewhere in the world, have tried the website. But that the world is a weird, humongous place you knew, what has baffled me as I obsessively researched where everyone was coming from was what a surreal, boundless nonplace the web is. These last two days have shown me a dazzling array of bizarre organisms—mashups, filters, feeds, composites, parasites, symbiots, recomposites, bots, leeches, scams, automators—that thrive on the web, underneath the hood.

Oh, and one more thing: the sheer, brutal, speed of it all. It took two days and one email to Emily Chang (Thanks Sean!) to go from a pretty much forgotten website to this.

The present’s baffling.

A pesar de sus terriblemente anacronistas definiciones y su interfaz decimononica, el diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española es utilisimo y le agradezco sinceramente a la Real Academia que lo tenga en linea gratuitamente. Aclarado eso, el pet peeve que me mueve hoy a escribir sobre ella es su extraña fijacion con los acentos. A pesar de que dispone, sensatamente, de una busqueda por aproximacion que me permite buscar palabras sin tener que escribir acentos, me restrega siempre en la cara el no haberlos escritos. Por ejemplo, si yo busco “redaccion”, me manda a una pagina de redireccionamiento en la que me dice que “La palabra redaccion no está registrada en el Diccionario.” y procede a darme una larga lista de un link, obviamente, “redacción”. Es decir, me fuerza a aceptar conscientemente una opcion que se da, de sobra, por entendido. Parecera poco y hasta me rei la primera que lo vi pero ya por la sexagesima vez que ocurre empieza a perder lo gracioso.

Claro que quizas todo sea solo pesimo usability design de su parte, pero conociendo a la Academia lo dudo, a mi me huele a pura mala leche linguistica, a esa sabida preferencia real-academica de la prescripcion sobre la descripcion.

Yay! I just got my invitation code to Google Analytics. What little I’ve been able to see is pretty amazing (mmm… make that very amazing), all the more so considering that it is free (it has always baffled me to no end that I’ve to pay more for stats than for hosting my website itself).

The best part was Google’s seemingly offhand notice (emphases mine):

5 million pageviews? Per month? Per… day? That scale is one of the many things about Google that make geeks’s mouths (mine included) water. (I think it’s important to point out that StatCounter, my previous web stats provider, charged me $19 a month for 10,000 pageviews.)

Of course I’m fascinated with the Speech Accent Archive: a massive (521 samples) archive of English accents from all over the world! They put native and non-native English speakers to read the same sound-rich English paragraph, record them, and then painstakingly transcribe the reading to phonetic symbols and even point out error generalizations (it turns out Mexican poblanos speak with “final obstruent devoicing”, “interdental fricative to stop”, and so on…). It’s pure beauty  —though it’s a shame that there’s only one Mexican accent in there, I’m thinking of sending my own recording (they do accept them and even have some precise instructions).

Damn! Damn! Damn! I just lost two hours trying to recover a photo in Flickr. It wasn’t that important but it just pains me everytime I lose something great for not saving it. Baka!

Even so, my vagrant vagaries brought me something mind-blowingly useful: Flickr leech Tired of paging? Search Flickr in 200-photo chunks.

And I’m happy I found grace (Parental advisory: beautiful nudity ahead)

This is fantastic: a cool website that specializes in selling royalty-free stock photos, iStockPhoto, has created a new way to search through their whole catalog: by arrangement. They call it ColorSpace, and is wonderfully simple, yet powerful. It consists of a 3×3 grid of squares. You change the color of each square to indicate what you want in that area: green, if you want it clear; red, if you want it occupied; grey, if it’s the same to you.

It works. If, for instance, you search for “flower” with this colorspace, , you get:

Or if you search for “sky” with this colorspace, , you get:

The star here is not only the algorithm but the clever, information-design interface.

Overall, it’s a very impressive site, its web developers really do care about it, and that’s always refreshing. The weirdest thing is that they’ve convinced me that selling royalty-free stock photos on the web makes perfect sense…