MoreWhite
a web 2.0 blog
Flexibility is Overrated: Having a ton of features isn’t great, it’s information overload. The geeks will always ask you for more - resist. Reduce decision making to a minimum. At any page of your application the user should only see the features relevant to the current context, not the application as a whole. Web applications are like story-boards: the user is meant to navigate them, being assisted as much as possible at every step. Read the rest of this entry »
Developing extate I’ve realized how disorganized database access is in PHP. So I’ve developed SDBA - a simple database abstraction layer for PHP. You’ve probably heard of ADOdb, PEAR DB, etc, and already concluded that they are not worth the time (to learn) or performance issues that come with them. Simple Database Abstraction is different. Click here to learn more and download the first release.
The real estate search engine I’ve been working on for the past few months is now ready for (beta) action. Check it out, and let me know what you think. The engine uses a spider (written in C#, works under mono of course) to crawl some large agents (UK only for now) and extracts property information into a MySQL database. I’ve attempted to stick to LAMP environment as much as possible, except for the spider itself (although it would be interesting to implement it in PHP some day, as it is not performance focused). Everything is highly automated: crawling is done in many cases just by pointing the spider to the site, and I’m about to automate extraction completely.
I don’t see what the deal is with syndication. I think its a fancy term for a directory listing in XML. Just like online shops provide their products as XML feeds for various affiliates to advertise, RSS & Atom feeds advertise content. As a directory listing, RSS should only contain a preview / thumbnail / summary of content, thus allowing it to act as an advertisement similar to adSense and sponsored search results.
If anyone has missed the announcement, Google Base is an upcoming repository of everything, that supports schemas for objects, user created attributes, bulk uploads and future integration with search. Here are some screenshots [1, 2, 3].
Isn’t this a centralized, google-owned, semantic web anyone? Something that the RDF guys, including Tim Berners-Lee would sweat over and throw shit at. If anybody, Google may have the potential to pull it off, although I’d hate to see that happen. The monopoly would be far beyond Microsoft, it would wipe out Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, everything.