A new kind of socially-biased search engine: Blekko

August 26, 2010 by Ryan Garver Leave a Comment

A new kind of socially-biased search engine: Blekko.

This idea of a simple query language that actually is geared towards normal people is interesting.  SQL was supposed to be that way back when, but no one today would ever claim that a search engine that exposed SQL to users would be better for the masses.  But a simpler version could have some really awesome broad impact in other areas.  As people become more comfortable using semi-structured queries we can use them in our own web apps without extensive education or making them “advanced features”.  I don’t know if Blekko can succeed, but if they can I think the web will benefit in some interesting ways.

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HTML5 Brief: in one paragraph | Alex Kessinger

August 9, 2010 by Ryan Garver Leave a Comment

HTML5 Brief: in one paragraph | Alex Kessinger.

Amen.

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Google Wave: why we didn’t use it

August 7, 2010 by Ryan Garver Leave a Comment

Google Wave: why we didn’t use it.

I really am disappointed that Google Wave has failed.  I think the Ars article does a good job of summarizing why it didn’t really take off despite the best press you could ask for not to mention Google backing it.

I’m still hopeful that the underlaying protocol can still be salvaged in some alternate clients.  It really would be interesting to see it reanimated in a different form by someone else.  Even if it were just added as a new account type in Mail.app or iChat and literally only provided feature parity with that tool initially, that might be a more logical progression to introducing what should be a more powerful and flexible communication protocol.  This will also give users a better understood starting point and we can more gradually figure out what people what to be able to do and how they want to do it along the way.  The fully baked solution the Google’s implementation provided really didn’t enjoy much user feedback to influence its development until way too late in the process.

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Hoptoad and Javascript, Sitting in a Tree, S-E-N-D-I-N-G – GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS

August 5, 2010 by Ryan Garver Leave a Comment

Hoptoad and Javascript, Sitting in a Tree, S-E-N-D-I-N-G – GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS.

I’m really excited about this new feature of HopToad.  I’ve played around with ExceptionHub but it was missing some important features like team management.  Leveraging HopToad to do this kind of JavaScript/browser level error tracking really cleanly combines two useful and similar tools for debugging a running system.

I should add that I echo the concerns of some of the commenters on the linked to blog post about security concerns.  It would be helpful if ThoughtBot followed this up with a post to address this concern in a bit more detail.

All in all though, this is nice

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JustinFrench.com: Pagination Alternatives

August 2, 2010 by Ryan Garver Leave a Comment

JustinFrench.com: Pagination Alternatives.

Great description of some of the deficiencies of pagination as well as a number things to think about when presenting large quantities of data to users.

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SPDY looks… possible

November 19, 2009 by Ryan Garver Leave a Comment

Google recently announced their SPDY protocol that they’ve been working on to address a number of inherent non-performant aspects of the HTTP protocol that most of the web depends on.  In the last few years the web has shifted much more towards real-time applications.  Web application development is starting to think about interaction experiences much closer to desktop apps.  It’s not out of bounds to consider the response times of certain queries on a website in terms of keystrokes (~200ms).  Moving the request/transmission protocols to catchup with this change makes sense.

One thing that I am happy about with SPDY is that is appears to be built with deployment clearly in mind.  This isn’t the first attempt to improve web speeds, it’s not even the best, but it does appear to be the simplest to deploy in to the wild and see rapid adoption.  If Apache and Firefox gained support for SDPY out of the box, and it was show that using the protocol would improve server throughput, it would be enough to shift most websites over.  That’s only two players.  That’s pretty promising.

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