Ajax Blog

This news has been simmering for a while. When Ross Levinsohn (pictured left) resigned as the President of Fox Interactive Media late last year it was rumored that he intended to raise a large fund to acquire Internet startups. He soon partnered with Jonathan Miller, the former Chairman and CEO of America Online and the two have been out raising capital for the last few months.

They’ve found their partner - $15 billion hedge fund General Atlantic. Details on the amount of capital committed to the new fund are scarce, but General Atlantic issued a press release today announcing that Levinsohn and Miller have become advisors to the fund. The timing is interesting - 5:14 pm EST on the Friday before the long weekend. The press was circling on this story, and the release was obviously made to preempt the news from breaking.

More news should be coming next week as details leak - size of the fund, name of the new company, etc. The new venture will compete with Demand Media and others for acquisitions. Demand Media, which has raised $220 million in capital, was founded by former Intermix Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt. Ironically, Intermix Media, the parent company to MySpace, was acquired by Fox during Levinsohn’s tenure there.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/150701313/

Wikipedia attracted a lot of attention earlier this week when Nikola Smolenski calculated how much paper it would take to print out the English entries in Wikipedia. Smolenski calculated that as of last September, Wikipedia’s English index of informative/controversial articles would fill about 750 400 page volumes. Under the assumption of a 6MB volume, the total site would take up about 2,500 volumes (~15GB).

Today Scribd has released some numbers talking about just how big they’ve gotten as well. Since launching 6 months ago, the site has collected over 178,798 documents. That may not seem like much compared to Wikipedia’s over 5.3 million articles (source) across all languages (as of last September), but Scribd users seem more verbose. Scribd users have uploaded over 1.9 billion words, which would take up over 2,287 of Smolenski’s volumes (13.4 GB). No word on how many of those words are copyrighted.

However, Wikipedia is still obviously the pageview king, drawing over 7 billion pageviews (June) and 42.9 million (Feb) visitors per month, to Scribd’s 3.8 million uniques. Google was responsible for 24% of the traffic, and I imagine the same is true for Scribd. Wikipedia also features highly targeted and edited content to Scribd’s library of reports and rants. Although, unlike Wikipedia, Scribd is helping a lot of people catch up on Harry Potter.

Scribd has had quite a ride since launching over 6 months ago. They sustained a considerable amount of traffic after launch, and eventually went on to raise $3.5 million from Redpoint Ventures. Apparently, easily publishing documents online was not a solved problem.

Here’s a chart of the word growth of both Wikipedia and Scribd:

Note: According to statistics listed on Wikipedia, the site (all languages) has grown from 49,000 words in January 2001 to 1.7 billion words last September (the last reported point). Since the data only goes to September 2006, I extrapolated the growth (yellow) assuming the previous year’s monthly growth rate of 7.7%.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/150722255/

We are hosting a party in central London next week on Thursday, September 6 to support the Seedcamp event and to announce some TechCrunch UK news.

Most of the spots are reserved for Seedcamp attendees, but we are opening up 100 tickets to the public as well. To discourage no shows, we are charging a £10 fee per ticket, which will be donated to charity. Tickets are available here. There will be plenty to drink (and we’re working on food), and we’ll be giving away a ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch20 conference.

I will be flying in to London for the Seedcamp event and to attend the party. Hope to see you there.

We are taking a limited number of sponsors to offset the cost of the event. Email Jeanne Logozzo for more information about sponsoring the party.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/150683693/

The worst strategy is whining

“Whining is rarely a successful response to anything. Instead, start by acknowledging that most of the profit from your business is going to disappear soon. Unless you have a significant cost advantage (like Amazon’s or Wal-Mart’s), someone with nothing to lose is going to be able to offer a similar product for less money. So what’s scarce now? Respect. Honesty. Good judgment. Long-term relationships that lead to trust.”

All about hummingbirds

“Hummingbirds while in flight have the highest metabolism of all animals, a necessity in order to support the rapid beating of their wings. Their heart rate can reach as high as 1,260 beats per minute, a rate once measured in a Blue-throated Hummingbird. They also typically consume more than their own weight in food each day, and to do so they must visit hundreds of flowers daily. At any given moment, they are only hours away from starving.”

You don’t need a plan, you need skills and a problem

“Screw your plans. Work on your skills. Apply them to a problem that is biting you. Flush and repeat until people believe you had a plan.”

7 futuristic interfaces

Listed at the recently launched Oobject (“like Billboard charts for gadgets”).

List of next generation acronyms

GI — Google it, MOP — Mac or PC?, FCAO — five conversations at once, IIOYT — is it on YouTube?, DYFH — did you Facebook him/her?, etc.

Italian Futurists

“At the beginning of the 20th century a small group of artists set out to ‘destroy cultural institutions and create new ones.’ This group became known as the Italian Futurists and their beliefs encompassed many areas of politics and culture. Within literature and visual arts the artists expressed their beliefs in visual poems. These poems took the traditional elements of type, color and page and recombine them in a radical new way through creative typography.”

Webistrano: “Capistrano deployment the easy way”

Webistrano is a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments. It lets you manage projects and their stages like test, production, and staging with different settings. Those stages can then be deployed with Capistrano through Webistrano.

Leave your laptop behind with iPhone Web apps

“This past weekend I realized I do most of what I want on the Web with my iPhone. I don’t mean editing web pages, updating blog posts, downloading photos and such, but for the basics of checking email, updating Facebook and Twitter accounts, sending instant messages, reading RSS feeds, making a list, taking a quick picture and emailing it to my flickr account, and listening to music or a book, I’m covered.”

iPhoto Library Manager

“iPhoto Library Manager is a must-have utility for those who love iPhoto but whose photo collections have outgrown iPhoto’s practical capabilities.”

Are taller people smarter?

“Taller people earn more because they are smarter on average. They document that, as early as age three (before schooling has had a chance to play a role), taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests. These higher scores persist through childhood.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/587-sunspots-the-futurist-edition

Until we get <input type="date" /> into the browsers, we will need to create data pickers.

DatePicker is a simple one that users Prototype and Script.aculo.us, and does the basics well (although the fade can be a touch annoying to me).

It is very simple to use too:

Of course, you could easily wrap this in a microformat so you can just do class="date".

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/150542259/datepicker-using-prototype-and-scriptaculous

Peter Van Dijck thinks that long pages work and he points to Wikipedia and pages like this as proof.

The content + a lot of comments world can definitely make sense. You can use Cmd+F to hunt around, and the main content is still at the top.

We have in the past been obsessed with "above the fold" and "page views are king". It is really painful when you still see articles split into short chunks, and it leads me to find the "printer friendly" page in very short order.

The iPhone is also showing that scrolling is a nice UI tool, especially when you have lists. The auto-keep-scrolling technique works really well on the phone.

We shouldn't get complacent though, there is a reason why you see heat graphs showing where users click, and if they can't see it, they don't know it's there.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/150509805/long-pages-work

Everyone's throwing up JavaScript functionality left and right, most of the time without giving any thought to accessibility. Not so for Brian Reindel who has created an accessible news slider component which meets the requirements of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

Brian really gave the development of this jQuery plugin some good thought as attested by his overview of the functionality:

• The JavaScript is only 2KB compressed.
• The XHTML and JavaScript were developed specifically to meet the WCAG 1.0, and this will always be the number one priority of the plugin. It is suggested that if you modify the XHTML, you do so keeping this in mind.
• Users with color vision deficiency, or color blindness
  The plugin does not use color as a primary indicator of a change in state for the slider. Instead, the "previous" and "next" arrows are either visible or hidden, depending on the location of the news slider. There is also an indicator that communicates the total number of news stories in the slider.
• Users with limited or poor vision, but who do not use a screen reader
  If the user chooses to resize the text via the browser file menu, the slider will flex vertically to accommodate the larger text, and still function. This is primarily a function of the CSS, and it is suggested you maintain a variable font size on your site in order to take advantage of this capability.
• Users that are legally blind, and who browse Web pages with a screen reader
  Since screen readers actually read through the code, it is important that the XHTML be formatted free of confusion. The appropriate skip links and title tags have been included for navigation and messaging. The important thing to remember is that screen readers like JAWS ignore elements with the display property set to "none", or with the visibility property set to "hidden". This helps significantly in managing the presentation to several categories of disabled users.
• Users that browse with the keyboard and an adaptive device such as a mouth stick
  When developing a Web component to be accessible, this is the most difficult group of disabled users to accommodate. If you have ever tried to browse by tabbing through a Web page, it can be frustrating. Although the core functionality of the news slider is partially accessible with a keyboard, the "View All" link was added as a catch-all mechanism.
• Users who have turned off JavaScript or CSS
  The key was to make sure that not only were all the news stories readable with JavaScript or CSS turned off, but that the appropriate messaging was displayed to the user to inform them of the implications. Although not a category that I think fits explicitly under accessibility, it is a component of the WCAG 1.0 checkpoints, and strides were taken to make sure the plugin met these requirements.

You can download the plugin here and you'll need to pick up a copy of jQuery v1.1.3.1 or higher in order to use it.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/150505557/wcag-10-accessible-news-slider

Here’s the first entry in what we hope will become a regular feature on Ajaxian. The Ajaxian Featured Tutorial will feature a tutorial that we’ve found interesting and we think the community will enjoy. Now granted, we realize that not everyone will find it interesting and we’re okay with that. We want to spread the tutorial love equally among the many different technologies that make RIA development easy and fun.

This week, we’ve got a nice one for all of you Adobe Flex aficionados. The boys over at Paranoid Ferret Productions have a good introduction on how to build one of the most useful of components, a DataGrid, Flex-style.

If you’re feeling adventurous after going through their first tutorial, then just head on over to part 2 of their DataGrid series where they enhance the DataGrid using images and advanced styles.

If you’d like specific topics to covered, please let us know and we’ll see what we can do.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/150500511/ajaxian-featured-tutorial-building-a-flex-datagrid

Jack Herrington and Steve Yen have put together a nice little article introducing TrimPath Junction:

Junction is an all JavaScript framework that closely models the Ruby on Rails model-view-controller design pattern and implementation. And with the help of the Helma JavaScript web server, it runs the same code both on the client and on the server. Exactly the same code, in fact.

The framework not only handles the basics of rendering pages (using JavaScript templating), but it also handles data and code synchronization with the server, local client caching using Google Gears, model versioning, and much more. It’s an amazingly complete solution for an entirely new model of web development.

The article walks through the building of a very simple contact management system, and shows that ONLamp doesn’t believe in Long Pages ;)

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/150479334/trimpath-junction-a-walk-through

Andreas Ecker, project lead of qooxdoo, sat down to have a chat about the state of the project, how it works, what it does, how it compares to other frameworks like GWT, and how it integrates with third party development environments from Borland and the Eclipse Foundation.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/150456700/video-brief-on-the-qooxdoo-framework