Liudvikas Bukys

websiteoptimization.com: Web Connection Speed Trends – United States Users

Disobey.com::

Dave mentions that NetNewsWire has RSS 2.0 <comments> support in the latest downloadable beta. I sometimes forget how easy it is to add new display data to AmphetaDesk – all current versions of AmphetaDesk could have supported display of <comments> the second Dave rolled the idea off his tongue. Here’s how you do it with the default AmphetaDesk templates. First, open AmphetaDesk/templates/default/index.html with a text editor. Then, look for the following line (wrapped here for clarity):

to_browser(qq{ $item->{description} })
   if $item->{description};

Right beneath it, add one line (wrapped here for clarity):

to_browser(qq{ <div align=”right”>[<a href=”$item->{comments}”>Read the Comments!</a>]</div> }) if $item->{comments};

You can do this with AmphetaDesk open already – once you save the file, refresh your page, and any RSS 2.0 feed that uses the <comments> tag will give you a chance to go directly to any posted comments on that entry. Try it out on Brent’s (of NNW fame) RSS feed.

From Dylan Greene dot com – Blog Comments – XML button created via CSS, with one small addition:

<a title=”RSS 2.0″ href=”rss.xml” style=”text-decoration:none”><span style=”border:1px solid; border-color:#ffc8a4 #7d3302 #3f1a01 #ff9a57; padding:0px 3px 0px 3px; font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif; color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#ff6600; text-decoration:none; margin:0px;”>XML</span></a>

The ‘ style=”text-decoration:none” ’ inside the ‘a’ element is needed to prevent Mozilla 1.0.1 (Linux) from underlining the text.

e i g h t – c u b e d . c o m – RSS 2.0 comment links
This is in support of aggregators that can use these links to post comments back to a site without leaving the aggregator.

Don Park:
Workflow business evaporating?
“IBM announced that it will bundle
BPWS4J, a BPEL4WS-based web service workflow engine, with Websphere. If workflow becomes just another weapon in the application server feature war, what will happen to the workflow business?”

Jakob Nielsen: 10 Best Intranets of 2002:
Notable points:

• “In terms of management structure, the only trend we found was that there was no clear picture of who winning intranet teams report to within the organizations. The two most common organizational homes for the intranet teams were information technology departments and human resources (HR) departments, but we also found good intranet teams reporting to the corporate secretary and the corporate communications department.”
• “Much of the value of an intranet comes from making it a communications tool that all employees check every day. This can be a challenge, especially if the old intranet was universally hated for being clumsy and impossible to work with, as was the case in some of the companies.”
• “The one-stop shopping approach extended to the security features for most of the winning intranets. Single sign-on is finally becoming a reality on many good intranets, following years of persistent user requests.”
• “The winning intranets had all made great strides toward consistency and were typically successful at overcoming internal politics by the sheer quality of the central design, as opposed to the dubious designs usually produced by individual departments.
  Wal-Mart has a particularly fruitful strategy for managing its intranet for consistency: Users own the content and the central team owns the design.”

and you can buy a
158-page report on the annual competition, including 104 screenshots of the 10 winners.

Schoon, Rees, Jezierski (Microsoft):
Designing Application-Managed Authorization

Jakob Nielsen:
Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002 ” Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines. “

Google’s new toys:
“Google labs just released for your pleasure, some new toys to play with. The first is Google’s Viewer, just type a few words to see a fully working preview of the web site. Another new idea: Google’s Webquotes, View search results with quotes about them from other sites, and the last one is Google’s Froogle, which aims to be the world’s largest catalog.”
[Slashdot]

OS News: An Overview of the Boa Web Server:
Boa is a single-tasking HTTP server. Boa does not fork a copy of itself or spawn a thread to handle each incoming connection, but rather internally multiplexes the connections. Boa only forks for CGI programs, automatic directory generation, and automatic file gunzipping, each of which must be a separate process.