I’m back from Web 2.0 Expo. I met many interesting people and watched many interesting presentations.

I also started to think about converting TechPresentations.com from blog to Wiki. In any case, I’ll post update it in a coming week to reflect the knowledge I got at the conference.

I’ve been looking at JavaScript recently, especially after watching those courses by Douglas Crockford.

I was doing some bookmark and widget coding I realized that there is no tool to load JSON data from remote hosts. While plenty of libraries provide you with various tools to organize your XMLHttpRequests and other hacks to load data asynchronously from your site, none of them allow you to overcome same-host security limitations and load data from other sites without using some sort of server side proxy.

So to streamline the rest of the development I wrote a library that can be used to load JSON-formatted data from remote hosts without spending your own traffic.

See project page here: JSON Remote Loader

P.S. as part of this project, I got some experience using JSLint, Firebug, Google code project hosting and even wrote Makefile to automate minification and colorizing as well as zipping of the code.

I haven’t been publishing about many changes in Feed Friends and I can’t really remember everything I did but today I finally got tired of link toolbar to only have Feed Friends share button and not to have Digg, del.icio.us and the rest so I changed this processor to include all In-Feed Controls I configured in processing customization page.

So, even if you don’t use Feed Friends sharing functionality, you can still enjoy Feed Preprocessor part of the system and use it to get If-Feed controls to work for you.

P.S. Actually Feed Preprocessor configurator allows you to pick more controls then listed on infeedcontrols.com and they include: del.icio.us, Technorati search, Digg, Feed Friends, Newsvine, Fark, Reddit, Yahoo! My Web and Netscape.

Bre Pettis posted my playing cards top-hat project on MAKE blog.

Alex Tew created his new project - Pixelotto.

I’ve tweaked original MDHP scripts to produce Pixelotto versions of the graphs as well:

Blogging activity graph:

Traffic graph (by Alexa.com):

Sales progress graph:

Animated sales history:

I hope this time I’ll be given some credit over these graphs if they’ll be used on Alex’s site.

Today is a TechPresentations day - I published two presentations about Google infrastructure systems (an overview and BigTable) and one about Ubuntu Linix by its founder, Mark Shuttleworth who sold Thawte to Verisign and became second space tourist (I thought he was first).

I fixed annoying bug in XML::RSS::LibXML which rendered multiple tags as one tag with value of ARRAY(…).

It was most often seen when multiple categories were assigned to feed item but affected all duplicate tags (I fixed similar problem specifically with enclosures earlier).

Hope that will not break feeds any more.

Just a note: I didn’t see any records in access logs on old server for a while and disabled all fetching on old servers as well as web site instances.
It should not affect anybody except those site owners who’s feeds fetcher was double-crawling - now it’ll only do it once.

Let me know if you’ll have any problems getting your feeds.

As many of you noticed, there were several registration-related bugs. I fixed most of them yesterday/today but if you still have troubles registering or logging in, let me know and ‘ll try to fix them ASAP.

I’m really sorry that users were trying to register but failed to complete the process and went away. To remedy the problem at least partially, I created a page to resend an email with confirmation code (which didn’t reach some people and they are stuck in the middle of the process). I also added some links back and forth to make it harder to get lost during registration process, hope that helps.

I also fixed strange bug (a product of trash-OOP conversion process) with feed fetching failure when you just added it - please let me know if it’ll happen again.

I moved Feed Friends (and Feed Preprocessor) to new faster server. It was planned for a while and I was setting server up but today I finally moved it.

I updated DNS and I hope you will not see any glitches but in case you are still directed to old servers, you’ll have Access Denied error page - it means your DNS servers still cache old IPs.

Feeds will be updated on both old and new servers for a while to avoid problems with feed readers freaking out. There might be some unusual bugs though if you share your item or adding new feed already using new server but your feed reader still goes to old one (especially if you’re using some web-based feed reader) - reader will not get updated feed as you might expect.
Also i planned to put magic “beta” mark next to the title for a while and now it’s a good time. Once I moved whole thing to new server I hope to proceed with fixing bugs and adding new features.

Please let me know if you’ll find some problems with new server - best way is by adding comments to this post.

Thank you for your patience!