Tag Archives: internet

the culture and technology of, and participants in, the internet

http://d+w+.com

The number-noun name has got to be the least creative of all the silly website naming patterns:

  • Six Apart
  • 8 Days (hot-or-not)
  • 9 rules
  • 30 boxes
  • 37 signals
  • 43 folders
  • 43 things
  • 88 miles

Just for fun I want to make a site called 0 points, or maybe 3.25 dollars. -7 employees?

Internet, meet Spydentify

spydentify-400x107Spydentify is a new experiment/side project of mine. It fills a niche that I first identified over at the Typophile Type ID Board: people love looking a pictures and trying to figure out what’s in them. The site’s interface is designed to be as addictive as possible, with a neverending, rapid flow of interesting images, big, shiny buttons to click, and instant feedback on your actions. I’m going to add more ego-stroking, viral-spreading and moderation features soon.

The interface also follows the MVC pattern I laid out in this article. It uses one static HTML file, all dynamic data is loaded through XMLHTTPRequest (AJAX, for those of you who speak Web 2.0), and all HTML generation is done via JavaScript manipulation of the DOM. The backend uses Pylons, which gave me a chance to learn Pylons, Paste, Routes, SQLAlchemy, FormEncode, and Mako. And comments are rendered with my own PottyMouth.

I also designed the logo all by myself.

Check it out.

Underwater data cable maps

Coverage of Thursday’s internet outage in the Middle East and South Asia, caused by a ship that dragged its anchor off the coast of Egypt, has included some nifty maps. ForeignPolicy has this close-up of the Mediterranean cable network:

cable_systems.png

And The Guardian UK included this large map of the global cable network.

seacablesarticle.jpg

The source for both maps, TeleGeography, has some pretty impressive maps of the global data network for sale; unfortunately their prices are just as impressive.

The next big thing, part 1: Resolving the conflict between Model-View-Controller and AJAX design patterns

or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the XMLHTTPRequest…

This is the first part of what will become an ongoing series.

If you’ve built a website in the last few years, most likely you’ve adopted an architecture similar to Model-View-Controller, or MVC. If not, well, either your website is terribly simple, you haven’t had to modify it yet, or your code is spaghetti and you should be fired. Just kidding. (Or maybe you’ve come up with an even better architecture, in which case you should share your insights with us mere mortals.)

In MVC architecture, the model reads and writes data to and from a back-end data-store, and organizes the relational data in a nice, hierarchical fashion to be used by the controller. The view accepts input from the controller and generates output HTML, XML, RSS, JavaScript, SVG, PDF, or whatever you want to send to the user’s browser. And the controller accepts browser input, figures out what to query the model for, and picks which view to use and what data to send it.

figure 1: The traditional MVC architecture.

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