ProjectX Blog

I’ve decided to ditch mephisto blog software and go back to wordpress. I want a fully functionality blog software with proper theme support, lots of plugins and WYSIWIG editor. Mephisto was light weight, but a little too immature for our tastes.

The conversion over to wordpress went OK. Only thing left is to import the comments into the system. We’re using the mandigo theme which fits in with the new ProjectX style.
FYI: If you’re looking to migrate / import into wordpress from mephisto, you’ll need to use the RSS2 importer. But first you’ll need to convert the atom feed to RSS2. (Note it can only handle about 2000 lines at a time) Warning it can only import posts. Comments you’ll have to figure out yourself !

(It was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to do this)

Ajaxian has just post about Spyjax a tool that can search your browser history. It works by using javascript to check if you have visited a site by analysing CSS colours!

“It only allows a site to test a predefined list of URLs to see if you have visited any of them. It’s like the card game “go fish”, you can’t see the players cards but you can ask them if they have any particular card. Most likely the way this technology would be used is to examine a list of competing URLs.”

I wonder how long spam marketers and blackhat seo’s have been using this technique???

So how to do stop it ???

Turn off javscript (This is bad no more ajax goodness) or in Firefox uncheck the “Remember visited pages” checkbox (This is also a pain as you’ll lose the autosuggestion of all your visited sites.)

W3C stats is reporting that Firefox is now has 25% share.

Looking at ZoomIn stats, IE still rules the roost.

Browser stats: 28/05/07

Browser stats: 9/02/07

Browser stats: 5/11/06

Ran into this again.

Heh heh!

Scoble has just posted about Popfly – Microsoft’s new mashup builder. With Yahoo Pipes and Popfly, a new age of mashups is dawining where you can build a tools within minutes.

When I first saw this demoed a few months ago the Microsoftie who showed it to me literally built TwitterVision in two minutes right in front of me without writing code.
– Robert Scoble

Webservices will power the next generation of websites. If you’re building a new website, you should consider how webservices can increase traffic to business.

Performance

• 14 rules for fast web pages
• Scaling your rails app
• How facebook scaled
• How Livejournal scales (PDF)

Design / Innovation

• Jakob Nielsen on the state of web 2.0
• Steve Jobs on innovation at Apple
• Make your site mobile friendly
• The man behind Apple’s insanely cool products

Entrepreneurship / Business

• Eric Schmidt: Google buys a startup once every few days
• Only half of the bubble-era companies out of business
• Why mobile services fail
• Asking the crowd to spread the news
• Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs
• Traits of the best entrepreneurs

Here’s an post from ZDnet blog in US about the rise in profile and acceptance of SaaS. The post has links to the original article from a couple of McKinsey consultants. Here is one of key messages from the post:

Quoting McKinsey’s research last year that found a jump from 38% to 61% in the proportion of CIOs planning to use SaaS, the authors set out “why this trend seems bound to gain traction where an earlier generation of hosted software failed to do so a decade ago.” Several of their most compelling arguments come down to simple economics: they say that SaaS has less financial risk for buyers, is cheaper to use and yet just as profitable for vendors.

The SaaS is starting to gain some momentum at an enterprise level. This enables lots of opportunities for niche players to reach a wide world wide audience.

Time to getting cracking and release our new our map services 🙂

Hi, I’m a Mac… yeah, I wear jeans and quirky t-shirts. I have an iPod and a MacBook and I look at Windows people with a little pity but the last hour of the keynote presentation at MIX07 has made me tip my hat towards Microsoft. They are really onto something great here.

Enter Silverlight. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. This thing runs on anything and does anything. Literally. I encourage you to view the session videos on the MIX07 site. In particular the video editing software implemented as a web application! And the whole web app is delivered in 50k! It was made by Metaliq and is code named Topbanana.

The development tools are really excellent too. They showed remote debugging (from a Windows box) of a Silverlight application running inside Safari! It’s really slick and impressive and it all actually works.
For the love of all that is sane and pure… they are coding in Ruby, against .NET in TextMate! I think I want to have their children.

Now, Apple do some great tuff but they are concentrating way too much on the desktop. Microsoft
is really pushing the envelope with their new technologies.

Anyone interested in developing rich, web + service based applications should take a look at Silverlight technology. I think that MS re doing some great things in this space and this thing will become very dominant in this market space. Microsoft are even providing, for free, distributed hosting space for Silverlight content.

You can get the Safari/Firefox plug-in here: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/downloads.aspx
Once you’ve got the plug-in, restart the browser and have a look at some Silverlight enabled sites here: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/default.aspx

By the way, I should say thank you to Microsoft for sending me to this great event. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here and to see new and promising technologies, not to mention meeting nice people and eating great food.

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We have developed a new dynamic content delivery system. Its currently being used to display advertising on Smaps. Eg. If you look at Queen St in Auckland. You’ll find a lot of ASB, National Bank and the Warehouse icons showing on the map. Move around or zoom in on the map and it’ll dynamically update the points.

Spotted this on slashdot this morning, Indian Govt is proposing free 2Mb broadband to ALL of India by 2009.

India is working on a broadband future, what about NZ?