Example of a web mashup at work
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Web
A web Mashup is essentially a way of taking data from one web service or application and then using another web service or application to either add to, modify, or display the data in a unique way.
Ran across an excellent blog posting that demonstrated this.
… So to recap, we have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Google map.
-Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets
The resulting KML file can viewed in Google Maps here.
Tags: Google, Mashup, Web, Wikipedia, Yahoo
New theme
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Web
In all fairness to me, it has been quite a few months since I last changed themes not quite a year, but decently close.
I’ve also added a “lifestream”, a collection of my social feeds all in one place. Probably more useful to me then to anyone else as I can use it to prove to myself that I actually did something on any given day.
Still have plenty to iron out, I manually added Gravatar support, still need to add a mini bio in the footer. I also need to figure out what I’m doing with categories vs tags.
Tags: Web
index.php mixup
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Web
Last night I was up till 8AM, then woke up again at 11, been out for the last 12 hours. I come home and login to my computer, and the moment I do that Ian messages me with a link to the 540 site…
I click wondering whats up…and OH DEAR GOD…what do we have here!
Well it may not be the calamity that you imagined but it’s probably close enough…
I had been playing around with an online service by My Movies, and had somehow edited index.php in the 540 folder instead of in another folder. So I’m going crazy opening up Editplus, SmartFTP trying to login and somehow the server knew the urgency of the matter so it started rejecting all my connections.
But luckily I managed to get on, and upload an old backup file. Because the dynamic content on the page had been ‘include’ed, there had been very little content change since I had backed that page up just under a year ago.
Now the only thing left to update is the picture on the home page, I swear I had changed it and replaced it with a different one, but I cant remember which one now.
Anyway, life’s back to the regular old 70bpm, and I can try and resume where I left off in the morning - when I was in the middle of:
- 3 SSH Sessions
- 3 Browsers with a bajillion tabs
- 2 Irc Channels
- e
- Fixing a web application that didnt want to start with Apache
- Trying to implement muh
- And a partridge in a Ruby tree
So if anyone happened to see the perpertrating page, and also is looking at this now, I do appologize.
I also want to reassure you that I have properly scolded my text editor, and I am fairly confident it won’t try anything like this again!
RoR’s IRC community
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Web
As I mentioned in a previous post, I just aquired a new host that has Ruby on Rails support so I’ve been playing around with it for the past couple of days. It’s definitly been an unbelievable experience, both in a good and bad way.
The good is that the possibilties are literely endless, there is so much you can do with RoR..and the list is just growing. RoR was only released in the wild just under four years ago and the online community has been expanding like crazy.
For example there are currently 318 users in #rubyonrails and only 23 in #windows95, which says a lot considering Windows has been around for more than five times the number of years…
…ok that might be a bad example, but hey, 318 users isn’t too shabby.
RoR provides an easy to use method to get the backbone framework of a web application up and going in next to no time, and you can find examples of this here. As DHH says while he’s creating a weblog, “Whoops! Look at all the things I’m NOT doing!”.
The bad for me is of course the fact that I do need to switch my way of thinking. Before dipping into RoR, I would look at http://example.net/foo/bar/ as if I was looking at the contents of the bar/ folder inside foo/…well that all changed. RoR instead says that im actually looking at the action “bar” for the controller “foo”.
Or to put it in simple terms, looking at http://example.net/pages might give me a list of all pages, and http://example.net/pages/new, would preform the “new” action on the “pages” controller. Which would…you guessed it, create a new page.
Might sound complicated but it gets easier as you work through it.
Which brings me to the reason I had the urge to write this post. I’ve been lurking on #rubyonrails and just had to comment on how helpful the other users are. Anytime I have a question, I throw it to the other 317 people in the room, and under a minute or two someone has been able to guide me. Which is outstanding considering no one is paid, infact spending time on the server probably takes them away from something more productive.
Although something one of my highschool teachers brought up comes to mind, a lot of the guys* on the channel have their ego’s to maintain, and thus they will do everything possible to help people like me who are just venturing into their world.
*Contrary to XKCD, there are indeed no girls on the internet.
OpenID
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Web
OpenID is a decentralised, web based, authentication system that has many uses.
Although I have known about OpenID for quite some time now, I basically totaly ignored it and it’s potential. I will be posting lots more information over the next few days, but I have just finishing watching a couple of talks on the concept so I’m quite exciting at the moment.
Let me just say that I truly feel that OpenID is going to become an integral part of the online web community. If you can spare just 15 min, watch the first bit of this video. I thought I was fairly well versed on the subject, but when Simon exhausted my knowledge in the first 10 or so minutes I knew there was something big here. Something that could turn out to be a staple building block of tomorrows Internet 4.0 or whatever version the media is currently all hyped up about.
Amazon gift card
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Web
Yay, Free Money! I got a $50 Amazon gift card!
..
Wait a minute, what would I actually want to get from Amazon.
That’s right folks, It would take an awful lot of digging for me to find something worthy of purchasing on Amazon (free or otherwise), and I did spend a good 30 min trying to do just that to no avail.
For the 88.75% of my readers who live either across the pond, or below the 49th, let me fill you in. Amazon.ca’s inventory comprises of, Books, Music, Video, and Software. Whereas Amazon.com sells all of the above, as well as a plethora of other products ranging from Patio Furniture to Lamb Sampler’s, but to the more important stuff on my list like Panaonic’s Lumix DMC-TZ5, and the my excentricities like the Pertelian External LCD Display (more info on that here).
Slight problem, all that interesting stuff that Amazon.com sells, isnt shippable to Canada. Which means I have to resort to creating couriers out of my visiting family…
HostMonster, the new host on my block
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Review, Web
Well I’ve been pretty busy the last few weeks, and this blog has basically gone dead. Although I still get a fair share of googlers looking up Mojo, or comparing the Sequoia with the Navigator.
So onto current news of the…month now I guess; On browsing around the web I stumbled across HostMonster, a webhost that had some intersting features to offer.
Currently I am with 1&1 hosting, and I have been extremely happy with their service, the price was an unbelievable $5/month for two included domains, 120GB storage, 1.2TB monthly bandwidth (Not a typo), and the usual 2GB IMAP email inboxes, PHP, Perl etc.
For $6/month (Promotional price, now it’s $7), HostMonster gives me unlimited storage and bandwith (Which itself pays for the $1 premium), one included domain, SSH access, & Ruby on Rails. RoR is something I’ve been wanting to sit and play with for quite some time now so it was love at first site.
In addition one of my only caveats with 1and1 was that they forced your ftp account name to contain your Customer ID, a long random string of numbers. Small annoyance, but terribly irratating when you dont have it saved in the software. Needless to say, this was non-existant with HostMonster.
That’s enough for praise.
The first incident I had with HM was that immediatly after confirming my payment, HM sent my user/pass in clear text in a URL. Which meant that not only did my password get saved in my computers history, it also got sent over the network for anyone to sniff.
In addition it seems that one of the two ways that HM verifies your identification when you call in, is to ask you for your password, it seems that anyone on their tech support has access to your password. Which may not be the end of the world, as they also have full access to your account, but it is the priciple of the thing. In this day and age, it should be their policy to never ask for a customers password. 1&1 asks for the customer ID number, and/or phonenumber, name.
Also for some unknown reason, Editplus isnt able to edit any files on the ftp server, due to either permission issues, or cryptic error messages saying that the “File doesn’t exist”.
I plan on sticking it out a little while longer, till I can get shell access (a procedure that has to be verified with a Photo ID) and play around with RoR.
Tags: RoR, Security, Server, Technology
