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The folks at Opera have just released their Web Standards Curriculum, an online course on building web products using web standards. The curriculums covers a range of topics: from explaining what the web is to building state-of-the-art applications.
Education is an important part of the process with any technology. The Web Standards Curriculum serves as a course to teach people how to create web sites that adhere to the standards that exist for the Web and following best practices like unobtrusive scripting and progressive enhancement. Written by some of the leading experts in the field it covers all of the subjects you need to get a head start in web development.
Many of my colleagues at Yahoo such as Christian Heilmann, Mark Norman Francis and Ben Hawkes-Lewis have been involved in writing this curriculum. At Yahoo we believe that web standards are vital to a vibrant developer community. We want to provide the most accessible, cross-browser compatible sites possible and web standards gives us the tools to do that.
Whether you are an educator or simply a developer looking to learn a little more the Web Standards Curriculum comes highly recommended. The curriculum is licensed with Creative Commons, so there is no problem with using it in your company.
Tom Hughes-Croucher
Yahoo! Developer Network
Yahoo's new Address Book APIs is a welcome addition to the arsenal of APIs that Yahoo already has and provides very interesting possibilities to developers who would like to include their users' list of contacts in their application. One very obvious and straightforward example is the ability to virally invite the user's contacts to experience the new application that the user might find interesting, ala Facebook and the myriad of social networking applications out there.
In the following tutorial we'll show in an easy step-by-step format how to use the API with Ruby on Rails. You can download all the code examples in the article so you don't have to type them in.
Continue reading "Using the Yahoo Address Book APIs with ROR - a step by step tutorial"
As trailblazers in the world of ethical hacking, hackdays and providing free APIs and data for mashups It is pretty amazing to see exactly the same ideas being taken on by sources you wouldn't have expected.
Show us a better way is a web site and competition by the UK government that asks ethical hackers to come up with ideas to use a wide range of public data for the good of the public. Straight from the horse's mouth this sounds like this:
The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government's behalf, and we have a 20,000 pound prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here.
To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition. Rest assured, this competition does not include personal information about people.
We're confident that you'll have more and better ideas than we ever will. You don't have to have any technical knowledge, nor any money, just a good idea, and 5 minutes spare to enter the competition.
There is a vast amount of APIs available to play with so what stops you from giving it a go?
Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
The last two days an old and historic school in London, England hosted 2gether08, a "festival of ideas, popular technologies and progress". Predictably during Wimbledon season, the weather was a glorious English summer as the photo of Steve Moore's final "thank you" talk shows:
The event had an immense amount of illustruous sponsors, with Channel4 being the leader and also covering the whole event and happenings around it.
The short tagline of the event was "solving bigger problems", the larger vision is much more wordy and available at the 2gether08 site.
The main mantra is the following:
The first 2gether Festival will bring together over 300 innovators from a wide range of fields to focus on how using digital technologies we can generate real social benefits. 2gether08 is not just about wise words and rousing presentations. A defining hallmark of the Festival will be how we frame problems and work towards solutions. This is happening now in advance of the Festival and will continue during and after the event. Imagine what we might be able to achieve…
This is all part of a larger movement right now called social entrepreneurship, especially in the world of media and IT. A lot of successful specialists in these markets feel that they are not having much impact in the world with what they do and want to concentrate on solving real human issues and save the environment instead. There are a lot of government and otherwise funded awards and competitions going on in this sector in the UK at the moment with the UK catalyst awards and Channel Four's 4IP - Innovation for the public fund being the leading lights and smaller funds like Show us a better way asking for more concrete hacks.
As a geek and developer evangelist I was a bit out of depth at the event. Yes, as lot of the talks and discussions revolved around using internet technology to change real social issues and environmental problems but not much was hands-on. The Social Innovation Camp, who were one of the co-sponsors did a better job at that, but the main idea of 2gether08 was to allow people to meet, collaborate and inspire another to do their share to spark social change by using technology.
That said, what I found was that there is a massive gap between all these great ideas and funds and IT and web experts available to deliver web solutions. I spent most of my time explaining mashup opportunities, already existing systems to host and remix videos online, create your own social networks or just host photos and make it easy for people to comment and tag them (yes, Flickr).
Case in point was that the organizers tried hard to make the participants network before the event via Crowdvine and Twitter, but it just did not catch on. I went home with around 50 business cards, about 20 of them from people that already connected with me on both of these systems.
As expected, the media coverage was great. Channel4 filmed the events, numerous film crews and reporters walked around and interviewed people and in general we'll find a lot of the things that happened and were said in the media soon.
The main social issue I subscribed to solving at the event and the nearer future is try to make the gap between the geeks and the people with great ideas a little smaller. Geekyoto earlier this year had a similar agenda as 2gether08 - on a more technical level. The 2gether08 people went to this event, too and started merging the groups of skilled and concerned geeks and more "wider picture" thinkers. There is much power in this merger, so let's make that happen.
Christian Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Editor's note: This post was originally published on hueniverse: thoughts on technology & open standards.
The first OAuth Summit hosted by Yahoo! last week was a huge success.
Fifty (!) OAuth community members attended, representing 20 companies, large and small, as well as a couple dedicated individuals. The list of companies represented is extremely gratifying to see
considering that OAuth remains a community-driven
effort: Agree2, AOL, BroadOn, Bubble Labs, Eye-Fi, Facebook, Garmin,
Google, LinkedIn, Ma.gnolia, Microsoft, MySpace, Plaxo, Pownce,
SafeMashups, Salesforce, Songbird, Veodia, Vidoop, and Yahoo!.
The summit would not have been half as good without the help of a few individuals. Stacy Milman from Yahoo! Developer Network did an outstanding job organizing the event on behalf of our host, setting the location, helping with registration, and making sure everything was just right. Cindy Li designed our super cool schwag: the OAuth T-shirt and stickers – look out for the OAuth cat on a laptop or co-worker near you.
Eric Sachs helped create the agenda for the event and organized the demo session that kicked off the rest of the day. Chris Messina set up the wiki and registration page.
The summit started with an update on the OAuth IPR (intellectual property rights) agreement, which is in its final approval stages (more news on OAuth licensing to follow); the current proposal for revising the Core specification; and the list of proposed extensions for the community to consider. The update was followed by a demo session which included:
It was great to see real products coming out with OAuth support as well as existing players transitioning to use the protocol. After the demos, we dived into a four-hour technical roundtable session about the future of the protocol. The discussion covered a wide range of topics and included:
The day concluded with dinner and drinks and some interesting casual conversations about where the community is headed and projects people are interested in working on. The summit provided much needed energy and got the community excited about the work ahead, which is already taking shape on the OAuth list. If you are new to OAuth or just could not make it to the summit, please join us and participate.
Eran Hammer-Lahav
Open Standards Evangelist
Kai Hansen, Tony Ralph, Eric Goldsmith, and Artur Bergman during, This is Your Page with Ads, a panel moderated by Steve Souders.
It turns out I’m not the only person who thinks micro-optimization of CSS files is cool. I learned this lesson a year ago when I joined the Exceptional Performance team at Yahoo! and had it reinforced by the quality of both the presentations and the hallway conversations at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference last week.
Attending Velocity Con was fabulous. I was especially impressed that the sessions on web performance were packed. There were a ton of Yahoos at the conference, Julien Lecomte from Yahoo! Search spoke about “High-performance Ajax Applications”.
“In the past few years, Ajax has become very popular because it has enabled developers to build more complex web applications. However, in the rush to push the browser to new limits, we have created a monster. “ – Julien
Julien suggested several detailed strategies and patterns that developers can use to accelerate their applications. Stoyan Stefanov, the lead developer of YSlow, and my colleague in the Exceptional Performance team, spoke about Image Optimization, including the 7 mistakes most sites are making. He showed non-designers how to automate image optimization and reduce image bloat by as much as 30%. After attending the talk, Douglas Crockford shared some love.
“It is good to be able to point with pride at something that Yahoo does that is extremely smart. The Exceptional Performance Team is one of the things that makes me proud to be at Yahoo.” – Doug
John Allspaw from Flickr joined a panel about Surviving Success by preparing to be TechCrunched, Dugg, Slashdotted, or even “Oprahed”. He also presented Capacity Management.
“Your process of capacity planning should be adaptive, adjustable, and include more than just system statistics. Measurement, architecture, and economics are all equally important to having your site perform. Becoming popular doesn’t have to mean being afraid your site will fall over from too much load.” – John
Adam Bechtel, the chief architect covering network, storage and systems infrastructure at Yahoo! presented “Performance Plumbing”. He believes that scale provides unique opportunities to leverage the network to improve performance.
“As your site scales, don’t overlook the performance opportunities that the plumbing creates.” – Adam
Tony Ralph who works on ad quality and performance for Yahoo! participated in a panel, This is Your Page with Ads. He made an important point that I hadn’t really thought of before. He indicated that the ad industry and engineers measure performance in very different ways; one via monetization, the other via impact on response time. He emphaiszed how important it is for engineers to understand both points of view, so that we can effectively measure and convey the impact of end user experience on revenue.
Kai Hansen from Google Ireland also mentioned the need to properly advocate this point of view from within our companies so that quality metrics such as keyword relevance and performance are tied to the cost of displaying ads.
I look forward to Velocity Conference 2009. I do hope that it will focus on the front end with more talks about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax. These sessions were the most popular of the conference, and front-end performance is still in its infancy. Douglas Crockford expressed it very well.
“By showing the browser makers how web applications actually perform, the browser makers are now able to make effective changes to the platform. As the platform evolves, we will need new rules and new tools. There is still much to do. (Emphasis mine)” – Doug
Exceptional Performance Yahoo!
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