Labnotes

Rounded Corners - 54

Bring back the people. Tim Berners Lee is planning a new future for HTML, away from XHTML 2.0. It promises to bring HTML back to the people, and bring the people back to HTML. Either way, simple is good. It doesn’t have to be radical, it just needs to work.

The age of the universe is a function of time. And it takes a lot of time to understand what the hell we’re talking about, but our understanding grows exponentially. I could use this law in so many other fields.

Quote of the day. Rachel Cunliffe: “The bigger the organisation, the more complex the homepage.” And yes, Google is the counter example, otherwise we wouldn’t mention them ad nauseum.

The metric system. Elle magazine (don’t ask), in the beautybodyhealth section: “A pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat, but takes up less space”.

Scraping CNN. Benjamin shows how to scrape CNN in a handful of lines. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Posted by Assaf Filed in general

Flex 3 and Ruby on Rails 2 integrated with HTTPService and XML
RESTful Rails controllers that support Flex and HTML clients
Coverage of how to use Cairngorm to architect larger Flex applications
A full application--not just a toy--developed and refactored iteratively

Oct 31st, 2006

whatever

just a thought,

It would be nice if you put some examples in there. You have spent so much time writing hundreds of lines of code. Is it too much to ask to have a few general cases so people can actually use the dang thing?

For example, I would like to write a quick script to go to a given page of files, put the url’s there in an array and then just do a “system wget” to download every file (it is a directory of mp3 files”)

Please don’t act like Rails assholes, and show unnecessary bullshit attitude. If you have the time to write all those lines of code, then make an effort to have some workign examples. Don’t release it just to frustrate every body.

you’re hot shit, we get it. now try to help people for a change.

Nov 3rd, 2006

Assaf

whatever,

Most of the code I wrote is for special purpose, it wouldn’t make sense to put it here. But I’ll post more generic examples, like the eBay one. The CNN example is a good one.

For your example, something like:

class UrlScraper < Scraper:Base
def prepare
@urls = []
end

process “a[href]” do |element|
url = element.attributes["href"]
if url =~ /\.mp3$/
@urls << url
end
end

result :urls
end

urls = UrlScraper.scrape(URI.prase(url_of_page))
urls.each do |url|
`wget #{url}`
end

Nov 4th, 2006

Daniel E. Renfer

Google’s opening page is simple by design, you’re not meant to stay there for any length of time and it’s intention is to get you to the juicy search results page as fast as it can. (Where the adsense lay) I remember reading a while back in a thread about why Google doesn’t use XHTML is that the homepage was designed to fit within a single packet. That was before they added all the extra features (Personalized account, sign in links) so I’m sure that doesn’t apply anymore, but they still know that people go to Google to search while people go to Yahoo! to do many things. (search being one of them.)

Google’s personalized search gives them the ability to be the big heavy homepage while not wasting bandwidth on the “just searchers”.

To really see the complexity of the universe that is Google, you have to look at their all options page. [1] My Personalized page is far from simple.

[1]: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

Nov 4th, 2006

Scott at Real Epicurean

Absolutely true - big organisations tend to feel they have to go complicate on their home page too. Crazy, isn’t it?

Web 2.0 is all about readability.

Nov 6th, 2006

Assaf

readability … I like that.

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Rounded Corners - 54

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