Now, those of you who know me personally know that I really dislike most things. With that in mind, most of you who know me professionally can probably extrapolate that I have little use for buzz-words like AJAX, podcasting, vidcasting, vlogging, etc… Note: This does not mean I’m critical of the concepts behind the buzzwords; I’ve done remote scripting on the web for ages, and I’m writing in a goddamn blog, so that really wouldn’t make much sense. No, it’s the buzzwordiness of it all that I can’t abide. I guess I’m just a curmudgeon.

That said – sometimes, you have to know when you’re beaten. That’s why I’m doing something right now that I really would rather not – I’m using the phrase “Web 2.0.” As near as I can tell, Web 2.0 refers to a website that features a dynamic user experience, and achieves this dynamic user experience with flare and techniques that aren’t employed by most standard websites, which are typically more of the “static page -> form post -> server response -> page reload” variety.

Well, I’ve attempted to throw my own hat in the ring, with a local community website, which launched on New Year’s Day. Check it out:

The Portland Scene

It’s for the city of Portland, OR, specifically, but if you’re a web developer, you might find it interesting anyway, even if you live in Nova Scotia. Why? Well, let’s list some features.

• I’m using the Scriptaculous Library , which I’ve found quite good, although the Prototype library, which it requires, I have found buggy in the past.
• I’m using Yahoo’s Map and Geocoding APIs , which are very, very keen.
• User and picture grids are sortable and filter-able without reloading the page. Play around with the grids in the righthand column, but don’t lose focus on the other things you’re looking at.
• The Scriptaculous autocomplete control makes searching for locations less tedious, and almost – gasp – fun!

• There are tons of bits of functionality that are handled without specific page reloads, including picture reordering and adding to favorites.

  Basically, the entire goal of the site was to create a virtual community for a physical one, and get rid of some of the interface annoyances that we put up with when we use sites like Citysearch. Is it successful? I hope so, but I’m not sure. But, like anything else in the Web 2.0 world, The Portland Scene is in beta, and the features and fixes are coming fast and furious. Hope you find it interesting.

There are a lot of good reasons to lambast MySpace, but how many of us have an account on the site in spite of them? With that in mind, I decided to have a little fun with it, and created a cross-browser, alpha-PNG talk bubble, that can be attached to various portraits, auto-generated, and pasted into a MySpace profile page (for example).

MySpace Bubbles – Available Here

I realize this post doesn’t have a very creative title, but when you’re writing for Google, it helps to try and summarize the problem in a straightforward way, using keywords others afflicted with the similar problem might use when searching.

So, what is the problem I speak of? This morning, I learned about the Yahoo Maps API, which is very exciting, and which deserves its own post, at a later date. (Ok – one digression: what makes the Yahoo Maps API exciting? One word: geocoding.)

Like the Google Maps API, the Yahoo Maps API allows the placement of marker points. This is basic stuff, but, for some reason I was having difficulty getting the marker points to display. Even when using Yahoo’s basic example code, nothing would display. Undaunted, I decided that perhaps the problem was the website into which I was attempting to integrate the Yahoo map. I started stripping away HTML, CSS, and finally other JavaScript.

And that’s when I found the solution. I am using the very popularity prototype javascript library in this particular web application. Well, for whatever reason – and bonus points for someone with enough time to dig through both libraries and find the cause – loading the prototype library prior to loading the Yahoo Maps API will cause your points not to display. Simple fix? Disable prototype on pages where you’re embedding maps with marker points.

Due to the popularity of the prototype library, and coolness of the Yahoo Maps API, I imagine I won’t be the only one who encounters this problem. Hope this post helps someone else. Oh, and if you want, point to cool examples of your Yahoo maps web apps.

As many tech-savvy folks know (most of you, I’m sure), Apple recently released an iPod with video capabilities. The practicality of video on the go notwithstanding, I think the most interesting part of that announcement was that they’d be offering television shows up for download, ala cart, along with full seasons, if you wanted to download them. This is very cool, and I hope it continues to mature. However, this has angered some network affiliates, who are worried that will people will download the shows they want to see, and no longer turn on local television.

One affiliate, however, has taken some forward-thinking steps to combat this:

ABC Affiliates Start ‘Vidcasting’ News Broadcasts

So, am I angry at the affiliate, for some reason? No.

I’m angry at the word “vidcast,” which I find profoundly stupid, and indicative of a larger trend with which I’m sure you’ll all be familiar. There is currently this need, which I see primarily in the web industry, but is probably manifested elsewhere, to reinvent that which doesn’t need reinvention, and to use new language to do it. I know that one of the best parts of English is its malleability (woohoo!), and the fact that it can be refined and honed to properly express new ideas as they materialize. This is fine in certain cases. Hypertext becomes the web, a web page becomes a web site, etc… And you know what? I’m even okay with the word “blog” representing any kind of a website with either an article/link focus, typically published in reverse chronological order, with comments enabled (although it could certainly be argued that that definition is starting to lose its utility).

However, there are some things that I’m just not ok with, and this story was the one that broke the camel’s back.

AJAX – Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.: Cute, but misses the point that it’s really not about XML at all, beyond the fact that XML (along with plain text, if desired) can be returned, and that the name of the object used in JavaScript to facilitate this transfer is the XMLHttpRequest (which should, really, be simply called HTMLRequest). This should really be termed “remoting with JavaScript”, or JavaScript remoting. I guess “JeMo” isn’t as sexy as AJAX (although it’d probably make a kickass musical genre). Of course, flash has had this for awhile now, but I guess Flax isn’t as cool as AJAX, either.

Podcasting – Points for coining this word at the exact right time. It still seems to me mostly like a solution in need of a problem. Oh, and I liked it better when it was just referred to as timeshifting.

Screencasting – Yeah, this is a movie of your computer screen. It isn’t cool.

Vidcasting – Huh? VIDCASTING?! You mean, like displaying VIDEO to USERS on the WEB? Maybe if I download these videos with broadband, I can refer to the whole movement as BROADCASTING, and we can step away from the brink.

Mashup – Ok, this isn’t about the web, but I still hate the term.

Web 2.0 – Look. I’ve been making websites for about nine years. I’ve been making interactive web apps for five. I’ve been using techniques like hidden iframes, and advanced JavaScript for four. So don’t tell me that we’re just now being ushered into some sort of glorious panacea with draggable DIVs, opacity and remoting. Some of us have already been here. (However, mad props to Scriptaculous, which is indeed a very cool JavaScript library, the prototype library, and to Ruby on Rails, for grouping web zealots into one easily ignorable set, in a way that hasn’t been done since GNU/Linux started picking up steam.)

So is this just sour grapes? Am I just another web developer who, having used all these technologies for years in quiet obscurity finds it irritating to have my skillset renamed by a bunch of posers?

Yes. That’s pretty much what it is. It is a rant, after all.

Oh, and incidentally, I’ve submitted this as a news story to digg.com – I have subdigged it, you might say – and will later record myself reading this blog entry, in preparation for a first-ever blogcast/podcast, a term to which I will refer as a podblogcast. If this takes off, all websites dealing with blogs recorded exactly as written will no longer be referred to as websites, or even blogs or audioblogs – they will be podblogs, or pooblogs for short (in spite of the fact that this does not shorten the word at all.)

Ok, now that that’s over – does anyone has any terminology to add?

As those who stumble onto this website can see, Electricstate.com hosts a few small projects, like the iPod bartender, and LinkFinder. Well, I’ve added another one to that mix. This one is called Patron Grid

What is Patron Grid? It’s a way, ala Million Dollar Home Page, for website owners to display those who have donated to their projects. It’s data file is a plain XML file, which is parsed – AJAX style – and displayed. A Wordpress Plugin is in the works. It will be freely available. In the meantime, if you want to hack around with something, the code is also available on the some page.