nonsmokingarea.com

• XRAY is a point-and-click tool that exposes CSS-attributes, inheritance-hierarchy and screen-dimensions of any DOM-element. since XRAY is a bookmarklet, it works not only with Firefox but Safari/Webkit as well.

• Yahoo’s YSlow is a plugin for popular Firefox-extension Firebug. YSlow analyzes a webpage’s performance and assigns grades (A-F) regarding number of HTTP-requests, use of expire-headers, use of gzip-compression,  DNS lookups, javascript/css-bloat etc. linked sections from Y!’s developer network explain how to improve the various benchmarks. highly recommend!

after receiving serious (see Google Blogoscoped, Spiegel) flack over their supposedly stereotypical logo-design, german del.icio.us-competitor Mister Wong finally gave in and removed the lamented artwork, featuring the image of a man of asian ancestry alongside dumb taglines in the likes of “Ping Pong, King Kong, Mister Wong” (I mean, seriously??). personally, I tend to believe Mister Wong’s founder, Kai Tietjen, who claims in this blog-post:

“It was never my intention, nor that of my company, to hurt anyone with the use of the illustration. We are extremely sensitive to this issue and the feelings of others.”

ok, the first part, at least. I’ve my doubts, if people sensitive to issues of (racial) discrimination were actuallay present when Mister Wong’s service was branded. for such folks, this should’ve been really obvious…

oh, and by the way:  Mister-Wong’s asian anchor-man can still be found in the favicon-image…

if you’re looking for an easy way to syndicate all the traces you are leaving on web 2.0, try tumble-blog Soup! Soup integrates everything you put on flickr, YouTube, digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and your own blogs into a single web-page & RSS-feed. just like Facebook, only way simpler!

try my soup at: http://subnet.soup.phoria.eu/

(via smime)

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan has the scoop of Yahoo’s latest beta-product, Yahoo Search Assist. an iteration on type-ahead tools like Google Suggest or Yahoos own Search Suggest, Search Assist selectively suggests terms for refining a query by clustering common keywords within search-results. this should basically help in situations when users struggle to find the “right” keyword to refine their queries. in his screencast, Danny demonstrates the new feature - which is only available to a select number of users at the moment - by searching for Lego organizing systems. (more…)

Amazon’s traffic ranking-service Alexa finally gets rid of its most criticized flaw - strong bias towards Internet Explorer - by releasing their toolbar for the Firefox browser!

it will be interesting to see how strong this is going to affect rankings over the next few weeks, while ‘Sparky’ (the nickname of the Firefox-extension) supposedly experiences some adpotion. of course, if Alexa’s extrapolation-algorithms have been on par, we probably might not see any changes at all…

iterating on a little script I wrote few months back (and inspired by a recent server-crash ) I have now put this script public on Twittermon. all you need to start watching your web-servers is an OpenID- & Twitter-account. Twittermon will check your sites every 5 minutes and alarm you via SMS, E-Mail & RSS if a server goes down.

(more…)

Gecko-based web-browser Flock (Windows and Mac OS-binaries available) has been upgraded to version 0.9 earlier this week. 0.9 features even stronger integration with social web-services and blogging-tools than its predecessor - Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, del.icio.us are supported out of the box, as well as most hosted & self-hosted blogging-tools. besides these well-known qualities, the Flock-team added numerous improvements to the user-interface. (more…)

Steve Gillmor (The Gillmor Gang) is back from the dead with his new video-show Bad Sinatra. the first episode features Mark Benioff (Salesforce,CEO) alongside former gang-members Doc Searls, Dan Farber & Michael Arrington. bring it on!

just noticed that my YouTube-hack PHPTube has been nominated for June’s PHP Innovation Award at PHP Classes, cool! weither you’re using PHPTube or not, your votes are highly appreciated… [voters are required to sign up for an account, which I'ld recommend to PHP-developers anyways, PHP Classes being a constant source of quality-code for years]. thx!

btw., if you’re looking for convenient ways to upload clips to multiple video-platforms with a single click, check out hey!spread - the meta uploader currently supports YouTube, MySpace video, Photobucke, Blip.tv, Metacafe and several others….

so I got approved for a beta-account on Kevin Rose’s (Digg, Revision3) latest venture, Pownce, this weekend. all around the net, Pownce is described as an iteration of the Twitter-concept,  adding the capability to post & share not only messages, but events, links & files too.  however, Pownce currently does offer neither SMS-notification nor -message-posting - and is therefor lacking the killer-feature of Twitter, Jaiku & Co. on the sunny side of life, Pownce offers broad support of microformats (both for posted events and user-profiles - a feature I’ld like to see more often in social webapps) and a fancy desktop application utilizing Adobe AIR (that’s what Apollo is called, now it’s officially launched). Pownce doesn’t expose an official API yet, which might prevent it from turning into the “coral reef” Twitter has become (see Dave Winer’s post). all in all, trying out Pownce leaves some aftertaste of “me too”, despite some added functionality and fresh design.

if you want to try out Pownce yourself, shoot me a comment - I’ve got 6 invitations pending!

update: here’s more info on the upcoming Pownce-API, including working code-samples!