Back in October, Tantek Çelik wrote an entry on the Microformats blog, featuring my online identity, jaredhanson.net, as an example of a beautifully styled hCard.
While I don’t claim to be particularly adept at web design, especially compared to the other two featured individuals (Tim Van Damme and Rogie King), my use of Ajax to display a status indicator was highlighted.
Since that time, I’ve had numerous people inquire as to how I added this functionality to my website. In response, I’m supplying the source code that I use. Download: web-presence.zip
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Two weeks ago, I attended Internet Identity Workshop 9 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. IIW brings together a group of people working on user-centric identity, and gives them a common time and place to collaborate with one another.
In the past, I’ve followed previous IIWs through blogs and mailing lists. I’ve always been impressed with the caliber of people that attend and the quality of work that results. This was the first IIW I attended in person, and my expectations were met.
IIW is organized in unconference style, with the agenda set by the participants. A grid is drawn on the wall, with meeting areas along the X-axis and time sessions along the Y-axis. With each day divided into slots, anyone can propose a topic and schedule it for an available room and time. The format works very well, and allows people to tailor the event to their desired focus, be it business, legal, technical, or cross-discipline.
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Continuing in the series of entries derived from my notes taken during Mozilla Labs October meetup, this post covers Brett Slatkin’s talk about PubSubHubbub. PubSubHubbub is a simple publish/subscribe protocol for turning Atom and RSS feeds into real-time streams.
The publish/subscribe paradigm is commonly found throughout software engineering. In essence, a component of a system publishes events as it performs its tasks. For example, a video encoder would post an event when it has completed encoding.
Separate components register as subscribers, and receive notice when an event occurs. In our example, a content management system could take the encoded video and publish it to a website. Meanwhile, a separate component could email the director to inform him that his video is available online.
A broker in the middle (a “hub” in PubSubHubbub terminology) is responsible for delivering published events to any interested subscribers. This decoupling creates a flexible architecture, in which separate components are isoloted and can evolve independently.
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Last week I went to the Mozilla Labs October meetup at Twitter HQ. Employees of Mozilla and Google presented their latest projects, which were very interesting for those involved in engineering the future of the Web. I intend to turn my notes from the gathering into two or three blog entries. This is the first of those.
To kick off the evening, Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin (both of Google) presented on WebFinger and PubSubHubub, respectively. Brad stated that he “would like to totally decentralize social networking,” which is a common link between the two efforts. This post will outline Brad’s talk on WebFinger; PubSubHubbub will follow separately.
WebFinger attempts to solve the problem that we don’t have good identifiers for people. Over time, people have become accustomed to identifying themselves by an email address. They sign into websites with this as their ID and print it on their business cards. People instinctively recognize anything with an @ sign in it as an email address.
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Via a tweet by Tim O’Reilly, I came across an excellent post entitled The Rise of the Data Web, on Dataspora Blog (which I quickly subscribed to). The author, Michael E. Driscoll, summed up nicely an important trend occurring presently on the web.
The web originated as a set of documents and files served up for people to read and occasionally edit. Indeed, it is this web that we all still experience as we surf from page to page reading news or looking at photos.
Underneath all this, and unseen except by software engineers, is a massive web of data. Sensors of all kinds are now measuring everything that can be quantified, from people’s location and biological functions to the environment we all share. All of this data is flowing through the network.
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