Hello.

I have been playing with the Blogger Tool for Windows, and there are some features that I would like to see go into future versions: The ability to edit the HTML before uploading to the Blogger. The ability to add Images The ability to add Tables The ability to add Select styles to text that is based on a style that I define Correctly create Ordered Lists and Unordered list.

This is my first post using the Blogger Word Blogging tool. It is pretty cool, pretty easy to use. I would like to know If I have any control of the HTML that is created. Only because the AJAX tool that I use only outputs HTML. It will be interesting to see what people can do with it. At least I have a decent spell checker! One thing I have noticed is that if you put a smiley icon in the text it only comes out as a “(“.

Blogger have released a new product. Just when I filled in the survey saying there weren’t developing enough cool new stuff to keep me interested they come out with this: Word Blogger, which I think I will call Worger! :)This is a plugin for Microsoft Word that lets you post a Word document direct to your blog. I can’t wait to have a go, it looks interesting. Does anyone have any reviews of it yet?

Robert Scoble talks about how Developer API’s are changing the face of retailing. I think I briefly talked about this a while back now (Are there any good web services out there: http://www.kinlan.co.uk/2005/04/are-there-any-good-web-services-out.html).I personally think if a retailer isn’t planning to create API’s that enable applications to be built on top of their product catalogue, ordering systems etc, then they are losing out on a massively huge potential future audience. I can’t really justify it more than that, other than it is what I belief will happen.

This is the fourth part to my successes and failures when creating an AJAX Experimental application.Part 4: It got me thinking about how to take advantage of the Technorati API.Because the general idea of the application that I was starting to develop was to help automate the creation of Technorati Tags and other Interesting searches, it was a logical step to start to use the Technorati Developer API (http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/).Technorati offers about 8 different API’s which allow you to create applications based around the data that they collect from their spider.

It got me thinking about how the Yahoo! API works. The Yahoo API can be found at http://developer.yahoo.net.I have been investing a fair bit of time investigating the Yahoo! API’s. I am really impressed so far. They offer so much to a developer than the Google one does.The main areas that I have been working in are the Term Extraction API and the Related searches API. I have also been thinking a bit about the Contextual Search API too.

I was just reading Robert Scobles Blog Article: http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/08/15.html#a10851.And at the end he makes the following comment: Blogging, though, gets us close – because it increases the number of sites everyone wants to keep up on. What happens when everyone in your family has a Flickr site and a blog? How many people are in your family? At my wedding there were more than 50 family members and I don’t think that’s atypical.

I am just sitting here reading about the Feedster API, and I am wondering what is the point.I like the idea of them providing an API, but I just don’t get what it is this API is supposed to provide. Is it supposed to be a list of feeds and related data belonging to a site? I was hoping that they would provide a content search.However syaing that, you can quickly get do a search by substituting the query paramaters in their own search on their site, like the ones I used to provide.

It does seem that technorati couldn’t parse the way I had done my URL’s. Saying that I definatly did them wrong.

Don’t get me wrong, my application wasn’t a success. I am just dealing with the easy stuff first to prepare my self for the failures!!!The second success of this web application is that it got me thinking about how to code JavaScript for Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE6 and IE7). There are some subtle differences about the two browsers when it comes to JavaScript support. (I suppose they are not subtle if you think about it).

I have not been keeping the list of feeds that don’t work in IE7 up to date for several reasons. The major reason is that I was in the middle of emailing Sean Lyndersay who is a Lead Program Manager on the RSS team.He confirmed that the sites I had listed do in fact work with Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 and that potentially there is a bug in the RSS code that makes all the feeds not viewable.

I can”t recall how I came accross this link but it is really handy. It basically describes how colors should be combined so that they are pleasing to the eye. I never actually knew that this type of stuff existed. I am going to do a bit of reading about this because I found it quite interesting.My limit of understanding about colour theory (Color Theory for anyone outside the UK) is to use shades of the same colour.

This is just a quick post. It concerns how IE7 (Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1) deals with XmlHttpRequest Object (commonly used for AJAX based applications) and multiple windows. If I construct a request in IE7 that is not asynchronous it naturally will stop the browser from responding until it is completed. In IE7, if you have multiple tabs open and perform a long XmlHttpRequest that is synchronous in nature, it stops all the other tabs from responding.

I was looking through my logs today, and I noticed that I had not had a single referal over the past day from technorati. I investigated a bit more and I noticed none of my blogs are in any of the tag searches on Technorati…. This is odd I thought.It is my Technorati AJAX application that creates the tag information for a post now. So there must be a problem there.

This is the first in the series about the successes and failures of my AJAX application. With me talking about this, I hope to make a better version 2. Talking about everything that I have learnt so far is good for me and I hope to also help other people so that they don’t hit some of the traps and pit falls that I ran across.Most of the successes are related to me learning something.

My first Ajax Application was a success and a failure at the same time. I have detialed some of the points below, and hopefully I will be able to discuss them in later posts, this will give me more content in more readable bitesized chunks. Successes It got me thinking Asynchronosly. It got me thinking about how to code JavaScript for Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE6 and IE7) It got me thinking about how the Yahoo!

I am going to do a little bit more research on this but I think I have found an implementation difference between IE 6, IE 7 and Firefox, centering around XmlHttpRequest.In both browsers, IE and Firefox, the developer can create a script that sends an HttpReqeust out via JavaScript. The following code is pretty standard:httpObj2.open(“POST”, url, false); // Asyn = true, Sync = false httpObj2.onreadystatechange = parseSearchResponse; httpObj2.setRequestHeader(“Connection”,“close”); httpObj2.setRequestHeader(“Content-Type”,“application/x-www-form-urlencoded”); httpObj2.send(“query=”+ escape(query)); The above code will send a request synchronosly (it will block at send).

Following on from my previous post about concerns over the way IE7 displays favorites (here).My IE7 (Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1) is crashing (as in every instance of it closes) when I try to view my favorites, it is okay when I view the favorites in collapsed form (see picture)[[posterous-content:DvECEHuwAGJiJpeJsECc]]When I click on the double down pointing cheveron, it completly crashes the application. If you look at my previous post about the favorites you will see that I have a lot of unsorted favorites.

I was looking at how Microsofts” Start.com (www.start.com/myw3b) pulls in data from web feeds that are not on there own servers and it seems that they have a script that forwards on the request to the remote server and passes it back as their own. Essentially the request is tunneled through their systmen and passed back to the client.This is done so because browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer (in certain configurations) will not allow a website to get data from another domain.

It appears that my sample AJAX Application (here). Has some minor security issues. This is a similar problem to the problems I have in Firefox, cross site data access. The work around for this is simple in IE6 and IE7 (although not preferable). If you go to “Internet Options -> Security -> Custom Level” and select the option under “Miscellaneous” select “Enable” in the “Access data sources across domains” section.See the image.