Twitter Search Results With JSON and Callbacks

Posted on by Rob Larsen

A question was posed in the comments on my JSON Feeds For Fun and Profit Part 2 – Callbacks with Twitter post about handling Twitter search results for a #hashtag. As with the rest of Twitter’s API, dealing with search results is relatively straightforward. This post will examine how to handle a #hashtag search.

If you’re not familiar with JSON or callbacks you might want to read the above referenced post to get up to speed.

Otherwise… it’s on.
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Code I Like: Using Apache's .htaccess and mod_rewrite to Redirect All Traffic to "www"

Posted on by Rob Larsen

I know I was talking about HTML/CSS and JavaScript when I started this series, but I never said anything about being exclusive to the presentation layer 🙂

And heck, there’s always room for Apache when I’m talking about technology…
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Some Internet Explorer Innovations You Probably Forgot About While Waiting for IE6 To Die

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Lost in the past few years of IE6 based stagnation (and ensuing developer angst) is the fact that the Internet Explorer team have come up with some pretty cool enhancements to the way we build web sites over the past ten plus years.

So, while we’re cheering on Firefox’s growing market share, hesitantly eying IE8 and waiting for the ugly stepchild of the browser landscape, IE6, to finally die a painful (and hopefully immediate) death, I thought I’d lay out some of the innovations introduced by Internet Explorer to remind us of relatively positive days gone by*.

As a fun exercise, while you’re reading this, compare these innovations to the black hole left in the web development world by the long and terrible reign of IE6. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of help vs. harm. Here’s hoping future versions of the browser continue to trend closer to the “help” line as IE7 has and IE8 appears to be doing**
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Say Hello to JavaScript’s Native getElementsByClassName

Posted on by Rob Larsen

With the recent release of Firefox 3, we’ve now got a full fledged, mainstream browser that supports the long-awaited, often replicated, getElementsByClassName method. This is good news as we’ll all be just that much speedier as we ditch the various helper functions and go right into the browser for that functionality.

The thing is, the transition, when we’ll finally be able to make it, isn’t a one to one swap. In fact, depending on what you’re using it for you could run into problems transitioning from a helper function to the native method.
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Best Lightweight Web Server for Serving Static Content?

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Dear Internet, anyone out there have any experience with lightweight web servers that they’d like to share?

We’re (meaning Cramah!) looking to set up an asset server to serve static assets like css, javascript, images, flash (destined for progressive downloads) and mp3s. We want to offload that kind of stuff from app servers as a general architecture approach going forward (my obsession with performance is spreading 🙂 ) Since it’s (at some level) my baby and is something I’m generally interested in, I’ve taken a little time and starting looking into what the set-up should entail. I’ve done a little bit of research and it looks like the names I already know are the names that people are using:

Based on what I knew when I started, what I’ve read since, and a recommendation from a co-worker, lighttpd seems to be the way to go. Thing is, I don’t want to jump into anything before asking you, the Internet, if there’s anything I should know about it (or the other two) before heading down that path.

So… anyone out there using this stuff and feel like sharing an anecdote or two? Is there some other candidate I’m missing?

All comments are welcome 🙂