Jon Udell

URI, XML, HTTP, REST, and the Azure Services Platform

When friends and family ask about the Professional Developers Conference I attended this week, I tell them it’s kind of like Microsoft’s State of the Union address. I’ve been to a number of these over the years. This was my first as an employee, and Microsoft’s first as a company fully committed to what I [...]

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31.10.2008 18:20:54 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Kim Cameron’s excellent adventure

I hope James Governor, Mary Branscombe, and Kim Cameron will triangulate on this, but here’s my report on a cosmically funny incident at a party last night. I walked up to James just as he witnessed Kim being forcibly denied access to the venue. He lacked the necessary identity token — a plastic wristband — [...]

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28.10.2008 16:04:25 - Jon Udell

Hard link

PyAWS, Fermat’s Last Theorem, and search diversity

I use the Amazon API to check wishlists programmatically, and back in March I mentioned that it was being upgraded in a way that would break the Python wrapper I’d been using for years. Readers pointed me to a new wrapper called PyAWS, but I found that it didn’t offer the one thing I needed: [...]

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25.10.2008 15:32:25 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Pumpkins with Oomph

Five years ago I was exploring the idea of embedding active chunks of structured data into web pages. Back then I used the phrase interactive microcontent. Nowadays, we say microformats. If you’re a reader of this blog you’re probably technically-oriented, and you already know about microformats. But most people aren’t, and they don’t. The challenge [...]

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24.10.2008 16:14:57 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Why and how to blurb your social bookmarks

From a 2004 entry entitled Information Routing: To further my own self-interest in keeping track of things, I’ve made a minor extension to the del.icio.us bookmarklet, so that selected text on the target page is used for the (optional) extended description of the routed item. This makes the items I route easier for me to scan. [...]

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22.10.2008 16:41:22 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Finding faces

The fun I’ve been having with DoubleSearch has reminded me how easy it is to create new search providers that plug into your browser’s dropdown list of search engines. Here’s an interesting one: FaceSearch. As the name suggests, it finds pictures of faces. This is nothing more than a Live Search for images, with face recognition [...]

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21.10.2008 15:12:15 - Jon Udell

URI, XML, HTTP, REST, and the Azure Services Platform

Kim Cameron’s excellent adventure

PyAWS, Fermat’s Last Theorem, and search diversity

Pumpkins with Oomph

Why and how to blurb your social bookmarks

Finding faces

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