Francis Shanahan[.com] » web2.0

Foolstr.com Soft Launch

Francis — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:51:00 +0000

"The fool is proud of the one thing he knows…"

foolstr is a new website, located at www.foolstr.com. It’s all about the Wisdom of Crowds. foolstr lets you publish your ideas, lessons learned and get feedback from the community. It’s a simple social site, intended to gather up collective wisdom.

foolstr is innovative in that it relies on OpenID as its form of authentication. This means foolstr doesn’t invade your privacy and registration is a snap. It’s also completely anonymous. Things like Passwords or Email addresses, we don’t need ‘em. Your email or password is never sent to Foolstr, you don’t have to remember a NEW password, you don’t have to remember ANYthing. Try it and see!

It’s a fun site and we want the barrier of entry to be small. You can post content without even registering and so far there is some interesting content.

From a technical side this site is another experiment, this time dealing with OpenID to determine just how viable this technology is. So far it seems sound for this level of authentication. The question is will the public understand it and be comfortable with this as a means of authentication. We’ll see. I’ve also hooked up the Yahoo Term Extraction API for content analysis and Google Analytics for Traffic.

So blog about it, Facebook it, Digg it, tell your friends, share your ideas and opinions and vote on what’s there. Let’s see what the fools know…

Foolstr’s still in pre-alpha, with many kinks still being ironed out. If you find a bug, post back to http://foolstr.blogspot.com or use the contact page at foolstr.com.

Now get out there and tell us something we don’t already know!!!
HTTP://FOOLSTR.COM

Great Web2.0 Video

Francis — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 00:05:00 +0000

If you ever needed a rundown on what Web2.0 is this video does a nice job of summing it up. It’s also a great example of compelling editing. I wonder if there’s a name for this style of video/editing?
[LINK]

More Ajax Fun

Francis — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 20:52:00 +0000

Seems there’s a lot of interest around the Ajax Collage of Jeff Bezos. A quick word on this, I’m not sure if folks have realized as this is not in the normal vein of LiveSearch (ala Zuggest) or Google Maps but this Collage thing is actually an Ajax example also.

Clicking the images does a request behind the scenes to load the product.

There are plenty more collages on the way over the next week…

In other news, I’ve been playing with XML-RPC the simplest and some would say best of all protocols. I figured I’d try it out with the Visual Studio 2005 beta and .NET 2.0. I have to say, those partial classes and enhanced IDE are quite nice. I could get used to vs2005.

Anyway, long story short I was finding that the HttpWebRequest was intermittently throwing an exception.

When I tried the same code in .NET 1.1 it worked everytime. A quick google reveals the following bug logged on MSDN. It’s encouraging to note as this would indicate that MSoft is finally taking standards compliance and security much more seriously than with previous releases. Unfortunately the likely down-side is that Microsoft will be releasing a bunch of "work-arounds" e.g. the "httpWebRequest useUnsafeHeaderParsing = "true"" to enable migration of legacy NET 1.1 code. So where’s that leave us? With the option of tighter security, the likelyhood that it’ll be bypassed and zero culpability on MSoft’s part. And that’s ok, the onus is on the developer to ensure the security of the app. Two thumbs up!