Published in News, Rants and Ephemera on Friday, March 11th, 2005
Within all of the xmlHttpRequest and Ajax hooplah, I've discovered some cool new applications out there, and Feedmarker is one of them. I'm not the first to say it, but it's a little like del.icio.us + Bloglines meets Ajax.
I've recently been looking around for a new feed aggregator since dropping Opera, and while it is still in it's early stages, Feedmarker could be the answer.
While it does share a lot in common with del.icio.us and Bloglines, the beauty of it is that it is all right there in one place.
Another added bonus is the implementation of Harry Fuecks and Jason E. Sweat's jpspan to speed things up. Where copying a link in Del.icio.us takes a couple of page loads, at Feedmarker, adding a link (and later editing it) is done via xmlHttpRequest, and it's very very slick.
If you happen to have a client who wonders what all of the 'Ajax' fuss is about, 5 minutes with Feedmarker would make things very clear. If you're looking for an aggregator or bookmarker, be sure to give Feedmarker a look.
Sitepoint's web devlopment books have helped me out on many occasions both for finding a quick solution to a problem but also to level out my knowlegde in weaker areas (JavaScript, I'm looking at you!). I am recommending the following titles from my bookshelf:
I started freelancing by diving in head first and getting on with it. Many years and a lot of experience later I was still able to take away some gems from this book, and there are plenty I wish I had thought of beforehand. If you are new to freelancing and have a lot of questions (or maybe don't know what questions to ask!) do yourself a favor and at least check out the sample chapters.
The author line-up for this book says it all. 7 excellent developers show you how to get your JavaScript coding up to speed with 7 chapters of great theory, code and examples. Metaprogramming with JavaScript (chapter 5 from Dan Webb) really helped me iron out some things I was missing about JavaScript. That said each chapter really helped me to develop my JavaScript skills beyond simple Ajax calls and html insertion with libs like JQuery.
Like the other books listed here, this provides a great reference for the PHP developer looking to have the right answers from the right people at their fingertips. I tend to pull this off the shelf when I need to delve into new territory and usually find a workable solution to keep development moving. This only needs to happen once and you recoup the price of the book in time saved from having to develop the solution or find the right pattern for getting the job done..
Comments and Feedback
Like Jeremy Keith said, as long as it's backwards compatible.
However, it does look very neat. I should dive into it, and see what the real fuss is about.
Thanks for the nice comments.
Backwards compatibility is a big concern, but so is link structure. For Feedmarker I think it's important that you can browse using urls (like www.feedmarker.com/tags/webdev). If you load content exclusively through XmlHttpRequest (like Microsoft's experimental feed reader does) you end up with pages that can't be linked to.