Spun

Firebug’s creator, Joe Hewitt, demonstrates how he uses Firebug.

Social timeline maker Dandelife is really cool but I’m anti-social, and anti-hosted data. Happily, with the open source, fancy pants SIMILE Timeline one can create and host their own timeline. Fabulous.

After reviewing about 17 dozen dynamic RSS reader homepages on Lifehacker (like Google’s Personalized Homepage and Netvibes and Protopage) - which are all basically the same - it warms my heart to see a tutorial on how to build your own.

Hopefully this means these “desktop” homepages have jumped the shark and everyone move their “WebOS” dev efforts onto something a bit more innovative (and useful!).

FileChucker’s a $15 Perl script that provides an Ajax-y file upload interface for your web site, complete with progress bar. Haven’t tried it, but looks pretty cool.

The words “Ajax” and “Unit testing” spoken in the same how-to article make me all warm and tingly inside. If JSUnit is actually workable, I’ll have a lot less mental blockage around dev’ing Ajax functionality for sure.

The Yahoo! User Interface Library’s got a bunch of open source Ajaxy UI components, including a Calendar control, Drag and Drop, a Slider and Tree View. Neat.

A few Ajax links I’ve been hoarding:

• Ajax Tutorial: Ajax What Is It Good For?
• 24 ways: Edit-in-Place with Ajax
• Mastering Ajax, Part 1: Introduction to Ajax
• Mastering Ajax, Part 2: Make asynchronous requests with JavaScript and Ajax
• Mastering Ajax, Part 3: Advanced requests and responses in Ajax

Updated with one more link.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Forget XMLHttpRequest, this Ajax method sets the src of an img dynamically to pull data from the server.

I’ve been MIA here because we just launched invite-only comments over at Lifehacker which involve a crazy MT plugin and really neat Ajax as-you-type comment preview and posting.

Usually velvet ropes aren’t my cup of tea, but the invitation system seems to be working well. I’ll send anyone an invite who offers an earnest and worthwhile tip for the site. So far there have been fewer comments than I anticipated but the ones that are there are super-high quality and on-topic, so that makes me happy.

Comments completely change the face of a site, making a post an interaction instead of a statement, which is nice. I felt kind of high up there on my LH horse and disconnected from the readership. Now, with comments, I feel like we can all stand around and chat.

Comments also went live on Gawker, and already commenters there have been banned and threads seem more like a standup comedy routine where people compete to show who’s snarkier. Which makes sense for Gawker, I guess.

Anyway, most other stuff has been put on hold while I pack my apartment to move West and keep Lifehacker on track. Hopefully more dev posts soonish.

ObjectGraph’s define-as-you-type dictionary and Wikiwax’s dynamic Wikipedia lookup are my two favorite uses of Ajax.

The free Ajax SuggestBox will render a search input box that drops down with suggestions as-you-type on a web page. The Javascript and server-side script for getting suggestions available for download.

The most useful applications of this type of suggest I’ve seen are for entering freeform tags in del.icio.us, and for a Wikipedia search at WikiWax. Of course, there’s always Google Suggest which I think started the whole suggest theme. Any others out there?

O’Reilly developer Micheal Smith asks readers what resources will help him learn Ajax, and gets a few good recommendations in response.