Techn(ical|ology)

Most posts will probably end up in this category one way or another, because I tend to write a lot about technology and tech-related topics. I work online and really enjoy gadgets and gizmos, so a lot of what I get involved in revolves around those subjects. Anything from regular expressions to iPods to The Magic Bullet is fair game.

Twitter API/Developer Meetup Notes

Here are some notes I took during the Twitter developer meetup that was tonight, at Twitter Headquarters. They’re probably not complete, because I only took bits and pieces on my iPhone, then filled out some details when I got home. It does sound like Twitter are really trying to bulk up their efforts to support developers and let their community flourish, which is probably a great approach given their “we are a platform” strategy. Taken/formatted via ListML, thus the very-hierarchical list approach. Enjoy.

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Amazon Introduces S3 Versioning

Today, Amazon Web Services introduced beta access to a versioning system across all S3 regions in their cloud. This means that you can now save additional copies of an object within S3, while retaining older copies behind the scenes. You can read the developer documentation about this new functionality in amongst the other Amazon Simple Storage Service docs.

I’ll be interested to see how long it takes for someone to build a Time Machine-style backup service using this new core functionality; retaining all revisions of all files stored within that volume. People are going to have to be a little careful about how much they store with this new model, because I imagine it will be very easy to start adding up a lot of space when storing duplicates of objects over time. It seems as if AWS stores full copies of objects (not partial differences between versions), so storage space should be easier to calculate/account for at least.

Versioning is enabled on a per-bucket basis, and you may also optionally require multi-factor authentication with a hardware device to delete versioned objects. The new functionality introduces a versionid concept for each object within a versioning-enabled bucket which keeps track of specific versions of an object, while a normal GET request will get the most recent version available.

It’s great to see Amazon continue innovating and listening to their customers. They are definitely not the only players in the cloud storage/computing game, but they seem to be doing a pretty good job at staying ahead of the curve.

WordCamp Indonesia, 2010

WordCampID – January 30, 2010WordCamp Indonesia. The event was very well organized, with a core team (the same group from last year) involved in putting together all the logistics, handling media, organizing speakers etc. They handled things very well, despite a few problems which were out of their control (like bad name-tag printing and their stickers/WordPress buttons not making it in the mail!) and the day seemed to be a success for everyone.

Below are the slides and notes from my presentation, which covered the current state of WordPress, what’s coming up in the next release and some of the related projects. You can also get the slides on SlideShare. Click the link below the slides to expand my full outline/notes.
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Web Service Authentication APIs

For a project I’m working on, I’ve been looking at a lot of web service authentication/verification APIs lately. I thought folks might be interested in the results. Here are the methods available for a variety of web services/applications online, with links to their appropriate docs:

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BackPress, Your New Best Friend

If you’ve spent some time poking around in the code for either WordPress or bbPress, you may have come across comments that mention “BackPress”. You may have wondered what this BackPress thing was, well, wonder no more.

In the last few days, I’ve put together a quick site to try to help introduce people to the BackPress project. From the site:

BackPress is a PHP library of core functionality for web applications. It grew out of the immensely popular WordPress project, and is also the core of the bbPress and GlotPress sister-projects.

So effectively, BackPress takes all of the best core functionality (on a code level) from WordPress and bbPress, and makes it available to you and your next PHP-based web application/project. By using BackPress in your projects, you are then able to use most of the code you’ve come to rely on while working on WordPress-based projects, such as $wpdb, trailingslashit(), make_clickable(), __(), wp_remote_fopen() and more. The site includes some details on how to use BackPress in your project, and has the beginnings of a collection of documentation covering the main parts of the code library.

I’m personally really excited about this because I think BackPress has huge potential as a library for other folks and other projects. It allows them to benefit from the lessons learned through years (and thousands of “man-hours” worth of development) on the WordPress and bbPress projects. I’m using it as the core of my HTFS project (not released yet), and I know that some other projects are starting to use it as well. As a developer who has spent a lot of time in “WordPress land”, it makes life so much easier to be able to continue using a lot of the design patterns and techniques that I’ve become accustomed to.

Check it out, and please let me know what else we could get on the site, what needs more documentation etc!

Idea: Bookmark Plugin for WordPress

I just saved yet another link in my Delicious account, and suddenly thought — “man, it would really suck if Delicious one day disappeared and I lost all of this”.

Indeed.

According to my stats, I have 1,164 bookmarks, mostly with descriptions and manually crafted (to some extent) titles, 1,813 different tags in use, with some being used 187 times. That’s a lot of rich, valuable data that I’ve collectively invested a lot of time in. I want control over it. I want insurance.

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