onfocus

A jQuery port of Prototype's PerodicalUpdater method that includes a polling interval decay if updates aren't happening.

"...if after a few Ajax polls there’s no data, there probably won’t be for a while. Maybe the site is overloaded or the queue is backed up. In those circumstances the continued polling adds additional unwanted strain to the site." Another polling approach: increase the interval every time.

"And the greater risk is not of Flickr’s deletion of customers, but of the market’s deletion of Flickr. Because, after all, Flickr is a business and no business lasts forever. Least of all in the tech world." Valid concerns about Flickr, advertising, and how we fund the Web.

"If I had to give you a single piece of managerial advice, I would say: 'Your job with your nerd is to bring calm to their chaos'." The author of Being Geek on managing software geeks.

Kellogg's: not the best source for parenting advice.

A nice alternative to a standard AJAX poller that takes network latency and server errors into account.

Hey great! Alan Taylor is starting a new photo journalism project in February. Can't wait to see it.

"As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities." Great hypothesis. Hard in practice.

Paintings that capture alchemists, messy labs and all.

"It’s almost always better to correct than to unpublish."

Wait for it...

The lesson: "Create a service experience around what you publish and sell." Some nice words about MetaFilter and an interesting way to view online audiences: "Why Wasn't I Consulted?"

"But it is now also possible to use a Multi-domain UCC SSL certificate. This allows you to have a single certificate which covers up to 150 domains."

This is a good answer about responding to a server intrusion. The stuff of nightmares, but it's good to think about how to respond to a crisis when you're not in the middle of a crisis. [via anil]

400+ Moby Dicks!

"Dennis Delimarsky compared several weather APIs and decided that Google’s is best, despite having no documentation or support from the company." Looks nice!

A bit outdated, but full of good advice for tuning SQL Server applications.

"Eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days. The borrower does not need to own a Kindle -- Kindle books can also be read using our free Kindle reading applications for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices." It's a start!

"...the Pro users of yesteryear’s products, the people with the biggest investment in old technologies, are not the people who should be calling the shots in the design of their successors." Let Beginner's Mind have a shot! [via torrez]

"As a personal archive tool, it's pretty impressive, as a shared space to find interesting bookmarks, it's problematic." I completely agree with Matt, and check out Maciej's comment after the post. It sounds like more social tools are coming to Pinboard.

Devastating critique of the damage Yahoo! has done to Web culture. "All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: 'Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.' Great work, guys."

More Google Books Ngrams fun.

"The ability to quantify things that had once been subjective 'hunches' on the part of scholars...is nothing short of revolutionary."

"...a new project available in Google Labs today - Books Ngram Viewer - highlights some of the other benefits of digitizing texts beyond better reading and storage."