Hurley's World

We don’t have to tell you there’s some sort of economic troubles affecting our industry. We at Webmonkey knew it was only a matter of time before it would affect monkey_bites. Unfortunately, we were right and that time was this week.

Henceforth, Webmonkey has updated from 2.0 beta to 2.1 beta. In this update, the site will be streamlined in order to bring a little more focus towards our primary goal: being the web developer’s resource.

Unfortunately, it comes at a loss for what was the Webmonkey team. Michael Calore, Scott Gilbertson and Adam DuVander have taken their brilliant software and business news coverage over to Wired’s Epicenter blog. Scott Loganbill (that’s me) is left to maintain Webmonkey part time and continue to make the wiki the web-dev-opedia it is and was always meant to be.

With three less monkey_bites writers, the blog will change its direction slightly to cover less web software news and more web development community coverage. Also, all contributions to the wiki will be considered for promotion on the front page even more seriously. Webmonkey is all about sharing ideas and knowledge. The wiki is dedicated to putting out some of the most accessible web tutorials and resources. We think everyone should know how to build their own corner of the web, and we’re excited to provide a place for a community that feels the same way. In fact, this week we start out with a contribution by cpeterpan on how to write object-oriented JavaScript code.

If you haven’t contributed to the Webmonkey wiki, now is the time. Beyond the good feeling you get by teaching people what the web can really do, you also get the warm feeling that your tutorials are actually being read. If it’s really good, you might just find a Webmonkey t-shirt in your mailbox. If you’ve already written some tutorials elsewhere, feel free to cross-post to and from your own blog or website. Webmonkey is all set to host your content under Creative Commons so long as it is useful, on topic and not spammy. For more information, check out the Webmonkey Writer’s Guide.

As with any change, particularly in times like these, it comes as both difficult and challenging but with a healthy dose of excitement that only comes when starting a new chapter. The spirit of Webmonkey lives on in your voices and contributions. So pitch in people. After all, the web won’t build itself.

The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 10, the next generation of Fedora Linux. Fedora 10 brings many of the same improvements we saw in the latest version of Ubuntu — a better network manager and updated versions of GNOME and GIMP among others — but also packs in some unique new features.

The big news for Fedora fans in version 10 is the new “glitch-free” version of PulseAudio, which improves sound in Fedora 10, and, as the name implies, gets rid of the annoying latency and dropped audio problems that plagued early release of PulseAudio.

Fedora 10 is also notable for opting to using GNOME’s new Empathy instant messaging framework. Ubuntu passed on Empathy, and having tested Empathy in the Fedora 10 RC1, we can see why. While Empathy works well enough, the interface is a bit simplistic next to other GNOME IM apps like Pidgin.

Our favorite part of Fedora, PackageKit, remains largely unchanged in this release. If you’ve never encountered PackageKit, it’s worth taking the live CD for a spin to see how well PackageKit “just works.”

PackageKit will automatically search for and install any software you need to open a file. For example, say you download a ODF file, but don’t have OpenOffice install, PackageKit will step in and prompt you to install OpenOffice and any dependancies so you can open the file.

Obviously PackageKit has its limitations — download a file for which there is no open source software, say a Word file, and PackageKit will remain silent — but for the average use case it adds a nice layer of user friendliness to the Fedora desktop.

You can grab the latest Fedora release from the Fedora site. By default the live CD will install GNOME so if KDE is your preferred desktop be sure to grab the KDE flavor.

See Also:

• Fedora Releases Alpha Preview of Next Gen Linux
• Fedora 9 Gives Ubuntu a Run For Its Money
• Fedora 9 Beta Offers a Glimpse of What’s to Come

Google has revamped its popular Maps tool with a new interface that puts the emphasis on its Street View tool.

A new set of controls — looking very much like those you’ll find in Google Earth — highlights a new “Pegman” icon at the top of the zoom controls. Whenever Street View is available the pegman icon will turn orange. Dragging the icon onto the map then triggers the familiar blue lines of Street View and dropping the pegman icon onto the map will cause Street View to fill the map window.

Once Street View takes over, you can navigate using the Street View arrows or via a small thumbnail map that resides in the lower right corner of the map. There’s also a split pane view that shows Street View just above the regular map view.

Another very nice, and easy to overlook feature: zooming down past the lowest level of detail will automatically switch to Street View.

Although the changes are very slick, recognizing all the new options available isn’t immediately obvious. To help you out, Google has put together this goofy little video which shows the new features in action:

See Also:

• Street View Images Coming Soon to Your Favorite Google Maps Mashup
• Add the new Google Maps Street View Panoramas to Your Site
• Google Maps Street View Succeeds Where Other Giants Have Stumbledv

The second Firefox 3.1 beta release is past due, but already Mozilla says that working out the remaining kinks in the next revision of Firefox will likely require a third beta before the final release arrives.

In a message to the Mozilla developer planning list, Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s “Phenomenologist,” says that the new features set to arrive in beta 2 — Private Browsing Mode, TraceMonkey and more — “will benefit from multiple beta releases.”

Mozilla ended up with a very similar plan for Firefox 3.0, adding a fourth beta at the last minute to ensure that all the bugs were squashed before the final release.

The good news is that Mozilla plans to make Firefox 3.1 beta 2 a stable enough release for add-on developers to start testing their code against. Mozilla has already called on add-on developers to pick up the pace when it comes to making extensions Firefox 3.1 compatible, but the addition of a third beta will give developers a bit more time to catch up.

If accepted, Beltszner’s plan calls for a beta 3 release later this year, though all the features arriving in the final release will need to be part of beta 2. The final version of Firefox 3.1 is currently set to arrive in early 2009.

See Also:

• Mozilla to Firefox Add-On Developers: Stop Being Lazy
• Firefox Hits 20% Browser Share Worldwide
• First Look: Firefox 3.1 Beta Offers Speed, Better Searching and More

Lookout Flash, the increasingly popular Processing language, which was designed in part to turn visual artists into programmers, has announced its long-awaited 1.0 release.

Processing has long been a favorite of animators — the language has been used for everything from animation in Radiohead videos, to web-based tools that can extract a color scheme from your photographs.

Processing is also widely used in academia where even those not naturally inclined to the technical side of programming (that would be us liberal arts majors) have latched on to processing’s ease-of-use and ability to create complex visualizations (for some examples, check out Complexification.net).

Because it’s open source, Processing has also been rolled into a number of other languages like Python, Rails, Javascript and many more.

Given that the new version is a 1.0 release, the focus is naturally on stability. But, while the focus may be stability, there are some new features as well, including an optimized 2D graphics engine, better tools for working with vector files, and new ways to create development add-ons to enhance the Processing production environment.

If you’re tired of Flash animation and you want to try out the new version of Processing — which is free and available for Mac, Linux and Windows — head over to the Processing website and grab the latest release.

[via Daniel Shiffman]

See Also:

• New JavaScript Library Creates Amazing Animations

How come my desktop browser can get my location, but mobile Safari on my iPhone acts as if it doesn’t know where I am? I hate to seem impatient, but there is a proposed geolocation standard. Mobile browsers should adopt it swiftly.

The mobile web is here. The iPhone and Android are going to duke it out, and the end result will be more users. Facebook’s mobile visitors have tripled in the last year. That’s a lot of mobile browsing.

If the location-aware services are going to be as disruptive as everyone has said, these devices need to get better at sharing the information available within them. Yes, Android and iPhone both have apps. But we shouldn’t need to wrap our web projects in an app just to access the coordinates.

The Geode plugin for Firefox and its presence as a full feature in the browser’s most recent beta have proven it’s reasonable to include it even on a non-mobile machine. Despite the flakiness of WiFi-based geolocation, innovative sites have incorporated the technology. You can shout your whereabouts or tie files to a location all with the help of browser-based geolocation. Of course, we have a Geode/Gears geolocation tutorial so you can incorporate it, too.

But we really want it incorporated in mobile devices, so we’d be able to see some real innovation. Location-based services are at the horse and buggy stage right now. Let’s give it an engine.

See also:

• Why Location-Based Apps Suck
• Make Your Site An iPhone App
• Tutorial: Track User Geolocation With JavaScript

Mashups, web apps which merge two or more data sources, essentially arose from the introduction of the Google Maps API in June 2005. APIs for easily accessing data existed before then, but a way to visualize it geographically was a huge tipping point.

Due to the popularity of map mashups, ProgrammableWeb’s mashup directory is over a third mapping-related. But something interesting has been happening: other types of mashups are becoming popular. Over the last two weeks, for example, maps mashups are only 20% of the new additions to the directory. Granted, it’s a small sample and mapping is still tops by far, but other ways of mashing up data are becoming more relevant.

How can mashups be both dead and more relevant? Consider Friendfeed, which aggregates your data using APIs of several social websites, pulling in each item you and your friends post to Twitter, Flickr, Digg, your blogs. It fits the criteria of a mashup perfectly. If Friendfeed was entered into the recent MashupCamp contest, it would have come away victorious. Friendfeed is an uber-mashup, though nobody calls it that.

Mashups are dead because the whole web is becoming a collection of APIs. In the future, showing an embedded map of liquor stores near that New Year’s party won’t be a snazzy add-on, it will be a necessary feature.

See also:

• Google Maps Adds User Mashups
• New Digg API Means More Mashups
• Create Slick Spreadsheet Mashups in Google Docs

Google’s new SearchWiki features, which supposedly make it possible to rearrange and annotate search results, is turning into something of a train wreck. First Google released the feature without offering a way to turn it off, then the company inexplicably disabled it for a while and then restored it without making any changes.

If you’ve had about enough of SearchWiki we have good news: an equally disgruntled user has whipped a Greasemonkey script to hide most of SearchWiki’s features. The aptly named No SearchWiki doesn’t disable SearchWiki but it does hide the links, which many feel clutter up the otherwise stark simplicity of Google’s search results page (especially if you use AVG, which already inserts its own links).

So if you’d just as soon SearchWiki went the way of the Dodo, you can help it along. Just grab the script from userscripts.org. No SearchWiki works wherever Greasemonkey does, if you’re on IE, check out this script which does basically the same thing.

[via Google Operating System]

See Also:

• Customize Your Search Results Using Google’s New ‘SearchWiki’
• Wikia Search Launches Wikipedia-Style Search Engine
• Revamped Microsoft Live Search Disappoints

As we pointed out last week, YouTube is now offering HD quality video on select movies. But one of the hallmarks of HD video is the widescreen aspect ratio (16:9 rather than 4:3) and now the YouTube site has been updated so that all video is now displayed in a new widescreen player.

As the YouTube blog notes, this means that the vast majority of videos on the site — which were uploaded as 4:3 — are now displayed with black bars on the sides (the empty space not used by 4:3 videos).

You might be wondering why YouTube doesn’t auto-detect a video’s aspect ration and use the appropriate player — it’s a good question, one that many YouTube users are also asking, but so far the company hasn’t commented. We suspect the change is part of a broader move to make YouTube all HD, all the time, but it seems like giving video owners the option to choose which player is used would have been a sound idea.

But now that the groundwork is in place, with both HD converters and widescreen playback now available, look for YouTube’s video quality to improve. The service has already announced plans to host full length MGM movies and that move is likely to be followed by other partnerships.

In the past it was necessary to choose between audience size and video quality — if you wanted video quality you uploaded to Vimeo or Blip.tv, both of which have long offered HD and widescreen players, but if you wanted to reach the largest audience you uploaded to YouTube. However, that’s changed, YouTube is now a viable option for those of you wouldn’t dream of downsizing your videos to the grainy, boxy format that has long been the site’s hallmark.

Unfortunately, while the widescreen player is now the default on the YouTube site, the embed code is still written for the old, 4:3 ratio player. When we posted our write up of the HD features last week a couple people wrote to ask how we embedded a widescreen video.

I’m afraid the answer is that we manually changed the dimensions in the embed code. After a bit tinkering we found sizing the video player to 630×380 worked quite well — YMMV.

See Also:

• How To: Watch YouTube Movies in Full 720p HD Glory
• Find Your Neighbor’s Videos Online
• YouTube Commenters Hear Their Own Gibberish

HandBrake, our favorite way to convert DVDs to iPod-ready video formats, has released a major upgrade that adds support for just about any video source format, not just DVDs. The new features come courtesy of the libavcodec and libavformat libraries, which are borrowed from the ffmpeg project.

If all that sounds too geeky for you, here’s the short version: Handbrake can now convert just about any video format into something that’s ready to load on your iPod, Apple TV and other video device.

Although we would call this a major update (and the first release after a long silence from the Handbrake team), the release numbers have been only incrementally bumped — the latest version is HandBrake 0.9.3. But don’t let the version number fool you, this is a major release and ffmpeg isn’t the only news. Handbrake on Linux has also been upgraded and now has an official GTK graphical interface — there’s even available as a binary for Ubuntu. And don’t think that the new UI means just a wrapper GUI for the command line features, in fact the Linux GUI of Handbrake now has full feature parity with the Mac interface.

Of course, if you’re thinking that all this good stuff can’t come without a price, you’re right. Due to infringement concerns, the latest version of Handbrake no longer has built-in DVD decryption. The code that handles the decryption circumvents the copy protection present on commercial discs, and therefore violates copyright laws like the DMCA. We’d argue that copying a movie you own from a DVD to your iPod or iPhone falls within the bounds of fair use, but current laws state otherwise.

However, before you freak out, bear in mind that all you need to do to get it back is install VLC, which still ships with the libdvdread library which handles the dirty work of decoding.

As Handbrake project administrator jbrjake explains in the app’s user forum, “HandBrake being libdvdcss-free is something that a developer asked for over a year ago, because it made him feel uncomfortable openly contributing to the project. At the time I promised him we would try to get rid of it, and while it took quite awhile, dynaflash found a way to do it on the Mac side that I feel works very well and doesn’t make the process any more difficult in regular usage.”

He adds that since the project is open source, anyone can still build the functionality into Handbrake. The decryption code will download from VLC’s servers rather than Handbrake’s.

“Basically, we’re wiping our hands of storing and providing the decryption code ourselves. It won’t be in HandBrake’s binaries and it won’t be on HandBrake’s servers,” he writes.

The latest version of Handbrake is, of course, a free download. For more details on what’s new and changed, check out the Handbrake announcement or look through the release notes in Trac.

Frankly, we were getting worried the Handbrake project had gone dormant, so the new version is welcome, not only for the added features, but just to assure us that our favorite video converter is indeed still alive and kicking.

See Also:

• HandBrake Update Makes DVD To IPod/IPhone/AppleTV A Snap
• Use Handbrake To Put DVDs On Your IPhone

Opera has released an update for Opera Mini, the company’s lightweight mobile browser that will work with Google’s Android mobile operating system. Opera Mini 4.2 is the first alternative browser available for Android.

The latest version of Opera Mini, now at 4.2, should be much faster than its predecessor which is good news for users with underpowered mobile devices. Opera Mini doesn’t serve up raw web pages, rather it proxies them through Opera’s servers, slimming them down before sending them on to the browser.

Part of the speed boost in the latest release comes from Opera’s new U.S.-based server park, which means much faster load times for users in the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region.

Opera Mini 4.2 also improves video streaming and offers customizable skins to make Mini fit with your phone’s design.

The newest version of Opera Mini is available for the same set of Java-based phones as previous versions, but this release also adds experimental support for Google’s Android OS on T-Mobile’s G1 phone.

Opera Mini’s use of a proxy server to compress web pages makes it the perfect browsing tool for those stuck on older phones. Opera Mobile, the next step up, is a much more robust browser and offers an experience closer to desktop counterparts or the iPhone’s Mobile Safari browser. In the case of Android, the beefier Opera Mobile browser seems like a better option.

We have no doubt that Opera is working on a version of Mobile for Android, but for the time being, Opera fans will have to make do with Mini on their Android phones.

See Also:

• Opera Mini Skips iPhone, Citing Apple’s History of Rejecting Competitors
• Opera Mini 4.1 Beta Released
• Opera Mini 4 Beta Released

Yet another example proving the coolest things always come from Japan.

Lunascape is a web browser that incorporates all three major web rendering engines — Firefox’s Gecko engine, WebKit, which is used by Safari and Chrome, and Trident, the engine used by Internet Explorer.

The Windows-only download is the product of the Tokyo firm Lunascape, which has apparently been developing this product as Japanese-only release since 2004. This is the first English version of the browser, and it’s available as a free alpha download.

I ran it through some basic tests, and it’s stable. You can switch between the three rendering engines by right-clicking on the current tab under the menu bar. The option to select an engine appears in drop-down menu. There’s also an auto-engine switcher that forces specific pages to use one particular engine.

Most of us use several web browsers in testing our websites or even for just browsing around. Personally, I use Camino for all of my productivity apps (Gmail, Google apps and FriendFeed) and Firefox 3 for general browsing, but I also have to keep Safari open to use CondeNet’s intranet. Almost everyone has one critical site on their list that only lets you in if you have IE or Safari/Chrome, so Lunascape is an attractive alternative to running multiple instances of different browsers.

That being said, Lunascape is a total beast. It’s cluttered and difficult to use, especially if you’re used to the expertly-designed interfaces of IE or Firefox, or the barely-there UI of Safari or Chrome. There’s RSS support, but reading feeds is clumsy. There are almost too many options, including dozens of tweaks and interesting functionality available in the default menus, like the ability to download all linked media on a page to your hard drive at once, DownThemAll-style.

Speaking of DownThemAll, Lunascape sadly does not support Firefox add-ons even though the website advertises that it does. (If there’s some way to lash Firefox add-ons onto this, please let me know in the comments!)

The browser does have its own plug-in architecture, however, and it can be customized with a healthy assortment of downloadable skins. So, not only can you run Safari, Firefox and IE all in one browser, you can also do it in vibrant, pink Hello Kitty style.

Also check out the Lunapedia, an online user manual full of tips, links and FAQs.

What’s cooler than Google Maps? Tools built on top of it. Developers from the Netherlands have released some helpful libraries to make more usable, interactive Google Maps.

Google hosts an open source utility library with several useful examples. Among them, a drag-to-zoom feature and a way to create dynamic labeled markers.

A progress bar is among the new additions to the libraries. When adding more than just a few markers, it can take some time. Rather than make your users sit through the slow-down, this library shows the progress via a popup status bar that fills as it completes.

The other new library, SnapToRoute, allows developers to restrict some actions to just along a polyline. The example included shows zooming along a specific route.

I love these sorts of libraries that make creating advanced maps easy. Of course, I’d love to see platform-independent examples, so developers of any map API could benefit. These libraries would be great to see as a part of Mapstraction, the multi-map I covered in a tutorial.

See also:

• OpenStreetMap: Free, Editable Map of the World
• Take Your Geo-Mashups Beyond Google Maps
• Pipes Mashup Turns Google Maps into a Blogging Tool

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make Twitter better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster.”

That’s the speech I imagine Niall Kennedy giving himself recently when he decided to rewrite Twitter’s front end using web best practices. The result is a read only Twitter that’s a little less pretty, but a whole lot more streamlined.

To start, Kennedy converted Twitter’s table layout to XHTML/CSS-based design. He also split the page load so that all those little avatar graphics are loaded asynchronously, which makes pages appear faster.

One of the larger undertakings was localizing (or is it localising?) the site. Kennedy had to choose common wording throughout the site and ensure nothing that would ever need translating was hard-coded.

Kennedy claims a 41% decrease in bandwidth and a much faster DOM footprint. It’s a geeky way of saying that TwitterFE is an improved Twitter.

Of course, the front end has never been Twitter’s biggest problem. It’s the back-end, with thousands of messages a second, that prompts the Fail Whale. In all, TwitterFE reminds of redesigning Craigslist. It seems like a great idea, but it ends up being a solution searching for a problem.

But as a case study, TwitterFE is extremely useful. Perhaps Kennedy will release his source code, which runs on Google App Engine, and we can all learn from his experience.

See also:

• Twitter Asks for Scalability Help From Community
• Twitter’s Evan Williams: Create Something New By Taking Things Away
• Simple Solutions to Help You Avoid the Google Fail Whale

An iPhone clickjacking attack was fixed with last week’s release of the 2.2 software. Prior versions contained a CSS transforms bug that caused iframe content to appear as part of the actual page.

It looks like the bug never saw malicious use in the wild, because the developers who noticed it alerted Apple and kept the bug secret while it was fixed. Like other clickjacking attacks, the most likely use is to get a user to inadvertently click an ad. Although, an even more dangerous example is shown to harvest passwords.

If the StreetView and Maps additions in the latest iPhone software wasn’t enough to get you to download the free update, let this attack be reason enough.

Though the bug was apparently discovered by developer Wayne Pan, it was submitted by jQuery creator John Resig. Resig just keeps showing up for his various work. In addition to jQuery, he’s on the Firebug team at Mozilla, performance testing browsers and creating JavaScript animations.

See also:

• A Look at the ‘Clickjacking’ Web Attack and Why You Should Worry
• Hackers Are Watching You: Flash Clickjacking Vulnerability Exposes Webcams and Mics
• Flash Player 10 Solves Some, but not all ‘Clickjacking’ Attacks

Do you have an idea for an iPhone app? Yeah, me too. And so does the barista at my local coffee shop. Ideas for iPhone apps are as ubiquitous as screenplays in LA. The idea alone isn’t worth anything, according to iPhone consultant Raven Zachary.

There are several factors conspiring against your iPhone idea:

1. There are still few people who know how to create iPhone applications
2. There are plenty of iPhone ideas from people who are willing to pay
3. The App Store is lucrative enough for developers to create their own apps

I could probably add “you don’t know Objective-C” to that list, because if you did, you’d already be writing iPhone apps. Apple’s NDA, now lifted, handcuffed many developers eager to share their knowledge, so thorough iPhone how-tos are still hard to come by. Plus, see #3 on the above list. If you know how to create iPhone apps, you’re probably too busy doing just that.

Like Zachary, I love hearing ideas. Some iPhone ideas may be based on wanting to join the gold rush at the App Store, but I’d guess most are rooted in passion. It’s a terrible thing, dousing the fire of your iPhone excitement. But it’s not just the iPhone: all ideas are essentially worthless, as some commenters mentioned in reactions to Zachary’s post.

Ideas have always been a multiplier of execution. That was the case in 2005 when everybody had great ideas for a lucrative mashup and it’s the case now with the iPhone. The difference is that now it’s even harder to execute.

See also:

• 
  Make Your Site An iPhone App
• Hack Up Some Web Apps at iPhone Dev Camp
• iPhone App Store Exclusivity Is a Big Drawback

The web has all sorts of data, but it’s sorely missing yours. If you request an account from Daytum, you can change that.

The site lets its users collect data about themselves and share it via beautiful charts. Track your coffee consumption, how often you exercise, or anything else that matters to you.

One of the site’s creators, Nicholas Felton creates a personal annual report each year that shows his year in data. Through gorgeous visualizations, Felton shows off the mundane. And now you can, too.

Felton gave a talk about the history of Daytum at the Future of Web Design. His slides are embedded below:

Using the site is super easy. You can drop in, add some data, and drop out. There’s also a Twitter submission system, for adding your data on the go.

The site is so simple, yet has a number of options for users. There’s lots of room for improvement, such as an API to allow some automated inclusion of data. Overall, this is a fun, easy-to-use site that’s worth checking out.

See also:

• Google Data Visualization Opens a New Web
• Google Trends Takes on the Flu
• Google Spruces up Spreadsheets
• Mint’s New Investment Graphs Showcase Personal Recessions

Passwords are a little bit more secure now that Google added OAuth support to its iGoogle Gadgets. Developers can now use their gadgets to easily grab data from OAuth-enabled APIs. Using OAuth, users do not have to give their passwords to developers. Instead, if a developer wants data from a service, the user enters the password into the service itself, providing the developer permission to access their data.

MySpace updates, AOL Mail and Google Book Search are the first gadgets to use OAuth. Finding the MySpace gadget via the iGoogle search is difficult, as there are pages of results by non-MySpace developers. Some of these ask for your password in an insecure manner, without OAuth. If you have a MySpace account, try adding the official MySpace gadget.

Adding the MySpace gadget gives a good idea of the user experience provided by the OAuth process. Rather than username/password fields within the iGoogle box, there’s a sign in button. Click it, and an OAuth page pops up providing a MySpace login page. Once you’ve signed in, the popup disappears and the gadget is populated with your MySpace data: updates, status, bulletins, and inbox.

Behind the scenes there is an exchange of keys that ensures the gadget maker really does have your permission to access the data. Those keys are permanent, so the sign in process is a one time deal for each OAuth gadget, not something you’ll have to do every time you visit your iGoogle page. For an example of how OAuth works, check out my FireEagle tutorial.

The update to gadgets is world’s beyond password-sharing, but there should still be phishing worries. Emulating the popup process would be easy and there’s nothing to signify that the page I’m seeing really is MySpace. Luckily, that’s the same problem that many are already trying to fix. A solution to the problem for banking sites, for example, will probably be the same solution for OAuth.

[Photo by Eran Sandler]

See also:

• New Foundation Wants to Bridge the Gaps Between Open Web Tools
• Thanks to OpenID and OAuth, the Open Social Web is Beginning to Emerge
• Say Goodbye to Comment Spoofing: OpenID Goes Live on Blogger

Six Apart, makers of blogging platforms Movable Type and Typepad, have announced a new distributed blog comment system that offers a very simple way of integrating comments into any page.

Similar to services from Disqus and WordPress, the new TypePad Connect allows you embed comments in any page using JavaScript. Any user with a TypePad Connect profile can then comment on your page and you get a comment management dashboard that offers spam control, moderation and customization options.

Naturally any of your visitors that don’t have a Typepad account can still comment anonymously or use their own OpenID credentials to leave a comment. Other nice touches include the ability to post replies by e-mail and threaded comments (although the threading is only one level deep).

There are some custom code snippets available that make embedding Typepad comments in WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, Tumblr and other platforms, a simple cut-and-paste affair. Not using one of those systems? Not to worry, there’s generic JavaScript code that works on any site.

For those commenters that choose to use a TypePad account there’s also a new profile page, which will be linked back to via each commenter’s photo avatar.

If you’re thinking that sounds a lot like Disqus you’re right. TypePad Connect offers many of the exact same features found in Disqus and similar distributed comments systems. In September, rival blog software maker WordPress acquired IntenseDebate, a platform for distributed comments complete with profiles, custom feeds and many features similar to Disqus and TypePad Connect. IntenseDebate will be rolled into the next version of WordPress, due soon, and is now available as a beta plug-in for WordPress users.

So which is better? In my limited testing I liked TypePad Connect and customizing the CSS to fit your site’s look and feel is easier than it is with Disqus. But Disqus offers some nice features like true WordPress integration (the ability to store posted comments in your WordPress database) and a very slick API for pulling out data and storing elsewhere.

In the end, if you’re already using Disqus or other services like WordPress’ new Intense Debate comment system, TypePad Connect probably won’t lure you away. But if you’ve never used either, give them both a look — both are very capable systems and offer some nice features that go far above and beyond what most blogging software offers out of the box.

Also be sure to check out the video on the new TypePad Connect site, which and shows the new commenting features in action.

See Also:

• Intense Debate’s Return Brings Better Comments to WordPress
• Disqus Poised to Rule the World of Blog Comments
• Six Apart’s ‘Blog It’ Turns Facebook Into a Fire Hose

Six Apart, makers of blogging platforms Movable Type and Typepad, have announced a new distributed blog comment system that offers a very simple way of integrating comments into any page.

Similar to services from Disqus, the new TypePad Connect allows you embed comments in any page using JavaScript. Any user with a TypePad Connect profile can then comment on your page and you get a comment management dashboard that offers spam control, moderation and customization options.

Naturally any of your visitors that don’t have a Typepad account can still comment anonymously or use their own OpenID credentials to leave a comment. Other nice touches include the ability to post replies by e-mail and threaded comments (although the threading is only one level deep).

There are some custom code snippets available that make embedding Typepad comments in WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, Tumblr and other platforms, a simple cut-and-paste affair. Not using one of those systems? Not to worry, there’s generic JavaScript code that works on any site.

For those commenters that choose to use a TypePad account there’s also a new profile page, which will be linked back to via each commenter’s photo avatar.

If you’re thinking that sounds a lot like Disqus you’re right. TypePad Connect offers many of the exact same features found in Disqus and similar distributed comments systems.

So which is better? In my limited testing I liked TypePad Connect and customizing the CSS to fit your site’s look and feel is easier than it is with Disqus. But Disqus offers some nice features like true WordPress integration (the ability to store posted comments in your WordPress database) and a very slick API for pulling out data and storing elsewhere.

In the end, if you’re already using Disqus or other services like WordPress’ new Intense Debate comment system, TypePad Connect probably won’t lure you away. But if you’ve never used either, give them both a look — both are very capable systems and offer some nice features that go far above and beyond what most blogging software offers out of the box.

Also be sure to check out the video on the new TypePad Connect site, which and shows the new commenting features in action.

See Also:

• Intense Debate’s Return Brings Better Comments to WordPress
• Disqus Poised to Rule the World of Blog Comments
• Six Apart’s ‘Blog It’ Turns Facebook Into a Fire Hose