Public APIs are everywhere. Google has its search, maps and GoogleBase APIs, Yahoo has its own series of APIs from Yahoo! Maps to Financial Data, to photos, let’s not forget Flickr, BlinkSale and Basecamp. Read more »

I’m currently amidst a blog redesign. I upgraded to the latest Wordpress release, and figured I’d refresh the theme while I was at it. I’ll be starting to use asides as well as finishing up the work section with a shiney new Yahoo! UI carousel component.

I wasn’t really surprised to note that earlier this week Michael Cowpland’s company ZIM announced they would be partnering with the Chinese company PPLive. With earnings down, and ZIMs SMS sales on the decline (a visit to their bulk SMS site mentioned that “We regret to inform you that www.zimsms.com is no longer available.
All unused credits must be used by September 30, 2006. Kindly
note that if you fail to use your credits, no refund will be issued.” It seems like another bandwagon they could try and scramble onto, much like his forray into Linux with Corel Linux when Linux was the talk of the town, an Office Suite - Corel Office, purchased from Novell, and his later jump to ZIM with SMS.

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I opened OttawaBusinessJournal.com this morning for my morning read, and to my surprise, one of their featured (read: sponsored) articles was about having a website that represents your company and not going with a couple cookie cutter templates. Usually these ads are almost entirely dominated by HR firms, law firms and the odd workforce.com article, so I thought I’d take a look. The article was fine, but  in clicking over to the author’s company website, I shuddered.

It was all images and image maps.

{I’ll give you a few seconds to recover.}

I realize that it’s a new company started by a couple of Algonquin graduates, but come on now. Image maps? Tables? There’s no CSS in sight.

OttawaBusinessJournal.com has a pretty big readership from my understanding. I just hope that not too many companies sign on with these guys to find out they have absolutely no keyword density and no accessibility, and they can forget about showing up in search engines.

The makers of my favourite javascript library moo.ajax, and moo.fx have released their own modular library that brings moo.fx and moo.ajax together called Mootools. It takes the good bits from Prototype, JQuery and moo and packs into a tiny package. What’s really cool is their dynamic downloader that will generate a custom build and even compress it for you. Documentation and demos are slim at this point, so it looks like I’ll be diving in to take a look.