Seriously guys, we love you. Okay, fine, maybe not in the way your mom loves you, or your dog loves you, or your significant other loves you. But we definitely love you in that totally uncomfortable, care-free, "Hey, let us buy you a Red Bull and Pop Rocks next time we're at the convenience store" sort of way.
We don't just love you for your looks, or your superior intelligence, or because you can totally creep out little kids with that thing you do with your left eye. We will even go so far as to say the fact that you use Linux doesn't play into it one bit.
We love you because your suggestions rock. We scour the web ourselves daily, but you know, it's a big place, and we just can't know every single bit of software or tech goodness out there. We think it's way cool when we get suggestions from readers about applications for Linux (or Windows, or Mac, or Palm...) because you aren't only cluing us in on applications we may not be familiar with, but a lot of you are avid users, and can vouch that the application you are suggesting really works for every day use.
This week, we think it's only appropriate to wrap up the editors section of our Linux web tools discussion with a couple of reader suggested gems. So a big thanks to Tim for suggesting we look at Komodo Edit and kingkool68 for pointing us towards Aptana.
An XHTML editor is a lot like a teacup dog breed or a designer pig. Okay, so they don't tremble incessantly or have the tendency to pee in the corner of your living room. They are really just highly specialized, souped-up versions of something else. Chihuahuas are pack animals, just like wolves. Potbellied pigs know instinctively how to root around for tasty things, as do wild boars. And XHTML editors edit text.
They have many tools to make editing XHTML (and other bits of code geared specifically for web use) faster and easier, but there's nothing says you need to use an XHTML editor for web coding. Text editors can do the job as well. If Kate, gedit, or Cream do the job for you, either on their own or with a few plugins, that's got you ahead of the game.
But there are some XHTML editors that manage to bundle the basic functions and a whole slew of handy extras into a nicely finished package. There are quite a few of them, and we'll be touching on more of them next week.
This week we'll take a peek at Bluefish and Quanta Plus. Why? Because they are the two most often included in Linux as the sort of "came with the distro" web development applications. Even if they aren't installed by default, many people try them first.
htmlPlayground is a helpful reference for web developers of any skill level. It provides an easy way to generate, test, and learn about HTML and CSS syntax. Simply select your reference (HTML tags, attributes, or CSS properties), and then select an item like "blockquote."
htmlPlayground will then display a description of the item (to explain what it's used for), an example code snippet that is editable, and a rendered preview of the code snippet. The snippet is color coded: green for tags, red for attributes, and black for regular text.
If you click on a green tag in the snippet, you can edit the tag's attributes easily via another pane. When you're happy with your finalized code, you can of course copy/paste it to an HTML file to use on your website.
Brad Fitzpatrick, the developer responsible for Livejournal and OpenID is up to it again. This time, he let us know on the Google Code blog, that the API for Social Graph is now available.
Social Graph is an API that functions like a Pagerank for social relationships. The idea is that when you join a new social network you don't have to manually add previous relationships because it can populate your list based on your connections from other networks, your blog, or the web.
Social Graph works by indexing sites that use the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) open standards in order to gauge relationships between people.
Schnippselchen is a source code management app that lets software developers manage multiple types of code that may need to be reused. The program has a sidebar with a "Categories" section (helpful for separating code by language) and a "Snippets" section for the actual titles of your code snippets. So you could have a PHP category with five snippets of PHP code that run your LOLcats social-network site.
Syntax highlighting is supported for many languages and code types including CSS, Perl, Python, XML, Applescript, and SQL. There is also a "Go to Line" feature and the ability to comment on your snippets (so you can remind yourself what those C functions do).
Schnippselchen can run from a thumbdrive (or iDisk) because your snippets are stored in the .app package; keep this in mind if you remove or update the program.
Google has quietly announced some new features for Analytics, its web tracking tool. They seem small, but these additional tracking features will provide much greater insight into what is going on your website since you can't always peer over visitors' shoulders to watch.
The updates include:
Site Search Tracking - Users will now be able to tell exactly what keywords visitors searched for on your site, and where these searches end up.
Event Tracking - Currently in a limited beta test, these website reports will show how users interact with various multimedia aspects on your site, including flash and Ajax without messing with pageview metrics.
Outbound link Tracking - Also in a limited beta test rolling out in the next few weeks, reports will show what links website visitors click on that direct them to an outside site.
If you have a website, and don't already have the free Google Analytics code installed, you are missing out on understanding how your visitors move around, how they interact with your content and how they got there in the first place. Google Analytics not only provides insight on how people navigate, but it also aids in targeting site content towards what people enjoy. It's easy to set up, free and Analytics reports are super simple to understand.
The Trojan which was reported to have been inserted by a third party ad server, was tracked down to RightMedia. The infected banner ad supposedly ran several million times over a three week period after it was first spotted on August 8th by a web security company before it was removed.
The ads used Flash to load an invisible iFrame which in turn would load content in from another website. RightMedia has said that it has systems in place to test and determine whether ads contain malicious code, and will flag them appropriately. Upon further investigation of the ad, code inserted was actually designed to tell the difference between RightMedia's protection systems and not display the Trojan when the company ran the testing process.
Some Google Blogger users have been stung with attacks over the past little while, causing disturbing infections. Or is it just a case of the splogs.
Malicious hackers have supposedly been successful in gaining access to some blogs and posting fake entries with weblinks that lead to infectious downloads on Windows PC's. A security researcher started noticing the corrupt links turning up in Blogger accounts on August 27th. Since then hundreds of blogs have been reported to contain the malicious links. The researcher could not tell how the links were posted. They could have been posted through a Blogger exploit, through a feature that lets users email an entry, or the blogs could have been also set up solely to host spam and no hacking could have occurred at all.
So far the links appear to pose as YouTube links, others are looking for software testers, and others are links to supposed digital greeting cards. No word from Google on the matter.
Have you ever wanted to create a nice little Web 2.0 mashup, but just didn't know where to turn to for an API that could grab the information you are looking to incorporate?
API's, application programming interface, are the source code that computer program libraries provide in order to support service requests. API's are often part of a standard software development kit, commonly referred to as an SDK. Companies that offer APIs range widely from Sony for their Playstation, Microsoft for Windows software, and more recently popularized in the online environment with Google Maps and many other online based mashups. As more and more organizations open up API's for developers to tool around with, that includes many that you visit online every single day, it gets harder and harder to keep track of what's available, and what is possible with them.
ProgrammableWeb has done a great job of supplying a comprehensive listing of all Web 2.0 API's. Anything from Google Adwords, del.icio.us, 30 boxes, Feedgator, BBC, Twitter and Zoho are listed here. All categorized and waiting for you to click and download.
Digg, your favorite social news site, ran a contest to celebrate and promote the release of the Digg API.
Entrants to the contest used both the Digg API and the Flash toolkit to create interesting works that could be viewed in flash and on the Adobe Apollo platform. Submissions ended on May 16th, and the work started for the judges who narrowed things down to the top 10.
Criteria for the final decision was based on:
Effective display of data
Usefulness
Creativity
From this point Digg users got their say. Check out the winners on the site. This is just another great example of what we get when companies open their API's for developers to tool around in.
Ever want to see MySpace crash and burn? Or, are you at least a little tired of the horrific design/coding/everything nightmare that is MySpace? A couple of hackers plan to introduce security vulnerabilities in MySpace next month, revealing one a day as part of the "Month of Bugs" tradition. However, Mondo Armando and Müstaschio, in a kind of satirical, cynical, and humorous fashion, will attempt to subvert both the popular social networking website and the "Month of Bugs" trend simultaneously. From their website, their reasons for this endeavor are as follows:
Myspace is important, in that there are a bazillion users and a kajillion dollars involved.
"Months of Bugs" are whiny, attention-seeking ploys for acceptance. Myspace's design use is to enable whiny, attention-seeking ploys for acceptance.
"Months of Bugs" are annoying, so rather than suffering through another, we figured it'd be better to just create our own where we could at least direct the content a little.
MySpace haters, hackers, coders, and everyone else in-between should look forward to this experiment. What will be the result of spreading word of the Emperor's many vulnerabilities? Only time will tell. Godspeed.
Amazon recently released its fourth quarter results, and the fact that developers joining Amazon's web services grows over 55% each year struck struck Larry Dignan. I didn't think that this many developers were into this feature as I haven't heard too much about apps that have been created. We wrote about wrote about Amazons S3 service when it launched in March 2005. The service allows developers to use Amazon's data storage and transfer capabilities for free. There are monthly fees, however, for storing and transferring data, and it can only be accessed by API's. What can you use S3 for? DLS covered S3AjaxWiki, a wiki solely existing on the S3 service. We also gave props to a Python script creator who developed a way to back up Flickr photos.
If you want to add your name to the growing list of developers, or just check out some of the other neat applications people have created with the Amazon Web Services, there are tons of tutorials, tools and code samples. If you have anything to share, or if DLS readers have hooked up with the S3 service to create something interesting, please show off your skills in the comments.
What the heck is Google Airbag? We missed it's release back in late December, but first off, it's a developer tool. The Google Code website describes it as an open-source multi-platform crash reporting system. What it basically does is identify to the developer why the program that is being developed is crashing and help them understand more quickly what, exactly, is going wrong. A lot of the time it's difficult to reproduce crashes, but with this little piece of magic, developers can basically watch their applications crash, and understand what's necessary in order to fix them.
If you want to learn more about Airbag, download the code and join in on some discussions, check out its home on the Google Code website. Airbag currently works in Mac and Windows, and will be released for Linux developers in the neat future.
Cascading Style Sheets celebrate their 10th anniversarythis week, making websites more attractive, flexible, and making for easier cross-media publishing. Good old CSS Level 1 was officially published on December 17th 1996, and even though many people chose to shun it back in the day, the majority of web designers rely on it today to make highly functional, standards-compliant web properties. In order to celebrate the occasion, the W3C is inviting developers to submit their favorite CSS designs that will be integrated into the CSS 10 Gallery. Sites that are currently on the list include CSS Zen Garden, A List Apart, and the CSS Validator. Here's to another 10 years, CSS! Now if only we can get IE straightened out and displaying you correctly.
It's not very often that you hear of a bug attack with Firefox. A new little bug popped up in the newly released Firefox 2.0. It's only the second one though, so no biggie, it is a new version, and little things like this can happen. The newest Firefox bug can cause the browser to crash if the webpage a user is visiting has been intentionally coded to target the bug via JavaScript. The initial bug in Firefox that was found also caused the browser to crash when an extremely large document loaded into an iframe. There has been no release from Mozilla stating when a fix will be in place. Firefox 2.0, and IE7 have been under the microscope since their recent launches, with bystanders waiting patiently at the sidelines wondering which new browser they should test the waters with first. Yes, that is an actual picture of what a Firefox bug looks like when code is zoomed up on at 598,005,002 X.
Seriously guys, we love you. Okay, fine, maybe not in the way your mom loves you, or your dog loves you, or your significant other loves you. But we definitely love you in that totally uncomfortable, care-free, "Hey, let us buy you a Red Bull and Pop Rocks next time we're at the convenience store" sort of way.
An XHTML editor is a lot like a teacup dog breed or a designer pig. Okay, so they don't tremble incessantly or have the tendency to pee in the corner of your living room. They are really just highly specialized, souped-up versions of something else. Chihuahuas are pack animals, just like wolves. Potbellied pigs know instinctively how to root around for tasty things, as do wild boars. And XHTML editors edit text. 
Schnippselchen
Ever want to see MySpace crash and burn? Or, are you at least a little tired of the horrific design/coding/everything nightmare that is MySpace? A couple of hackers plan to introduce security vulnerabilities in MySpace next month, revealing one a day as part of the "Month of Bugs" tradition. However, Mondo Armando and Müstaschio, in a kind of satirical, cynical, and humorous fashion, will attempt to subvert both the popular social networking website and the "Month of Bugs" trend simultaneously. From 
