Bath Local Heroes

So I read about the Tentacle Man, the Red Man, the Grey Lady and the Purple Man, and tried to find a picture of the much missed Bath Blue Man, but couldn't find one. Anyone care to share? His gimmick was to paint himself blue and stand immobile in an alcove next to the Roman … Continue reading Bath Local Heroes →

More Intermediary Patterns

Prompted by some contributions from Mark Pilgrim, I've just made another quick update to the intermediary patterns. This expands on the number of Data patterns to include Page Context Reader and External Context Reader and the Action patterns to include Restyler, Blocker, and Rearranger. Ryan Shaw is also looking at documenting his Greasemonkey script amazon2melvyl … Continue reading More Intermediary Patterns →

Patterns of Intermediation Continued

Continuing yesterdays theme and after a quick bout of structured procrastination, I give you a first working draft: Patterns of Intermediation. Little more than a shell-document, but I've included some named patterns to get the ball rolling. I'm intending to evolve the descriptions, provide examples, etc so that the patterns conform basically to the Portland … Continue reading Patterns of Intermediation Continued →

Patterns of Intermediation

Jon Udell has suggested that what we need is an architecture of intermediation. In that piece he's seems to be mostly talking about the need for toolkits that make it easy to build this kind of intermediary. I agree with Simon Willison that Greasemonkey is a pretty powerful way of doing this, especially after looking … Continue reading Patterns of Intermediation →

SPARQLing Days and a Twinkle update

Unfortunately, despite being dead keen and a sucker for a free glass of wine, I'm not going to be able to make it to the SPARQLing days in Tuscany. Like Danny I was pleased to be invited, unfortunately the timing isn't good. Maybe next time. I'm consoling myself with the prospect of drinking Triples in … Continue reading SPARQLing Days and a Twinkle update →

My First Computer

A scan of the promotional flier for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum that I carried round for months prior to my parents buying me a 48K Spectrum for Christmas. Click through to the larger image to read the marketing text. Here's some extracts: "Professional power -- personal computer price!" "Your ZX Spectrum comes with a mains … Continue reading My First Computer →

RESTful Service Descriptions

Continuing his web services experiments, Norm Walsh has apparently been defeated by the complexity of WSDL. Can't say that I blame him not giving up; the fewer moving parts is one of the reasons I like REST so much, there's less chance for APIs to get in the way. I agree with Norm that some … Continue reading RESTful Service Descriptions →

Speaking at XTech: Social Content Web Services

While the final schedule isn't up yet, I've received an email to note that one of my XTech proposals has been accepted. The paper is titled "Connecting Social Content Services using FOAF, RDF and REST", and here's the abstract I submitted: A growing number of "social content" applications such as flickr, del.icio.us, audioscrobbler, and AllConsuming … Continue reading Speaking at XTech: Social Content Web Services →

WITW Feedback

Starting here Norm Walsh is blogging the development of his "Where in the World?" (WITW) web service. The laudable goal being to explore web services architecture and design issues by actually building something, and seeking feedback along the way. Excellent stuff! Elsewhere David Megginson is prompting similar discussion by posing a number of REST design … Continue reading WITW Feedback →

Where Should XML Go?

Liam Quin has been thinking about XML 2.0 and has posted an article to Advogato titled "Where Should XML Go?". Quin is obviously trying to reach a wider community than just the hardcode XML users, noting in his diary that: Where would you go (or post) to ask people why they're not using XML? There … Continue reading Where Should XML Go? →