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October 19, 2005
Some Del.icio.us Ajax
One of the most exciting things happening on the Net right now is the use of a web application technique called Ajax. I'm sure that I will be touching on many Ajax applications in the future (I've certainly mentioned some in the past – Netvibes, Google.com/ig). Ajax is the latest, greatest, bastardized web term since DHTML. In a nutshell it is the pot in which we throw the following acronyms: CSS, HTML, DOM, JS (okay they call this one Javascript – but JS could catch on), and XML. Season with JSON and EBML to desired taste.
Got that? Fantastic.
The Cliffnotes version (though I will likely be flamed for this): It is like DHTML
Like most things, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is our first example: del.icio.us direc.tor. Direc.tor (is there really a .tor TLD?) is an Ajax “client-side web service broker” that basically hacks a web page without really hacking a web page. These “brokers” load between you and some site and add functionality. If you haven't, you'll be hearing more about these too. Even you out in the land of Time magazine's technology section.
Direc.tor works as effortlessly as del.icio.us. You simply bookmark a javascript-enhanced link and click on it once you have signed into del.icio.us the old-fashioned way. My first impression is that it basically turns del.icio.us into an iTunes interface, so if you like navigating through iTunes then you'll like this.
Direc.tor also allows for special search operators that can help you search through your bookmarks quickly.
My head hurts. Read more about it (direc.tor – not my head) here.
This isn't really an endorsement, just something you might enjoy playing around with. Personally, I rather like navigating my del.icio.us tagClouds for now. I can promise you though, that you will watch some of these applications improve sites to the point where your Amazons are going to buy up their interfaces and make some Ajaxers very rich.
Posted by Andy Mott at October 19, 2005 06:28 AM