Techniques Behind Modern Web
27 Oct
No, it is not due to the economic crisis storming over the world to which I’m not totally venerable. Though some projects seems being put a hold forever life is still all right because old codes still need maintenance for long time. Hmm, just write a lot of codes and you’ll survive until all enterprises die - no joke!
The positive side of a downturn is you’ll often have to reallocate time and occasionally you get more time spare for non-official tasks like study, reading, and blogging. Of course, I fall into a rare case that I have fewer projects to carry out and I’ll make use of that to resume my favorite job: talking about web.
Starting this blog since the very first day of 2008, I soon learned that blogging is not an easy job. The famous Mike Arrington of TechCrunch hardly gets 8 hours for sleeping a day and once you dedicate your time for blogging, time for relaxation or other leisure turns out so luxurious!
For about five or six months I’ve written very little, however thanks to Google, “Just Talk About Web” blog looks still alive with 300 visitors a day average. I just feel I own them a lot for not able to write more.
This blog was my first attempt to enter blogging sphere, a lot of interesting things to discover, and like many others I tried out many “promotion” methods like link building/exchange. One day I found there were so many widgets sticking on the sidebar and most of them hardly brought any clear benefit to my blog instead made it a huge mess.
Today you can see a much cleaner theme (still based on old theme nevertheless): all unnecessary widgets are removed leaving more space for contents, sidebar is almost left for ads and a big footer for internal links and index. Hope you like it and feel free to add your ideas.
Now everything appears in shape and I’m back
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8 Aug
The idea of utilizing any part of your HTML document as template to render data purely with JavaScript and CSS has been realized with Pure library.
While nothing to prevent you from using server-side template engine like Smarty, it does not help much if your application is heavily ajaxified and many parts of the app are built after the “onload” event with data pulled behind screen. For example, a list of players is to be rendered just after user selects the…
4 Aug
Finding a web hosting service was an easy job when I started blogging - just picked up a cheap shared hosting with typical CPanel to begin. But after a few months problems loomed like slow response and “99% uptime” means your sites can be off a few days without prior notice. Worse after a major upgrade I could never get my sites work properly due to DNS panic with old web hosting (I had to temporarily host all my sites to…
1 Aug
I use this online bookmaking service quite often since it started in the good old days when all internet startups were welcome warmly and had somewhat weird names like Flickr, Digg and of course the “Del.icio.us”.
Time passed, many things have been changed but the “Del.icio.us” although many of us hoped for some innovatory shift after the service was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Del.icio.us 2.0 seemed never come out especially when its father left Yahoo in frustration over a month…
27 Jul
Now you have got a great idea and start a business that is somewhat proved prosperous but you have had no funding yet, what can you do?
Surely, you can find funding around friends, relatives or to write e-mails to angle investors/venture capitalists you know they may be interested in. The common scenario then is your friends don’t share the same vision with you; investors never answer your e-mails or politely refuse in automatic replies. But you still think it’s a…
25 Jun
They are extensions of Firebug which is, as you may know, a (well-known) plugin for Firefox. In other words, they are plugins of a plugin for Firefox.
Based on best practices for high performance web sites (a research conducted by the Exceptional Performance team of Yahoo), YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow.
The plugin adds a new tab to Firebug console and do analyses on the page on opening. Though being criticized for some impractical…
20 Jun
The benefit of keeping eye on sites about online marketing is sometimes you can find out an ad system that suites your better than others like the case of MediaText ads integrated into JTAW blog currently. Previously, I’d once used the same solution provided by Kontera in this blog but I removed it here for several reasons especially due to colors of ad pop-up (though I’m still using Kontera ads in other sites).
The MediaText in-text ads attracted me initially because…
18 Jun
Over 8 million downloads! Surely it’s the world record for single software product downloaded in a day no matter if Guinness recognizes it or not.

Yes, from here I can see how the world is going crazy about the latest version of Firefox: my blog traffic peaked yesterday nearly 10 times more than usual, and most of visitors were finding the Firebug version which works with Firefox 3. Half of Twitter messages to me were about to get Firefox 3 run…
16 Jun

It’s a bit late for me to get the Website Magazine, May-2008 issue - one of the mags I recommend for bloggers, SEO experts and anyone who owns a website. In this issue, I found several interesting articles and here are brief intro and comments on them.
A Semantic Search Engine (Source: Website Magazine, May 2008 - All rights reserved)
This article begins with very evocative introduction of the word “semantic” (but I’m not quite sure that…
9 Jun
I’ve just installed Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 yesterday, unlike beta versions, it was installed over the Firefox 2. Here are some issues I came across during setup process under Windows XP SP2. Firstly, the setup process required me to restart Windows, probably to close some open files Firefox 2 was using in working session, recalling me common behavior of setups under Windows 98. Secondly, the back and forward buttons disappeared at first run and I had to reset the toolbar…