BBC Backstage has launched, and very exciting it is too, providing content feeds for anyone to build cool stuff with. Headshift has built a rather funky ’shared tags’ tool for BBC News stories, which allows you to apply your own tags to any story, see what tags other users have applied, view other stories with similar tags, and see feeds from del.icio.us, flickr and technorati with similar tags. All done in almost-real-time through the magic of XMLHttpRequest (aka AJAX). Pretty nifty, huh? Please note that it is a prototype and as such is being improved all the time.
Check it out, dudes.
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Aardvark is a highly useful extension to the Firefox web browser (which we all use, right?), which allows you to do lots of fun things like view the divs in a page (v. handy for web designers/developers wanting to understand how a page is structured) and the source of any divs. You can also use it to delete any parts of a page you don’t want to see - for example you can remove banner ads or tidy up a page prior to printing. As an intarwebs designer I use it constantly, but regular non-geeky folks might find it handy, too.
Greasemonkey is another great Firefox extension, which allows you to add ‘user scripts’ to specific web pages. For example, you might want to try Book Burro, which shows prices for books on competing websites when you are on an amazon book page. Suh-weet! Or add persistent/saved searches to gmail…or look for related tags when uploading photos to flickr…where will the madness end?
I love all the cross-pollination of web apps, as I believe I mentioned earlier. Jon Udell has an interesting take in his article
Nobody expects the spontaneous integration.
Hm, it’s almost enough to make me want to learn to program…
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Today is the day that the clever chaps at 37signals launch Backpack, their new ‘personal information manager’ web application. If it is anywhere near as good as Basecamp, their project management tool, it will be very good indeed. Oh, and ta-da lists rock, too. Can’t wait to check it out!(You can get more of an idea about the manifesto behind Backpack in this blog post.)
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