Some people asked me at @media about detailed content of my upcoming book. So without further ado, here is the table of contents with page numbers: (more…)

It is great if a company offers their data to developers to use on their own sites. It is even better when it is pretty painless to embed this data into your own products. Nearly all of the Yahoo! services also offer a REST API to use results of searches in your own web sites - the difference to a lot of other services is that you could also have the data in JSON format rather than XML.

What this means? You don’t really need any Ajax trickery to use the data, a simple SCRIPT tag is enough.

Find out more about Embedded Dynamic Web Search Forms with JSON

This will probably be a first in a series of tips and tricks with the Y! APIs.

You’ve read enough of my stuff, now it is time to see and hear me talk (if you are able to do both). This means not only will you be able to listen to some stuff I have to say, no, you can even ask questions and shout at me without risking comment moderation.

Stuart Colville of Muffinresearch has organised the first Web Standards Group London Meetup and I was asked to give a presentation on “something about modern JavaScript”. He also asked Andy Budd to talk about “something about CSS and web standards”.

Hence I pondered and came up with the idea to hold a concept/idea/tips and tricks session about “Maintainable JavaScript”. This means I’ll talk about how to create JavaScript that will not come back to you for maintenance but make it easy for colleagues, clients and other third parties to change the look and feel and even the content of your scripting solutions.

In any case, it’ll be an interesting evening and there’ll be book giveaways (with mine being released 3 days after the event) and drinks to make you forget what Andy and me talked about. So go to the site, sign up and I’ll see you on the 14th of July in London’s beautiful north (I can take a bus home, or cycle!).

I just deleted my old PHP script EasyLetter from the server. EasyLetter was meant as an easy way to offer a newsletter for your web site and send out emails. It got some good recognition after once being featured on ScreenSavers, but I chose to discontinue it for several reasons:

• It is not spam safe and can easily be abused
• If you want to offer newsletters, get professionals to deal with the sending and data protection - there is just too much to keep up with
• I don’t have the time to answer problems with people’s server configurations any longer
• RSS feeds are dead easy to offer and are voluntary, not enforced data

So please don’t bother asking me for support for EasyLetter, I will not be able to answer, sorry. I might make it open source if there is interest, but I am not at all proud of it and email spam is too annoying a subject not to leave it to professionals.

I finally reached the AJAX chapter in my book and had to dabble with it for the first time (yes I know I should have done it earlier, but I work behind a proxy in the office that doesn’t let any outgoing requests through).

The first outcome is FeedNav, a RSS feed displayer: Have a look and I’d be happy about feedback here on the blog.

• Check and get FeedNav - an AJAX RSS displayer