Pingbacks, another federated web technology, dying

Pingbacks, another federated web technology, dying


Pingbacks are a technology from 2000′ era of blogging boom. Their role is to let publishers know when someone has linked to their articles from some other part of the web.

The idea is pretty simple – let’s have a protocol that allows content management systems to ping each other when published articles contain references to them. Then referenced systems can take that information and show it inside the article. Usually by displaying them as “look how popular my post is – here are the people who think it is cool!”.

Because it means publishing links to other people, authors are expected to manually approve those links. As you could imagine this quickly overwhelms a novice blogger. And it is unmanageable for more popular one. Especially since pingbacks are very popular SEO tactics to build links.

Big blogging platforms have many problems with pingbacks – not only is abuse by spammers confusing regular bloggers, quite some resources have to go in sending and receiving those pings. I was not surprised to read in January that Typepad is killing the pingback functionality. And I won’t be very surprised if WordPress and Blogger would follow suit.


A Spider’s Web by D. S.

So, another perfectly good idea is dying because of abuse, lack of innovation and primarily lack of interest. It seems that no one really has vested interest in fixing this technology. Naturally Facebook and Twitter have never really used pingbacks either. The players are more interested in building walled gardens where the information can be more easily controlled and aggregated, on top of that they can then provide better user experience and capture revenue. Along with RSS and Google Reader, pingbacks are another 2000′ era technology that is dying.

What is curious is that RSS and pingbacks  were invented to federate the publishing – to enable lots of small, independently run publishing sites. Is there something inherent in federated publishing technologies that makes them unsustainable? Similarly federated authentication and identification haven’t seen much of uptake.

The internet was built on federated, distributed services – web and e-mail being the most prominent ones. But taking a deeper look today we can see that behind the scenes de-federation is happening. Web serving is increasingly becoming the domain of the big guys – Google, Amazon, Facebook and you can add Heroku and some other big hosts. At the same time handling e-mail has become so complicated and costly that it’s not really a federated service any more. Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail are dominating the space and cloud is eating even into the enterprise Exchange installations.

Demise of RSS and pingbacks should therefore make us question what is the future of the web we want!

[Technically there are three different technologies - refback, pingback and trackback that serve the same function. For the purpose of this article I called them all pingbacks.]

WEB TECHNOLOGY FOCUS GROUP MEETINGS

WEB TECHNOLOGY FOCUS GROUP MEETINGS



What?   The City of Hamilton is hosting two Focus Group Meetings to gather feedback from those who may have an interest related to the selection of web technology for the City’s new website.

Why?    This is your chance to give feedback and share your ideas about how the choice of the City’s web technology could enable future innovation and collaboration.

Who?    Interested citizens, local technology developers and community stakeholders who understand how the adoption of new web technology can enable innovation and benefit citizens.

When?  Monday, April 29th – 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. or 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

While the focus group meetings are open any interested citizens, the afternoon session will be tailored to the Business/Education sectors and the evening session will be tailored to broader input from citizens and community members. The City’s consultant on the Web Technology Assessment will be facilitating the discussion, with support from City staff.

Where? City Hall – 71 Main Street West, 1st floor, Boardroom 193



To RSVP, or to ask questions, please contact:

Jennifer DiDomenico

City of Hamilton

Tel.: 905.546.2424 ext. 5596

How to Carbon-Date a Web Page

How to Carbon-Date a Web Page
If a Web page lacks a time stamp, how do you know when it was created? A new Web application could help.


Ever needed to know the age of a Web page only to discover that it lacks a time stamp saying when it was published?

If so, then the work of Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, may be of interest. These guys have created a Web application called Carbon Date that works out the creation date of a page by searching for the earliest evidence of its existence.

The process is straightforward. Many Web pages end up being recorded in various ways soon after they are created. For example, it’s easy to check Bitly to see the first time that anybody shortened the URL in question, or to use Topsy to check the first date that anybody tweeted the URL. Then there is Memento, which reveals the first time the URL was recorded on a Web archive. Google can also reveal the first time the page was indexed, and even the last-modified HTTP response header of the page itself shows when it was last changed.

Each of these is straightforward to check by itself, but checking them all to find the earliest date is time-consuming.  Carbon Date automates the process.

SalahEldeen and Nelson say their new tool works reasonably well.  They tested it on a set of 1200 Web pages for which the creation date was already known. “We were able to estimate a creation date for 75.90 percent of the resources, with 32.78 percent having the correct value,” they say.

That’s not quite as accurate as a researcher or journalist might like, but it’s a start. If you wanto to test it yourself, SalahEldeen and Nelson say they’ve made Carbon Date available at http://cd.cs.odu.edu/cd/. (However, at the time of writing it did not appear to be working.)

Update 23 April:  link updated and now working. See comment below. The service gives the estimated date of creation of www.technologyreview.com as October 2001. The historians at Tech Review tell me they first started using the domain in February 2001, so that’s not far off.

SECURE FILE SYNC BETWEEN COMPUTERS USING P2P TECHNOLOGY

BitTorrent Sync, a free to use (but not open source) tool that can be used to automatically synchronize files between computers using the BitTorrent protocol, is now available for all as public alpha. The application runs on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and NAS.

The tool, which has been in closed alpha for the past four months, is advertised as "a simple tool that applies p2p protocol for direct live folder sync with maximum security, network speed and storage capacity".

And indeed, BitTorrent Sync is a great way of syncing and sharing files between computers, even files that you usually wouldn't trust with cloud sync tools such as Dropbox: besides the files being transferred directly between the users (so your files don't end up on some cloud server), the connection is encrypted with a AES cypher and a 256-bit key created on the base of your Secret, a random 20 byte or more string. For increased security, there's also an option to generate a Secret that expires after a day.

Basically, this peer-to-peer (p2p) sync tool can be compared with cloud sync services such as Dropbox or Ubuntu One, but no server is involved which also means that the sync can be faster than such services and there are no space restrictions (except your HDD). This also means the computers need to be online for the sync to work, obviously.

How to use BitTorrent Sync on Linux

Arch Linux users can install BitTorrent Sync via AUR. 

To use BitTorrent Sync (or "BtSync") on Linux, download and extract the binary for your architecture (Ubuntu users: use the "Linux i386" or "Linux x64" links on the left; don't download the "glib 2.3" binaries), extract it and to run it, simply type the following in a terminal (assuming you've extracted the "btsync" binary in your home folder):

cd
./btsync

To see a list of available options, type:

./btsync --help

And if you want to stop BitTorrent Sync, use:

killall btsync

BitTorrent Sync doesn't come with a GUI for Linux, but it can be configured through a web interface so once you've started BtSync like we've explained above, open a web browser and enter the following URL: http://localhost:8888/gui/

Now let's add a folder to sync. To do this, click "Add folder", then browse for a folder you want to sync and also click "Generate" to generate a Secret for this folder. Then click "Add" to add the folder:

If you want to connect to other devices / synchronize a folder from a remote computer on your machine, follow the same steps as above, but instead of clicking "Generate" for the Secret, paste the Secret generated for the folder from the remote computer.

On Linux, most of the settings aren't available in the web interface. Instead, you can run:

./btsync --dump-sample-config > sync.conf

Which will create a new "sync.conf" file with a sample configuration file. Modify the settings in this file to suit your needs and then run BtSync using the following command (which will make BtSync use the newly created configuration file):

./btsync --config sync.conf

For more on how to use BitTorrent Sync on Linux but also on Windows and Mac OS X, see the User Guide PDF file.

Download BitTorrent Sync for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and NAS.

ASP.NET Web API: CORS support and Attribute Based Routing Improvements

ASP.NET Web API: CORS support and Attribute Based Routing Improvements

seen a huge adoption of ASP.NET Web API since its initial release.  In February we shipped the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 Update – which added a number of additional enhancements to both Web API and the other components of ASP.NET. 

The ASP.NET Team has been hard at work on developing the next set of features (lots of cool stuff coming).  One of the great things about this work has been how the team has used theopen source development process – which we announced we were adopting last spring - to collaborate even more closely with the community to both validate the features early, as well as enable developers in the community to directly contribute to the development of them.

Below are some updates on two of the great features coming to ASP.NET Web API – which were developed and contributed by ASP.NET MVP Brock Allen and Tim McCall (ofattributerouting.net fame):

CORS support for ASP.NET Web API

Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a W3C standard that allows web pages to make AJAX requests to a different domain. This standard relaxes the same-origin policy implemented in web browsers that restricts calls to the domain of the resource that makes the call. The CORS specification defines how the browser and server interact to make cross-origin calls.

The following image shows the ASP.NET Web API Test Tool (running on http://xyz123.azurewebsites.net/) making a cross domain call to the Contoso domain. When you click Send, a cross-origin request is made. Because the Contoso site is not configured to support CORS, an error dialog is displayed.

The CORS error appears on the Console tab of the IE F12 tools.

For security reasons, the web browser doesn’t allow calls from the azurewebsites domain to the Contoso domain. With the new ASP.NET Web API CORS framework, Contoso.com can be configured to send the correct CORS headers so the browser will accept cross-origin calls.

MVP Brock Allen contributed his CORS source to the ASP.NET Webstack repository. Brock worked with Yao Huang Lin (a developer on the ASP.NET team), to refine and iterate the design and then to get it pulled into the Webstack repository. Brock Allen, Dan Roth, and Yao discuss Brock’s CORS contribution in this Channel 9 video.

The CORS support for ASP.NET Web API page shows how to get started with this new feature.

Attribute-Based Routing in ASP.NET Web API

We recently published in the ASP.NET Web API roadmap our intention to support attribute- based routing in ASP.NET Web API. Route attributes bring the URL definition closer to the code that runs for that particular URL, making it easier to understand which URL must be called for a particular block of code and simplifying many common routing scenarios.

For example, let’s say you want to define a Web API that has the standard set of HTTP actions (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and so on) but you also want to have an additional custom action, such as Approve. Instead of adding another route to the global route table for the Approve action, you can instead just attribute the action directly:

    public class OrdersController : ApiController

    {

        public IEnumerable<Order> GetOrders() {…}

        public Order GetOrder(int id) {…}

        public Order Post(Order order) {…}

        [HttpPost("orders/{id}/approve")]

        public Order Approve(int id) {…}

    }

An extended route template syntax makes it simple to specify default values and constraints for route values. For example, you can now easily create two actions that are called based on parameter type. In the following People controller, the id parameter of the GetByID action takes only int values. The GetByName action method contains a default name of “Nick”.

    public class PeopleController : ApiController

    {

        [HttpGet("{name=Nick}")]

        public string GetByName(string name) {…}

        [HttpGet("{id:int}")]

        public string GetById(int id) {…}

    }

You can also define common route prefixes for your web APIs. For example, you can use route prefixes to set up a resource hierarchy:

    [RoutePrefix("movies")]

    [RoutePrefix("actors/{actorId}/movies")]

    [RoutePrefix("directors/{directorId}/movies")]

    public class MoviesController : ApiController

    {

        public IEnumerable<Movie> GetMovies() {…}

        public IEnumerable<Movie> GetMoviesByActor(int actorId) {…}

        public IEnumerable<Movie> GetMoviesByDirector(int directorId) {…}

    }

Or, you can use route prefixes to handle multiple versions of your web API:

    [RoutePrefix("api/v1/customers")]

    public class CustomersV1Controller : ApiController {…}

   

    [RoutePrefix("api/v2/customers")]

    public class CustomersV2Controller : ApiController {…}

Similar to the new CORS support in ASP.NET Web API, the new support for attribute-based routing is largely a contribution from the community. We are working closely with Tim McCall of attributerouting.net fame to bring many of the features of his AttributeRouting project directly into ASP.NET Web API.

It’s really exciting to see how these collaborations across the ASP.NET Team and the community are helping to move the ASP.NET platform forward!

Hope this helps,

Scott

Web Hosting: Definition and Tips

For newbie in internet marketing world, you may need to know everything related to website stuff. One of them is web hosting. Actually, what is meant by web hosting? Web hosting is a method which helps the surfers of the web to easily browse the internet. Web hosting company usually provides its clients to help them maintain the information and bandwidth traffic of the web. As a conclusion, web hosting is the advanced technique to put the ideas and product on the World Wide Web. Talking about web hosting, we will also talk about web hosting company. Web hosting company is needed to help you in expanding the experience in the World Wide Web.

After know about the definition of web hosting, you may get inspired to find web hosting company that will help you to maintain your new website. However, you need to read several sources of web hosting reviews to convince yourself before start to find best web hosting providers. For your information, there are several types of web hosting services available nowadays depend on what kind of website you have. For complex website, usually a web hosting company will provides scripts as an automated system which rarely found on free website hosting. It is not recommended to use free website hosting, because usually it only offers limited features for its client.

You may find in web hosting reviews 2012 that most of web hosting should be easily operate especially for someone who have little experience with web hosting stuff. With user friendly hosting, it will make it possible for you to keep your website life by gaining more and more visitors. Moreover, if you don’t want to use any website hosting company, you can look for video tutorial of web hosting technique or join in online forum about technology.

Definition - What does Deep Web mean?

Definition - What does Deep Web mean?
The Deep Web refers to any Internet information or data that is inaccessible by a search engine and includes all Web pages, websites, intranets, networks and online communities that are intentionally and/or unintentionally hidden, invisible or unreachable to search engine crawlers.

The Deep Web is also known as hidden Web, Undernet, Deepnet or Invisible Web.
Techopedia explains Deep Web
Coined by Mike Bergman, the Deep Web term relates to deep sea/ocean environments that are virtually invisible and inaccessible. Technically, the Deep Web is a series of interconnected systems that are not indexed by search engines and only directly accessible by their creators or individuals with very limited privileges.

The Deep Web contains data that is dynamically produced by an application, unlinked or standalone Web pages/websites, non-HTML content and data that is privately held and classified as confidential. Some estimate the size of the Deep Web as many times greater than the visible or Surface Web.