fiveminuteargument's posterous

Twitter, Google, and the hash-bang debacle

Since the 'new' twitter launched some 5 months ago, this is what's presented to the sorry Javascript-less user:

Twitter-noscript

Helpfully, twitter redirects to a URL informing you it's clever enough to detect that your browser cannot handle the javascript, but it's not courteous enough to give you anything more than a header and a blank page.

Anyway, the main reason behind this is that, now, everything's javascript-only, loaded via AJAX, using a bizarre URL-shredding technique invented (and hopefully soon regretted) by Google. Mike Davies eloquently explains why this is such a terrible idea with the use case of a recent complete site-outage for Lifehacker, caused by a Javascript error.

When you build your house out of such brittle material, it's gonna fall down sooner or later.

Geonames and SVG mapping

Brian Suda has created some awesome maps and documented the process.

Gb
He uses the stunningly detailed geonames dataset, and plots each place of interest onto an SVG image, using a clever colour-picking algorithm courtesy of dopplr. That algorithm simply MD5s the data and extracts the first 6 characters of the resultant hash. MD5's properties, combined with the hexadecimal value returned, make this an ideal and simple way of randomly choosing colours. The PHP is simple in the extreme:

$colour = sub-string( md5( $featureType ), 0, 6);

Brian's work, and - in particular - the geonames dataset, combine to produce a wonderful result, but this is surely only the beginning. The data includes hotels, parks, bodies of water; in all, a staggering number of 'features' are supported. I'd love to see a fully-scaling geographical representation of the entire planet with every village, aqueduct, and ATM marked on it!