In these days of Ajax and Web 2.0 Dion Almaer at Ajaxian has written an article worth thinking about. The article is mainly about the how we use terms as Ajax, claiming that every little cool effect we do with is Ajax even though we doesn't use the XMLHttpRequest object.

My blog uses a fair amount of Ajax but still, most of my Javascript code do other stuff like updating sections, placing elements, handling behaviours and edit posts.

Javascript != Ajax

So all the hype is about AJAX, an acrynom every programmer is familiar with by now. However, I use AJAJ and I think most sites using AJAX really is using AJAJ.

So what is AJAJ then? Well, basically the same as AJAX but the last J stands for JSON. JSON has proven to be most users choice since it provides less overhead than XML. Personally I send raw JSON-encoded database resultsets with AJAX(J) and use TrimPath to get rid of manual DOM-tree manipulation. For those familiar with the Smarty template system, TrimPath is very easy to get started with.

Did a simple Flickr-browser module today. It reads my public RSS-feed (Ajax of course) from Flickr and displays the thumbnails and you can move forwards and backwards in the feed.

Next I´m going to display some more information about the image and perhaps also make a grid and slideshow.

Why reinvent the wheel again, one might say? Because I can!

Seems like I'm spending more time adding quite useless features to the client-end of this blog engine instead of completing the administration GUI. But toys and Ajax-gizmos are so much more fun to do! =)

Did however set up another instance of the blog engine for a friend of mine, it was kind of an experiment to find out how portable it is. It worked out quite well, found a couple of bugs and made some new, temporary bugs, while setting it up. But head over to Jeppe to see what he is doing with it.

Wrote a new module last night.
The module is called mod_xmms and displays the current tracks being played in Xmms. However, it´s a quite custom module since it will not work unless Xmms is run from the same machine as the blog engine. It also shows the cover image from my Mp3 Archive which is my other ongoing project.

I also now load the jstemplates with Ajax and I am also able to reload the templates with Ajax after editing them. Quite handy if you ask me =)

Some time ago I was determined to make my own blog-enginge and I don't know how many times I actually started coding on something that, later, would be sent to the trashbin. I had some plans involving Ajax and Javascript-effects but nothing was good enough to save.

Then I saw Logahead and got inspired again. Logahead also uses of Ajax but in a different way than what I've planned. I wanted to use Ajax in the actual navigation of the blog, posts shoud be fetched with Ajax, comments would be posted with Ajax and such.

And here you have it, version 1.0 of what will be a fully functional blog-engine. So far all navigation works, and even though I use Ajax a lot the blog is still indexed correctly by robots and all links can be copy & pasted if you want to link to a specific page.

I'm currently implementing a XML-RPC backend for pingbacks and Blogger/B2Evolution compatible API's.

Let's edit this one aswell...