OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. Built from standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps with OpenSocial that access a social network’s friends and update feeds. By using a common API, developers can extend the reach of their applications more quickly, yielding more functionality for users.

About OpenSocial
OpenSocial addresses an emerging problem for developers who are eagerly building applications people can enjoy with their friends: before OpenSocial, if a developer built a “favorite photos” application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site. OpenSocial tackles this problem at its technology roots, providing common “plumbing” that lets social applications run on many different websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the websites.

The result is a vast distribution platform for social applications, whether they are for sharing photos or playing games or arranging real-world meetings or any number of other activities - everything is more fun, interesting, and useful when users can involve their friends and contacts.

Thanks to the Shindig reference implementation, most websites can have a proof of concept of OpenSocial applications up and running in days. That means websites need only to make this small time investment in order to make thousands of new social features available to their users.

Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, XING, and others. In time, OpenSocial will unlock more powerful and pervasive social capabilities across the entire web, as developers’ applications can easily reach users across any of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use.

This sounds way too interesting.

Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional is the brand new book about this fabulous framework. Finally a great addition to the not-so user friendly documentation.

The author says:

After poring over the online documentation, I realized there wasn’t much by way of an introduction to Cake. Most of the available resources require some sort of prior knowledge of web development to get a grasp on how to install and work in Cake. If you’re like me, you probably just want a handful of tutorials with code samples from square one that can get you up and running quickly and lead you in the right direction for more advanced techniques.

Furthermore, when asking a question on forums or chat rooms, many newbies get little help from the experts. Simple questions can get a response like, “Well, just read the online manual and API.” Sometimes we newbies need a very simple approach to the software, and this guide will do just that. We’ll start with installing Cake on a server and a localhost, what it all means, and provide some detailed code samples and visual snapshots to walk you through. By the end of the book, you ought to have a solid-enough foundation to give other advanced features a try on your own.

This manual is really welcome and I’m looking forward to get a copy of it. You can grab a couple of sample chapters at the author’s site.


// Permanent redirection
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.flipthedolphin.com/");
exit();
?>

I just copied and pasted the above lines of code inside an empty file and renamed it to index.php, then putting it inside my /wordpress/ folder made the trick: no more 404 errors if someone visit www.flipthedolphin.com/wordpress/.

I found an interesting way to make redirects in ASP/VBscript, Javascript, ColdFusion and so on. Interesting stuff if you’re receiving many 404 from visitors that did not update their bookmarks (or if you’re losing readers because you changed the wordpress/feeds folder). Here it is: Permanent Redirect with HTTP 301.