SurfRabbit…finally! A Greasemonkey replacement for Safari & Shiira (and possibly other WebKit browsers). It allows you to “customize how pages from almost any site are displayed”.
This means with this plug-in it is now possible to hide those annoying ads on Userfriendly or completely re-style your favorite news site.

Take a look at the developers homepage to read more about SurfRabbit. I’ll definitely give it a try now 🙂

A few thoughts on how the whole Web 2.0 hype thing might interfere with search engines.

I recently looked a bit into programming AJAX functionality in PHP for a closed project for the Red Cross. I manly used it to implement an “edit-in-place” functionality, which might be know from sites like Flickr and others. In another project, which I will announce here shortly, I used JavaScript and AJAX in JSP/J2EE.

After looking into all the new possibilites that come up with AJAX I came to think a bit about how Searchengines index pages and how the semantic web might be influenced by those new technologies. If people use AJAX more and more (which I hope they do) to create less web-like user interfaces which update information dynamically, searchengines won’t be able to get a view of all the information available on a specific website.

The possible solution I came up with might be something like a mashup between robots.txt and webservices. If a web aplication could offer a webservice for search robots that spits out XML rendered content of the information available on the page (behind the scenes in the database) the searchengine could easily index it and map it’s context, available in the XML structure, to the content. Another advantage would be that the sites could determine exactly which information should be found by searchengines and which should only remain on their site.

One offspring of this concept would be that services like the UDDI could be build up, that will be searched by the search robots, thus making it very easy to promote websites in a very descriptive manner. (Remind me to start such a directory website, when the concept kicks off. So I can charge customers for being listed and make loads of money 🙂 )

I assume everybody who is interested has found out by now, that you can subscribe to Flickr RSS feeds with the new iPhoto ’06 to have them show up as what Apple calls Photocast. The bad thing about it is that several infos are lost and mainly the feed only contains the small images.

A witty macosxhints user has reacted immediately and set up a little web application to convert the Flickr feeds for subscribing in iPhoto ’06, check it out below:

Thank you 3eyes (John Evans) 🙂

edit:
thanks to Jason who pointed me in the direction of a very similar service, with a few extra features, called photocastr.