wow, google recently released an API for their translation services called Google language API. Thats a good news but it even gets better! The api is really easy to use and applications can be boosted within minutes. The reference can be found here

Here is a quick example of how to translate something...

and it gets better and even easier: its possible to let the API detect the language .. so nothing you have to take care about anymore.

Further reading: An introduction to the language API and translation tools.

Now its time to come up with some nice little tools, widgets which use this service. "a user selects a paragraph an your page, clicks a button and suddenly the text is translated into the desired language".

Today i had some time and have created an own google discussion group (forum) for the ajaxed project. This will make the management of problems much easier for me. At least i hope so :) It should help you guys to communicate about your solutions and issues with ajaxed. Also all issues regarding JSON in connection with ASP should go there, and all other classic ASP topics. I can track all these stuff much better then. Thanks for your help and contributions!

ajaxed & asp JSON disussion

Ever heard from Picnik? It allows you editing your images direclty within your browser. Forget Adobe Photoshop :) Picnik has been around for a while now but recently it started to offer its service for the public. for free! I played around a bit and must say that it is amazing .. Use it within PHP, classic ASP, .net, Ruby on Rails or whatever... especially i like the idea of the whole service which works like this...

1. Send your images to their service (existing image via URL or encoded as multi-part)
2. Then the user modifies the picture (size, colors, rotation, special effects...)
3. Picnik sends you the picture back to your server (either an URL where you can download it or directly as multi-part image)

Here comes an example I have built for demonstration... read more...

You know the situation when some users add a couple of whitespaces to the front or/and the end of a value they just entered into your application? Yeah, and in most cases we dont really want those blanks in our data. But on the other hand we can not really blame them because sometimes it just happens by mistake. Just imagine your cat played with the space bar while you quickly went for a coffee. The solution is not to get rid of the cat, ... Its rahter an extension. And no not to your cat - small extension to ActiveRecord read more...

I hope that this is not really real ;)

A gravatar is a globally recognized avatar, which means that your avatar is stored in one place and it will appear on several websites, blogs, forums (which support gravatars). Whenever you change your avatar it will be updated on your existing comments, forum posts, etc. It's a great service! Now if you know what a gravatar is you might want to use it in one of your classic ASP applications. This post describes how to solve this simple problem... read more...

from today we are supporting your personal avatars from gravatar.com. You will recognize them in the post comments (see this post) and in the sidebar in the recent comments. If you don't know what gravatar is, then here is a brief description:

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites.

The creation is easy .. you just signup with your email and upload your avatar. Your image then appears on your webdevbros comments and hundreds other websites you comment. The nice thing is if you change it, it will affect all your existing entries on all sites. Thats cool! Long live service oriented architecture ... Get your gravatar now and be displayed on webdevbros

Today i have found scripteka.com which is an awesome resource for prototype and scriptaculous extensions. It offers one of the best extensions around on a very clear and web2ish site. Currently they offer 88 extensions which include javascript calendars, password strength meters, reflection generators, image croppers, faders, .... Go to scripteka.com and look yourself what they offer. Its good stuff which is based on one of the best libraries out there.

When working with Ruby on Rails on a windows machine you will sometimes need the development console or the interactive ruby console (irb). Actually you need it quite often :) If you do so you'll discover that special character like the tilde (~) or the {}-brackets are not supported there. Why? I don't know but let me know if you know the reason. However, to solve this problem just create a file which has the following content:


"\M-[": "["
"\M-]": "]"
"\M-{": "{"
"\M-}": "}"
"\M-\\": "\\"
"\M-|": "|"
"\M-@": "@"
"\M-~": "~"
"\M-?": "?"


save this to e.g. c:\.inputrc and put the following to your irb.bat (which is usually located in c:\ruby\bin\) straight after the @echo off line:

SET INPUTRC=C:\.inputrc

Now you should be a more happier Rails dev.. At least i am. (I found this information at flip's blog - Thanks!)

i have updated ajaxed (classic asp ajax library) to its 0.3 version. Thanks to all contributors who helped me with their feedback. Here are the updates... read more...