Hot on the heels of the improvements to the Profile Widgets, I’m happy to announce our first foray into javascript powered content, the AHAH Edition of the Domesday Book. Rather than loading up a bulky multi-widget Domesday Book page (which in some circumstances caused Firefox to freeze), you view one profile at a time while still having the option to browse through all of the widgets.

What is AHAH ?

Dynamic, javascript powered content seems to be all the rage with the “Web 2.0″ meme, but SLOpenID’s lead developer has never been comfortable with the approach that Ajax takes. AHAH on the other hand, is ridiculously simple- two basic functions, directly injecting HTML fragments. More information can be found on the Microformats Wiki

AHAH is a very simple technique for dynamically updating web pages using JavaScript. It involves using XMLHTTPRequest to retrieve (X)HTML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML) fragments which are then inserted directly into the web page. AHAH is intended to be a much simpler way to do web development than Ajax: “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.”

Thanks to the new search, the Profile Widgets and Domesday Book now have three major improvements:

1. Profile descriptions are now visible (and implemented with hResume)
2. secondlife app URLs have been implemented allowing the in-world profiles for Residents and groups to be launched from the profile widgets
3. SLOpenID’s photo resizing service is now discontinued as Linden Lab have enabled image assets to be viewed over the internet. Any calls to the resizing service will either be redirect to the appropriate image, or served the “Missing Image” texture with a 404 Not Found header.

The alpha release of SLOpenID had a feature to display the profiles of all SLOpenID users. In keeping with my quirky nature for naming things, this feature was called the “Domesday Book”. Since SLOpenID has moved onto MN:SL, I thought I’d bring back the feature for MN:SL. The Domesday Book uses the hCard and hResume microformats, enabling extra geeky uses when used with such Firefox extensions as Operator.

Anyone concerned about data privacy should be aware that all information displayed in the Domesday Book is publicly available via LSL, and is still in keeping with SLOpenID’s Privacy Policy.

WordPress:MU 1.3 Upgrade

All Marvulous Network sites, including SLOpenID will be upgraded to WordPress:MU 1.3 tomorrow. New sign-ups shouldn’t be affected by the upgrade, since the “less hackish” code doesn’t require any modifications to core WordPress files.

Update

Unless I missed an install (which I nearly did), all MN:SL sites are using WordPress:MU 1.3