Now ajax and web 2.0 is cool. So this ajax whois service wants to be web 2.0. In order to be web 2.0 it must be simple and things must be fetched asynchronously. The service is also using the captha technique – ajaxified. A service as basic as this, with only a search field, should allow the user to click “search” or “go” or whatever. Oh no. That’s not cool. Instead you have to wait for the forms to decide that you are finished typing. So stupid. If you are too slow with the captha form it is submitted anyway and then you have to start over again as the input field is cleared.

Just because something can be done doesn’t necessarily mean it is a good idea.

As a side note my wysiwyg editor, FireEditor, is coming along nicely. It’ll soon be ready for a first release. As soon as the extension api is stable. It’ll be copyrighted to my Swedish company Mesh but under a free/gratis license.

I wasn’t very happy with wither either FCKeditor or any of the alternatives as they were either bloated or badly implemented or both. To be honest I didn’t do a very thorough analysis. But as stupid as I can be at time I told myself that I could do it better. Another voice (?) instantly challenged me with the words “prove it”.

Implementing things like a good and simple extensions api, i18n and theming and still keep the total file size to a minimum is not that easy… Well it is finally starting to evolve into something really nice. I won’t release the source yet as I want the basic features to be rock solid but here is a nice little screenshot of the editor in Swedish using a Gnome theme.

FireEditor - wysiwyg editor in Firesite. The icons are made by my girlfriend for another project.

Starting this weekend I will take a couple of days off and attend the PHP Conference in Frankfurt. I really hope it will be as good as when I was there in 2003. It would be fun to know if there are more people coming down from Sweden. If you’d fancy a beer or two in the bar with a fellow Swedish just send me an email through my contact form.