The pulse of Alexander Interactive

There has been a lot of talk about Microformats, RDFa (Resource Description Framework – in – attributes) and Web Ontology Language (OWL). These naming conventions, although not widely used yet, present a solution that narrows down relevant search results and data correlation on websites.
As some of you may know, our favorite web pioneer has recently announced Google Search Options.

This refined view of data exploits semantic markup conventions making it easy for people to find the data they want. They also have some good documentation on structured data in their Webmasters guidelines section.
So far, it seems like the three most common implementations for rich snippets are reviews, people and products. When coding, property association for data can be added either by naming the element class or adding a property attribute. These two Firefox addons, Operator and Semantic Radar, will display this information.
Here is the recording from the webinar we attended today on the Semantic Web.

Have you ever been in the middle of a project, needed a few quick lines of code, and Google wasn’t quite helping you out?

Are you the kind of person who enjoys taking a few minutes from time to time to help out your friends with your coding prowess?

We created a new social coding utility called @codeoff just for you. Use the Twitter @codeoff account to reach out for quick programming help and/or exercise the good Samaritan in you by responding to quick requests.

We’re also hoping @codeoff awakens the competitor within the coder, as people fight to be the fastest/best in posting requests and sharing code replies.

Need some code?
1. Follow @codeoff on Twitter.
2. Tweet code you need to @codeoff:

Format:
@codeoff language requirement
Example:
@codeoff python: writer a retweeter

3. Wait for @replies

Code some code?
1. Follow @codeoff on twitter.
2. Look for code tweets.
3. Code.
4. Post your code to http://gist.github.com.
5. @reply to @codeoff, including the requester and your gist url.

Format:
@codeoff @user http://gist.github.com/gistid
Example:
@codeoff @apumapho http://gist.github.com/101263

We hope you enjoy using @codeoff.  Drop some comments and let us know your feedback.

Before I set out to write a significant amount of code, I search high and low to make sure someone else hasn’t already written it.
There are a few ways to do this:
1. Google Code Search
2. Look in your other projects for similar code.
3. Ask around (co-workers, twitter, IRC etc..).
One main reason for code reuse is that it will usually have less bugs than writing it from scratch. It is also evident that reusing code will save time. For example, why write a user authentication system when you can just download one and install it as a plugin. A few hours of research can save hundreds of hours programming. Another advantage to using pre-existing code is that it is usually more abstract and can fit a wider variety of applications. As a bonus, it usually has more features.
When you do have to write code because the problem you are solving requires more customization than anything out of the box, it is best to make sure it is reusable. For example, avoid naming your variables too specific, such as the_yellow_square_at_the_left_of_the_page, instead, create a function similar to shape('yellow', 'square', 'left'). This will allow you to reuse it for many situations. If you wanted a purple triangle on the right you would just write shape('purple', 'triangle', 'right'). It’s much easier to refactor and reuse on future projects.