dsingleton

Though older APIs they're still used by many older or infrequently updated clients, such as hardware devices with sold with Last.fm integration.

Unfortunately, the longer you've been around the more likely you are to develop dependencies that make it more difficult to upgrade your password hashing.

A new site can do whatever it wants with password hashing, but it becomes harder for older sites with more legacy dependencies to make that kind of change and Last.fm has been around for almost 10 years.

This isn't to say "MD5 is cool, don't worry", but to try and illustrate some of the reasons behind this.

That's not entirely accurate. While those are two of the most common cases there are plenty of other contributing factors (http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/10/how-many-..., this comment makes a good case). Errors stemming from network congestion, developer error and even CDNs failing - only a few weeks ago the google hosted version of jquery (iirc) failed leaving lots of sites with broken JS and an effective no-JS experience.

Personally I think building a site that works well without JS and then progressively enhancing it is the Right Thing to do. It means you're building a robust site for the real web and the multitude of clients and conditions that comes with. In your example I wouldn't want JS failing to prevent a checkout process, it should be robust and continue working, albeit less smoothly.

> honestly don't see the point of degrading the experience for everyone based one these two demographics

IMO If you're doing progressive enhancement well then this is not the case. I don't think the iOS/Android comparison is accurate either. The web is much more varied, the differences less well defined.

You're right, it does depend on what you're building and for who. But I don't think the general case is as binary as you've make out.

This article is mostly bullshit and certainly doesn't "help grasp what Tech City UK is all about", notably:

"which started as a government effort to rejuvenate East London" is laughably incorrect. Silicon Roundabout was a jokey term coined (by Matt Biddulph) to describe a bunch of companies working and socialising in the area. That was a few years ago, since then it's become a big PR thing for local companies (mostly co-working spaces) and now government.

Sure, there's tech growth, but an much is from pre-existing companies and people. Gov involvement has brought some attention to the area, but also a lot of sycophants and opportunists.

Another good skeptical read: gigaom.com/2011/11/11/is-london-tech-citys-phenomenal-growth-just-spin/

We see them in the pub quite a bit.

It gets harder when someone scrobbles a track by "Felt", to which artist do you attribute it? There's a whole host of problems like that to solve too.

To try and explain the apparent lack of activity; the last couple of years have had a lot of sorting-house, changes in product (moving away from on-demand, charging for some services, etc) and some technical "house keeping". Last.fm has been around for ~8 years, that is a long time and comes with a lot of technical debt, it can slow you down.

PS: One of my favourite things about Last.fm is our approach to openness of data, our API makes it totally possible for hypem (who are awesome, especially Anthony) to use your scrobbling data, even the recommendations we generate for you, on hypem.

We believe that if the data is visible on the website then there should probably be an API for it, because if there isn't, then someone will have to scrape it anyway.

Spotify is trying to be the perfect on demand music service, Last.fm isn't. It's something we tried and ended up moving away from a year or two back.

On demand music is a very difficult market to be in. There are lots of companies trying but many failing or hitting difficulties, like Spotify in the US. There are real challenges in a) being profitable and b) stay on the good side of labels.

Personally I believe that the on-demand part of music streaming is commodity and more can be easily replaced, where as scrobbling provides a richer and more personal experience. However, I do agree with parts of the article, Last.fm hasn't moved as fast as it could have, some features need adding and some improving. That's part of the plan for this year.

I'd suggest using New Base 60, which has some smart readability built in: http://tantek.pbworks.com/w/page/19402946/NewBase60

Is $167 for all Spotify Lady Gaga plays, or those plays made in Sweeden (and thus under the remit of STIM)?

As I understand music licensing Spotify would be required to pay royalties to the collection society relative to the location of the play.

Don't get me wrong, it's a nice project, but it's as annoying as constantly plugging your startups alternative to a popular service, the fact it's open-source doesn't dull that.

(I work here, and have had no indication that the TC allegations are true)

http://hackspace.org.uk

I think the reason for the popularity is a mix of work discontent and people wanting to do radically different things than their day job may offer them.

I'm not implying it's some big conspiracy, just that keeping user data private when you're (part) owned by the companies a lot of your users are scared of is _hard_.

http://dsingleton.co.uk/code/lifestream/dsingleton.co.uk

The beautiful thing is that it's entire generated from a single URL. This requires the site to have implemented the microformat rel="me" link as it uses the SocialGraph API to scrape connected URLs. All matched pages are checked for a rel="feed" style link, those are all scraped and merged together to form the timeline.

Programatic is nice, but also a huge mess. I never got around to grouping/bubbling interesting content, and it unfortunately seems that my SG data is a bit corrupt, my URL has been linked to various things that aren't me.

edit note: I only resurrected this the other day, the code is awful garbage, but it is due a refactor and release soon if someone else wants to hack on it.

This I like. It wouldn't fly for all companies, especially as you get larger (or get bought), but it's a really nice simple idea. I'd imagine it creates an awful lot of trust between the company and the users, which is always a good thing.

Those are both very easy to find pieces of information. Let me select the question myself too. By forcing me to give you answer here you're potentially making my account _less secure_.

Right now I have standard fake answers to those questions, let's hope they never cross reference those with anything else. I'm not sure how I'd convince someone my mothers maiden name is "<insert comedy name here>"

Out of curiosity, what kind of audience does your site have? Particularly tech savvy?

But there are a few heuristic methods, basically just loading an image from a blocked domain (it's a sure thing double click will be blocked), waiting, then checking the DOM to see if the element has been removed. Not fool proof, or specific to AdBlock but good enough.

I have a couple of detection demos (including flash block) here:

http://dsingleton.co.uk/code/firefox-plugin-test-suite/