Web development is like playing with Lego

Over the last few weeks I’ve been pimping my blog and over the course of which I realized how similar it is to playing with Lego. The basic stuff is still build from normal basic lego blocks (html and javascript) but the extra stuff is more frequently being just slapped on (think embed code snippets), like those custom lego blocks (like those hair pieces that only fit on those little mens heads).

Let me channel a bit of Schobleizer on exploring 2010 web:

Pages now built out of premade blocks. You build these pages by copying a line of Javascript code to your template. This is very simple once you see how to do it, but for someone who doesn’t know code, or where in the template to go, this is VERY daunting. Silicon Valley has NOT made it simple enough yet for the mainstream to build highly useful pages. See the friendfeed block to the right of my words? I added that by copying and pasting from the friendfeed widget page. If you know where to look a TON of cool pre-built blocks like this are available for you to put on your website or blog.

These are the custom blocks I’ve just used:

• Twitter Updates - I’m using the HTML one.
• Disqus - for comments and recent comments widget.
• AddThis - for bookmarking and sharing via facebook, twitter, email etc etc.
• Tumblr Tag Cloud
• Google Analytics

Some others, not really applicable to my blog but I’m intending to use in other sites:

• RPX - multiple OpenID login.
• Feedback - either UserVoice (free) or GetSatisfaction.
• Google Web Elements - just launched today. I’m particularly interested in the custom search element as I don’t really want to roll my own search again.

The best part about all these services, is that they play nice with almost all frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Django, ASP.NET etc etc) as they are just html and javascript with a bit of AJAX magic to inject HTML and hopefully most have been tested against all the major browsers for you.

One immediately noticeable con is that your application takes a performance hit since your web application is pulling stuff from other places. In the case of this blog, the twitter feed, does cause some loading delays, especially since it’s loaded before my posts from Tumblr. I think I got to go look into making it load last.