http://www.flickr.com/photos/lancerrevolution/3710832872/

My mom is looking to buy a car, so I was asked to use my  superpowers of search and to find her a few candidates online. My only instructions: it must not be too small, it must not be to slow, it must cost less than R100k, it must not be ugly, it must not be chinese, it must be reliable, it must not be too old, and it musn't rust, ever. Right.

So off I went to my familiar port of call, namely autotrader.co.za and much to my surprise there was almost nothing of interest listed on there, useless. What now?! So I do a quick Google exercise and land up on Carfind.co.za.

Yuck! What an ugly site, this is like sooo old-school-not-web-two, don't think your rounded promo boxes with shaded backgrounds will fool me buddies! But you know what? There where real cars on there, I mean lots!

So off I went and added brazillions of cars to my shortlist. I was super stoked. Now what? So I visit my shortlist and lo and behold, I find that I can contact ALL of these dealers with a single form. Brilliant! Fantastic! Killer Feature!

Now to be honest, it was not all moonshine and roses. Nope, there was a field to enter my mobile number. Oh dear. You see, I have this irrational fear when it comes to handing out my mobile number to car dealers, weird huh? Happily it seemed that it was an optional field. But wait what's this? It's refusing to post the form, so in went my "mobile number" as 000000000. Right, disaster averted.

So at this point I was pretty happy, and was even more surprised to find that not only did I get sent a useful list of contact details for all the dealers via emails, my showroom request was also stored under my profile on the site. Quite clever this site, hey?

Anyhoo, that being done I refreshed my Inbox for the swift responses I was expected .. and there where none. But 10 minutes later there where. Imagine that.

I must say that this is probably a triumph for what we do in this (web) industry, I mean its really basic, there is nothing cutting edge or amazing here, it just works. It saved me a ton of phonecalls and I have had real results.

Now why the title of this piece? You see it's now 8 hours later and there are still some dealers that have not contacted me, why? I mean here is a solid sales lead, I did all the hard work for you, why can you not respond to me in a reasonable time frame? No, 24 hours is not reasonable, in fact I have already cancelled some viewings as other guys got there quicker. I get frustrated when we build these tools for people, they spend lots of money and then they drop the ball so heavily. Your tool which you pay for is only going to help you if you use it properly!

Now on another note, car sales guys listen up, learn to craft better emails, did you forget your job is to sell? Half the respondents forgot to tell me which company they are from and did not have a standard footer. Nearly ALL did not expand details on the vehicle, why? Do you realise there is only one crappy photo on carfind?

Kudos to David Carr from Barloworld Amstrong N1 City, he sent me a great email I was very impressed. He included a nice little sales pitch with the history of the vehicles (they are ex rentals in this case) and sent me 6 hi-res images from different angles, and had a complete mail footer with his name, title and contact details as well as the name of the dealership. That's what I expected from the others.

Remember, use it or lose it!

This is what I am thinking on my day off (thank goodness for tuesday holidays = looong weekends) as I am slowly sipping a perfectly chilled chocolate stumpie. Some might crack a beer to sip on the couch, but me, I crack a Stumpie. hmmmm.

The last week or so I have been dragging the occasional Steri Stumpie to work, much to the dismay of my colleagues who tell me its not the manliest thing to be seen drinking behind your desk. I think they may just be jealous, envy is such a nasty thing. If you don't have anything good to say you'd better just 'sharrup', so there you bastards!

*Sip*, hmm velvety chocolate delight.

Funny I was "off the stump" for a long time, you see I had a short affair with Super M from Clover, but that ended in tears, tragic really. Then as if the planets aligned in just the right way I spot this case of 24 Chocolate Steri Stumpies in Makro and through a combination of blind lust and price miscalculation I tossed the case in my trolley and wham, 13.5 bottles later and I am hooked.

One sec ... Bloody hell, that was a good sip ...

I see there is a social media campaign brewing for the elixer of the gods over at http://www.steristumpie.com/ you can become an "Ambassador" if you perform some wacked out stuff on video using a Steri Stumpie .. hmm .. maybe later, I am enjoying this bloody milkie too much. Oh I see there's a twitter account as well .. cool .. @Steri_Stumpie.

You know what life is good, who needs the Land of Milk and Honey? SA is the land of MILK, that's good enough for me.

Now my only worry is to remember to get a new case before I run out!! Erk.

The truth is that REST is not easy to use and/or explain. Yeah, its simple but its not easy, in fact its hard. So I thought to avoid that particularly uncomfortable situation recurring that I should come up with some basic points to explain it, I shall call them Conrad's 4 basic cornerstones of RESTful Web Services. Those reading here should also see it as an opportunity to chime in and help by providing feedback as I think there are a lot of people that THINK they understand REST but don't really grok and I am certainly not excluded in that statement. I am not going to go into the benefits and what not, read wikipedia for that. This is purely some notes on the very basic principles.

Conrad's 4 Cornerstones of RESTful Web Services (HTTP)

REST = Representational State Transfer

1. The service exposes application state and interaction as resources that can be represented (sic) as a unique URI over HTTP
2. Resources are manipulated (maybe not the right word) through a uniform interface, these are POST, GET, PUT and DELETE verbs
3. The service is stateless.
4. The service is strictly client-server

Right I believe that is enough for my purposes, there are some other bits around Caching and Layering, mime types and response codes that my points don't cover but IMHO we are ok as HTTP takes care of that for us to some extend and the rest are less crucial to grokking the concept and thus removed for simplicity.  (opinions?)

What does the URI address for the resource look like?
A simple example:
http://mysite.com/api/user/1
Here we are addressing a specific resource in the user collection .. though we are not expressing any intent as we are not providing a verb.

Throw a verb in the mix:
GET http://mysite.com/api/user/1
Ah, now we are getting somewhere we want to retrieve the data for that specific resource.

OR

DELETE http://mysite.com/api/user/1
I would like to delete the addressed resource..

Similarly POST would create a new user (drop the resource identifier "1" here) and PUT would alter and replace the resource.

Thus the verbs loosly map as follows for out purposes:
POST = CREATE
GET = READ
PUT = UPDATE
DELETE = DELETE

Responses on these actions will return status codes, another handy HTTP freeby that REST can use e.g. 200 OK's and 404 Not Found etc..

To state or not to state?

Um REST is stateless and the so-called gray area of using cookies for auth purposes is not gray, its broken. Just deal with the fact that your are not 100% compliant and leave that there.  Alternatively look at Amazons Rest Auth implementation which operates via headers sent to and fro. Also adding the session identifier to every URL is not valid as this breaks the uniqueness of the resources' address as each user will utilise a different URI to address THE SAME resource!

Ok I am tired now, I still want to talk about using RESTlike URL's in your web application/site (as opposed to API's for webservices) as I have done in the past which raises issues such as the difficulties of using PUT and DELETE via browser forms often addressed by repurposing the POST method somewhat .. maybe subject matter for a next time.

PS whats up with Facebooks so-called RESTlike API?

Methods like admin.getAllocation etc??? Looks more like RPCLike what with method names getting sent in the requests? Use of HTTP and XML does not a REST service make!

May be doing a talk on it at the upcoming SA Stormhoek Geek Dinner.

For each and every one that attended and/or helped out in some way .. thank you.

I am humbled by the amount of incredible talent we have in this country and to have been associated with you all even if it is just for two days.

So whats next? I hope we can keep some of the momentum going and that we can get together on a more frequent basis, even if just for a chat over beer/coffee.

Planning a post BarCamp get together next week sometime, let me know if you are keen.

Quote of the event: "The geek shall inherit the earth" >> Max Kaizen

Here are some other great update posts:

http://www.rafiq.za.net/blog/2006/06/20/plug-and-go-barcamp-cape-town/

http://www.rafiq.za.net/blog/2006/06/19/barcamp-cape-town-blogged/

http://maxkaizen.wordpress.com/2006/06/19/barcamp-collaborative/

http://dewet.org/wordpress/archives/19

http://dewet.org/wordpress/archives/20

http://mithrandr.moria.org/blog/534.html

http://www.markforrester.co.za/barcamp-cape-town-reviewed.htm

1. Come up with a design incorporating the BarCamp Cape Town logo with a
witty tagline for front of shirt.
2. Max 3 color design to be printed on khaki / cream / white shirts
3. To be submitted in Vector format (illustrator or freehand)
4. Submission date: 12pm 1 June 2006
5. Submitted to sarahaatquirk.biz
6. Winner to be announced on the day
7. Prize: R300 Kalahari Voucher

Download high quality copies of the BarCamp Cape Town logo here.

Technorati Tags: BarCampCapeTown, BarCamp

Technorati Tags: Spam, Blogging

Try our own one here.

Found via Scobleizer.

We are gatekeepers, the same way entrance ramps are gates to the freeway.

Then I realised, hey I said it first!! Now I can either come to the conclusion that this is another collective unconscious thing, or I can stroke my ego and say that maybe I planted that seed in his mind, in which case it is the greatest complement ever to have changed the thinking of a blogger that I really respect.

Ah yes, the world is really flattening, like Kent says. Maybe Rubel really has something here?

Then again, I could be wrong, but lets just stick with it for now, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Update: Kent has linked backed to me now in the article. Thanks, I appreciate the validating gesture.

Technorati Tags: blogging, gatekeeping, gatekeepers