Comments

• By postexitus 2026-03-139:33

  Also their use of AJAX and inline editing was revolutionary - probably created the whole industry around first Bootstrap, then jQuery. Man - spent so much time to emulate that light pastel yellow fade when you edited a title and saved it (later provided by jQuery).

• By tecleandor 2026-03-1311:41

  I remember using machine tags Last.fm back, back in the day (late 00s, maybe even 2010). That was still the time of the mashup/remixed web pages, and APIs were more open and you could do very fun stuff crossing Google Maps, Facebook, Craigslist and whatever.

  Then, Last.fm was a good site to keep track of the events (concerts/festivals) you were planning to go or you had visited.

  Every event had an ID (let's say, 3792998), and you could add photos to Flickr with a machine tag with certain prefix (in this case, the tag would be lastfm:event=3792998). So, when you visited an event on Last.fm, it'd query the Flickr API for photos tagged with that machine tag, and show photos from that concert.

  It was cool, but I think Last.fm removed that feature at least 10 years ago...

  Here you can still list Flickr photos tagged like that:

  https://flickr.com/photos/tags/lastfm:event=*

  Edit: Oh, I didn't remember that Flickr would also link back to the Last.fm event. The Internet was quite a different thing back then. Flickr blog post about the feature: https://code.flickr.net/2008/08/28/machine-tags-lastfm-and-r...

• By conductr 2026-03-136:37

  When I saw the headline I immediately thought of the API, this does a great job explaining its relevance in its time! It’s interesting how even programmers then were trying to learn the concept, but now “API” is common language even nontechnical people generally understand and use in conversation