Today Brad Neuberg of RSH and Dojo Offline fame blogged about the awesome work he's been doing on the dojox.storage module. His recent patches have resurrected the Flash storage provider, reworked the HTML 5 storage engine, and completely reworked the JS/Flash bridge based on some recent finding regarding updates to Flash's ExternalInterface API.

Today I had the good fortune to run into some of the folks from the MapQuest team on the SxSW tradeshow floor. For some months now they've had a beta version of their service online which has made extensive use of Dojo and DWR (our sister Dojo Foundation project) to improve the user experience of the world's largest mapping service.

We've been blogging about what's coming in Dojo 1.1 for a while now, and today I'm happy to announce that Dojo 1.1 Beta 1 is available.

1. A quick tutorial on writing dojo.query() extensions. It's fast, easy, and because we show you how to package it up as a Dojo module, it won't drag down your site performance
2. The awesomeness that is WebKit just won't quit and we've already added support for the native code path to what will become Dojo 1.1 (look for it in tonight's build). Of course, because the design of Dojo is layered, your dojo.query() extensions work no matter what selector engine Dojo picks as being fastest for a particular search.

DDD was a huge success, thanks in no small part to Google who is generously hosted the event.

Day 1 started with folks trickling in early, and for a bit we thought the turnout would be light, but by 9:30, the large room which we're in was totally full, and the buzz of old friends catching up and new acquaintances being made could be heard down the hall. Dylan and I actually thought twice about getting things under way, but the agenda was full and time at these things is always too short.

As Pete noted on his blog, we're getting oh-so-close to our fourth Dojo Developer Day(s)!

A couple of days ago the DrProject team sent mail asking about how to optimize their use of Dojo, and luckily the solution was easily at hand. By using the build system the DrProject team was able to speed up their load times by 300% and drop the number of requests from 35 to 4.

Today is the day the Dojo has been working toward steadily for more than 3 years: Dojo 1.0.

Today O'Reilly released their first preview of a forthcoming Dojo book in the form of a new "Short Cut": Get Up and Running With Dojo.

The Short Cut covers getting the toolkit, inheritance with dojo.declare(), building custom widgets (including some great material on the widget system's base classes and mixins) as well as how to use the template system and using the parser's type coercion to make constructing your widgets from markup a snap.

As a user of Plaxo, I've been delighted with their Pulse service for a while now. Bloglines is a really great start at letting me keep up with things, but Pulse fills an important gap where Bloglines leaves off. Why do I trust my personal data to a service like this?