Like so many others, I was shocked to find out this week that Warren DeLano died. He was both an inspiration to me and a genuinely nice guy.

In a 2007 interview, Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter, commented on the role Twitter’s Web API played in the growth of the now ubiquitous messaging service: Done right, a Web API can add significant value to a website by offering a way for third-party developers to get involved. In other words, a Web API is a prerequisite for creating a Web platform.

To create a broadly-applicable Web resource, content needs to be searchable through services such as Google. In designing Chempedia, one goal was to offer a tool that would work with the grain of the Web by offering a handle though which the full power of tools like Google could be leveraged.

Dmitry Pavlov of SciTouch writes in to announce the availability of Indigo, an open source suite of cheminformatics tools. Indigo offers an impressive array of capabilities, including graph matching, cycle perception, structure rendering, fingerprinting. The site documentation also indicates that work on interfaces to other languages, including Ruby and Java, is planned.

Over on the Chempedia Newsfeed, I’ve posted a wrapup of the Chempedia launch day. I’m delighted with the response and the feedback so far, and look forward to even better things to come.

In preparation for the re-launch of Chempedia, I’ve been spending some “quality time” with the Heroku DNS documentation. Getting Chempedia to work on chempedia.com and www.chempedia.com through Heroku required a crash course on DNS and in particular CNAME Records. One of the things that made this more difficult than is should have been is the latency of DNS propagation.

After a few weeks of intensive effort and help from some awesome alpha testers, the new Chempedia is now up and running. What is It? Chempedia is the free and open chemical substance registry. It enables anyone to register, at no cost, individual substances through a Web-based interface. Each substance receives a unique, numerical, checksummed identifier that can be used anywhere and looked up at no cost.

In a recent posting to the CCL List, Geoff Hutchison writes:

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I’d like to thank all of those who have participated in alpha testing of the new Chempedia - by setting up an account through the streamlined OpenID-based system, contributing a substance name, registering a substance, reviewing a substance name, or simply verifying that the service works as expected on their systems. One question I get asked, even by those who have used the alpha site, relates to the purpose of Chempedia.

One of the most important decisions we faced in the re-launch of Chempedia was how to deploy it. Although deployment tends not to get the attention that Web application development gets, it’s every bit as important in determining how the fruits of your labors are perceived by end users. Heroku is a Rails application deployment platform that’s unique for its laser focus on scalability and ease of use.