Archive for August, 2006

24×7 Free website monitoring and Box.net Lite Free file storage

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

These are both free services, both very web 2.0.

Site 24×7 is a free website monitoring service that lets you know if your web site is down. It will either notify you by text message and by email.

http://site24×7.com/

With Box.net lite you can upload a file of up to 10 MB and get a direct link.

For photos, you also get a thumbnail, so you just have to copy-paste the code. You can also upload audio files Box.net offers a Flash player, so you can embed it into a web page.

http://box.net/lite

When to use definition lists

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

Definition lists, created using the DL element, generally consist of a series of term/definition pairs (although definition lists may have other applications).

Thus, when advertising a product, one might use a definition list:

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Learn SEO From Buffy, the Vampire Slayer

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

Vanessa Fox from Google and Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch (unfortunately, not for too long) talk about search engine optimization.

They share a lot of interesting tips for webmasters, by placing everyone in the story of Buffy, the vampire slayer.

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Berners-Lee Defines Web 2.0

Friday, August 25th, 2006

Here’s an excerpt from the Tim Berners-Lee podcast with IBM.

I think he is genuinely quite excited about the new functions and user applications on the web.

However, he describes web 2.0 as what ever you want it to be. Another nice web 2.0 definition then.

LANINGHAM (interviewer): Do you get excited at all about emerging Internet technologies as described, you know, Ajax and things like that? Or are you thinking most of the time at such a conceptual level and a solution level that you don’t really feel like you have time to get too worked up over those things?

BERNERS-LEE: Oh, this tabulator project, the RDF tabulator, I coded it up in Ajax. So yes, I’m very…I find that Ajax is the…. It’s the one computing platform where everybody who has a Web browser has got that platform. So the nice thing about it is when you do code up an Ajax implementation then other people can take it and play with it. And I think that’s one of the things that’s so exciting.

Also it’s actually got a really powerful, you’ve got a really powerful user interface toolkit with the HTML DOM and also with the SCG DOM, so I think scalable back to graphics, Ajax applications are going to be really fun in the future.

And then when you’ve got an RDF and SPARQL library which gives you access to the Web of data, then that gives you extremely deep programmatic access both to the user and to the data underneath so that application becomes something relevant. So yes, I get excited about things which allow people to have fun and make progress and prototype new ideas.

LANINGHAM: You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?

BERNERS-LEE: Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

And in fact, you know, this Web 2.0, quote, it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0. It means using the document object model, it means for HTML and SCG and so on, it’s using HTTP, so it’s building stuff using the Web standards, plus Java script of course.

So Web 2.0 for some people it means moving some of the thinking client side so making it more immediate, but the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact.

Now, I really like the idea of people building things in hypertext, the sort of a common hypertext space to explain what the common understanding is and thus capturing all the ideas which led to a given position. I think that’s really important. And I think that blogs and wikis are two things which are fun, I think they’ve taken off partly because they do a lot of the management of the navigation for you and allow you to add content yourself.

But I think there will be a whole lot more things like that to come, different sorts of ways in which people will be
able to work together.

The semantic wikis are very interesting. These are wikis in which people can add data and then that data can then besurfaced and sliced and diced using all kinds of different semantic Web tools, so that’s why it’s exciting the way people, things are going, but I think there are lots of new things in that vein that we have yet to invent.

IE7 standalone version

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

Microsoft will be releasing or rather forcing us to upgrade IE7 soon
(as a windows update , so we all have to get used to using this browser.

Or at least testing our designs on it. As you can see around 60% of people use IE.

2006 IE7 IE6 IE5 Ffox Moz N7/8 O8/9
August 1.9% 55.1% 4.1% 26.4% 2.1% 0.4% 1.5%

Data from W3C schools.

Only thing is for testing, its always nice to have a few versions installed on a machine to test on. This cannot be done unless you have stand alone versions of the same browser, otherwise you will just have the latest version.

So found a good link to get IE7 working on PC’s and Macs:

http://tredosoft.com/IE7_standalone

CSS Management, bugs and IE7

Also we have to be aware that although IE7 is better than previous versions, it it still not bug free.

So its recommended as discusse back in June at @media06, its best to have the bugs to display your web sites correctly in a separate file to the main/global CSS.

For example:
@import url(“main.css”);
@import url(“ie.css”);

So you know your site works well in other browsers, and you have this bug.css file to cater for IE7. And hopefully when the bugs in IE get fixed you can easily take them out from the CSS file.

Have you tested your web site in IE7, does it display correctly?

You Are What You Search

Monday, August 14th, 2006

AOL researchers recently published the search logs of about 650,000 members – a total of 36,389,629 individual searches.

AOL’s search nerds intended the files to be an academic resource but didn’t consider that users might be peeved to see their private queries become a research tool. Last weekend, the Internet service provider tried to pull back the data, but by that point it had leaked all over the Web.

If you’ve ever wanted to see what other people type into search boxes, now’s your chance.

Which type of surfer are you?

  • The Pornhound – Big surprise, there are millions of searches for mind-bendingly kinky stuff.
  • The Shopper – AOL’s logs reveal that searches for “coupons” are a lot more common
  • The Manhunter – The person who searches for other people.
  • The Obsessive – The guy who searches for the same thing over and over and over.
  • The Omnivore – Many users aren’t obsessive—they’re just online a lot. Their search terms, while frequent, show little repetition or regularity.
  • The Newbie – They just figured out how to turn on the computer.
  • The Basket Case – AOL being a pretend therapist who only responds to your problems (“I am sad”) with more questions (“Why do you say you are sad?”).

Best API Links

Monday, August 14th, 2006

We’ve been starting to get experience in API’s (Application Program Interfaces).

The best starting point to learn and create how to make API’s for web developers is at the Yahoo! developers network http://developer.yahoo.net/

Check out cool applications and mashups in Yahoo! Gallery and learn about hacking new Widgets at the Yahoo! Widgets Workshop

Also whilst your at it, theres are great tutorial for Ruby on Rails here:

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/StartAtTheBeginning

And a web interface would not be complete without a microformat
http://microformats.org/code/

Enjoy, and stay tuned for some examples of these soon, at Callender Creates and Jayonline