Web stuff and all things related…
Archive for February, 2007
February 27, 2007 at 5:31 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
In this BBC Technology report Spencer Kelly talks about the movement towards social networking sites on mobile devices. As the mobile revolution has been expected for a couple of years now with many touting 2007 as the year of the uprising, this article makes for interesting reading.
Kelly also talks about how IBM are envisioning Second Life persona’s interacting directly with mobile devices on the ground. Microsoft has been talking for years now about blurring the line between the desktop and the Internet but this concept seems to be heading towards blurring the line between reality and virtual reality!
However, I’ll not get too carried away just yet as the mobile web still hasn’t managed to conquer its two biggest hurdles, i.e. bandwidth constraints and the eye watering cost of any sort of substantial mobile surfing….
February 23, 2007 at 4:57 pm · Filed under Graphic Design
If you’re like me and are always trying to remember what colour would work best to represent what idea etc, check out this little movie to help you remember, fantastic!
February 22, 2007 at 12:10 am · Filed under Strange World
Ever wonder where exactly the ’sample pictures’ that come on your spanking new Windows XP machine are actually taken? No, me neither…but this guy did and made it one of his life goals to discover the exact origin of his desktop image…interesting story!
February 21, 2007 at 5:57 pm · Filed under Strange World
A man has sued IBM, who dismissed him for visiting adult chatrooms, for sacking him claiming he is an Internet addict and needs help, not a dismissal.
On this note, I wonder if I could sue the University of Ulster for the ridiculous amount of time I’ve been sat in front on a screen on the Internet in recent months, and the worst has yet to come…
Just a thought!
February 20, 2007 at 12:14 am · Filed under Blog Development
..of the design of this blog?
Good, bad or indifferent?
Is it honey for the eyes or an optical assault?
I want to know so please leave a comment accordingly!
February 20, 2007 at 12:01 am · Filed under Strange World
The jury is in and apparently the most watched viral video in the history of the Internet is the Star Wars Kid…unbelievably its has been viewed over 900 million times, for those who like things to be broken down, that’s one in every seven people on earth has watched this poor guy try to be a Jedi Knight in his garage…I must admit I had seen it a few years ago but had forgot all about it.
However, despite his cult status on the Internet, this fame has been entirely rebuked by the man himself, Ghyslain Raza, who has reportedly suffered a mental breakdown as a result and now resides in an asylum. He is also reported to have sued his classmates,who found the secret vid and unleashed it on the world, for approximately $250,000. One would have thought that would have softened the acute humiliation caused but apparently not.
On a more serious note, I’m sure there can be parallels drawn to today’s growing culture of cyber-bullying on social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace and this story should offer a stark warning of the consequences, however unintentional, that such a public invasion of privacy can cause…
February 19, 2007 at 7:54 pm · Filed under Web Design
In this new age of semantic (X)HTML and standards, something I’ve been hearing alot about is Microformats, so I decided to check out what the hell they are and how I could benefit from them.
After doing a little bit of research, I found out that Microformats are a way to enrich mark-up to make the internet a much moe friendlier place without affecting presentation on-screen. Microformats also make your webpages much more compatibile with web applications, as they can then extract the specific data relevant to that application. I found this great resource at xfront.com which really helped me break down what Microformats were;
The purpose of microformats is to:
- Enrich the semantics of Web documents.
- Enrich the semantics of the whole Web. Via a bottom-up, grassroots fashion, one Web document at a time.
- Create standard semantic labels. Via a clearly defined community process.
- Leverage existing standards (don’t reinvent)
The real crux is however that designers like myself do not need to mark up our pages any differently just add to the tags, associating them with pre-defined class names which are then picked up by web applications. And as they do not change the presenation of the design of the page, they do not impose any constraints on my creative flair.
Paul Boag (who’s podcast I eat up on a weekly basis) also wrote in this months .net mag that designers and developers should be using microformats wherever possible so I decided to take his advice and try and implement a hCard into my contact page on my site.
It was incredibily easy, I justed added the pre-defined classes to each specific data type as below:
<div class="vcard">
<span class="fn n">
<span class="given-name">Barry</span>
<span class="additional-name">Gerrard</span>
<span class="family-name">McGee</span>
</span>
<div class="adr">
<div class="street-address">16 Clontycarty Lane</div>
<span class="locality">Tynan</span>
,
<span class="region">Co. Armagh</span>
,
<span class="postal-code">BT60 4RE</span>
<span class="country-name">N. Ireland</span>
</div>
I also incorporated the “tel” class into my telephone number in my footer to prevent duplication and…voilia!
February 19, 2007 at 1:17 am · Filed under The Big Job Hunt
I’ve just spent the last four hours of my evening tweaking my CV once more and consequently uploading to every reputable recruitment agency known to Google. It can be quite a monotonous process, I can now type my address with my eyes closed and my foot in my mouth, but hopefully one that shall prove fruitful nonetheless…
It seems that web design jobs are like hens teeth in Northern Ireland but there are quite alot of lucrative opportunities across the water with one ad boasting daily rates of £180+…I thought that day was long gone! Or maybe its a little too good to be true…
Anyway, my CV is now out there, just waiting to be consumed by hungry headhunters so I’m pretty sure all I have to do….
(….optimisim people, optimisim!!)
February 18, 2007 at 5:31 pm · Filed under Personal
Clergy men and people of charity often talk of their “call”…I got my call this week but it was of a different nature, an academic call. I am currently in the final semester of my final year in BSc Hons Interactive Multimedia Design (PDF)
at the University of Ulster and this week I received my results from last semester. Thankfully, they were pretty much what I expected to get and have spurred me on to put my head down for the next 10 weeks and concentrate on my major project, a DJ showcase website. However, there shall be a wake and funeral held this week for what I used to fondly refer to as my ’social life’…
Stay tuned as I will be posting my trials and tribulations right here folks…
February 18, 2007 at 5:21 pm · Filed under Web Design
Pretty cool video that is doing the rounds on YouTube is The Web is Us/ing Us which in short, documents how the web has evolved in the past few years and attempts to define the ambiguous Web 2.0 concept…
Personally, I think it carries a very valid point in that as we are now moulding the web into a much more web app friendly place with increasing use of semantic mark up and by embracing new strategies such as Microformats, which can only be a good thing as developer continue to create such great applications as Google Maps.
Now, if only we could create an application to start at the back of the Internet and work forward purging all those horrendously outdated sites still out there…
Next entries »
