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: Web Tech BlogNew Directions In Web Conferences
A few Australian conferences that are on in the next couple of weeks (and of which SitePoint is a media partner). The Web Directions crew have taken their traditional web conference model (which has been successful in Sydney and Vancouver) and are applying it to a more niche audience.
Web Directions User Experience
- What: A full day of workshops followed by a one-day conference focussing on user experience for the Web
- Where: Melbourne, Australia
- When: May 15-16, 2008.
- Who: A bunch of big-name speakers will be presenting, including Andy Budd as well as regular SitePoint contributors Cameron Adams, Lisa Herrod and Mathew Patterson.
- Cost: Conference — $595; Workshops — $550. SitePoint readers are eligible to a discount; just quote code WDSP when purchasing your tickets to receive $50 off.
View the full program for Web Directions UX.
Web Directions Government
- What: A full day of workshops followed by a one-day conference focussing on web sites and applications in the public sector
- Where: Canberra, Australia
- When: May 19-20, 2008.
- Who: Cameron Adams, Lisa Herrod and bunch of thought leaders in the public sector space.
- Cost: Conference — $595; Workshops — $550. SitePoint readers are eligible to a discount; just quote code WDSP when purchasing your tickets …
Enter The Matrix — Browse The Complete SitePoint Library
One common request we receive from our customers is for more information about where each of our books fits with regard to every other book.
When we first started out, we only had a handful of titles, so listing them all in (approximately) chronological order wasn’t really an issue. However now that we have nearly 30 titles, a matrix depicting the position of each book and a difficulty level is well overdue.
Well, better late than never — we now have available a matrix of every single SitePoint book, kit or PDF title. If you already own a SitePoint book, you can now chart your progression with regard to the rest of the SitePoint library.
The page itself is a technological wonder, making use of some hairy CSS in order to display information in a useful manner while retaining some form of semantic sense. I’ll let Brothercake elaborate on the details in a later post.
Go on! Enter the matrix!
Adobe AIR/Flex Competition Deadline Extended
We’ve had a number of requests to extend the deadline for this competition, so we’re doing just that.
The amount of effort required to write an article for publication is substantial, so we empathise with those of you who have struggled to get your submissions completed in time. We’re therefore extending the deadline by two weeks to Sunday May 18. Hopefully this should give some of you enough time to get your article finished and submitted.
If you’ve already submitted an article to this competition, but would like to use the two week extension to update your article or make changes to it, you’re welcome to do so.
If this is the first you’ve heard of this competition, you now have two weeks to write an article about Adobe AIR or Adobe Flex and win a copy of the Adobe CS3 Web Premium software package.
I look forward to reading your masterpieces!
An ODD example of Data Portablity
I recently became aware of a new initiative in the data portability arena - Open Data Definition (ODD). I applaud any effort to increase data portability between social networks and your data. But to really succeed the idea must be well thought out and research done to see what is out there and what really works.
Ben Werdmuller’s blog post introducing ODD defines it as a new format for import and export of data from social applications. He stresses that this project has risen from real world, not academic exercises. He makes a good argument for data portability; relating it the desktop taking a file created in one app and opening it in another. This is basic 101 here but the Web can’t do it — yet.
Where I feel he has seriously missed the boat is on the section where he talks about the Semantic Web. He describes the community as ambiguous and overcomplicated:
The semantic web community has RDF, a format designed for the purpose that is potentially powerful but – as one might expect from the semantic web community – prone to ambiguity and overcomplicated implementation.
And then the biggest problem I see with the entire argument comes from …
WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation Released
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) today announced that WCAG 2.0 had reached the candidate recommendation stage in its process of evolving into a specification:
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group is excited to announce the publication of WCAG 2.0 as a W3C Candidate Recommendation on 30 April. WCAG 2.0 explains how to make Web sites, applications, and other content accessible to people with disabilities, and many elderly users.
Candidate Recommendation (CR) is a major step in the W3C standards development process; it signals that there is broad consensus in the Working Group and among public reviewers on the technical content of WCAG 2.0.
The primary purpose of the candidate recommendation stage is for developers and designers to
“test drive” WCAG 2.0, to demonstrate that it can be practically implemented in a web
site.
Previous attempts at refining this document were met with outcry from both members of the working group, the general public and outspoken accessibility activists, primarily because of issues to do with confusing wording and concepts that appeared to threaten practical accessibility in exchange for tools being able to determine the accessibility of a page in an automated fashion.
Read the latest revision of WCAG 2 here.
PA.AM - Getting Ugly URLs into your Mobile Phone
I have to admit, when Jules sent through the URL to a new little project he was working on, I didn’t quite get it.
We’ve both had a taste for fiddling around with phone-based apps long before they were hip — or even vaguely practical for that matter — so when he devised this little free mobile service, it wasn’t surprising he IMed the URL through to me.
Arriving at the site for the first time, there’s not a lot to look at. A textbox, two radio buttons and a submit button. My initial impressions were ‘TinyURL in cool hipster pants’. The service appeared to convert long and nasty URLs into short and pretty URLs that are easy to pop into your phone. Hmmmm… ok, ok..
But these short URLs auto-expire quickly — at the most, 48 hours after creation — making them not much use as bookmarks.
And if you’re sitting at a computer to enter these URLs, why would you be bothering with your tiny phone screen? I shrugged and move on.
About two days later I was experimenting with the VICRoads live traffic site and Yahoo Pipes, trying to figure …
Measure Map Redux?
Only a week or so ago I was wondering if Measure Map had been abandoned by Google. This morning, out of the blue, I got an email that began amusingly with the words “Remember Measure Map?”. Well it appears Google is set to launch a new version! Here’s what the email had to say:
Remember Measure Map? A couple of years ago, we gave you an account on an
early alpha test of our blog analytics software. Since then, a lot has
happened. We got acquired by Google, we redesigned their Analytics app, and
we’ve since rebuilt Measure Map from the ground up.
To move to the new Measure Map the email instructs the account holder to login to a new server and fill in a simple signup form in order for the conversion to begin. A Google Analytics account is required as is the installation of the Analytics tracking code on your blog. Perhaps this means the new Measure Map will be an alternative front end to Analytics data?
Anyway, I filled in the form and now await the next step:
Great! You’re all set. We’ve got a few things to set up on our end. We’ll send you …
Bigger And Better: Trends in Mobile Screen Sizes
An interesting couple of posts in the past week by Morten Hjerde, in which he compiles Norwegian usage data (mobile phones with color screens, support for Java and a web browser). In his posts, Hjerde:
- charts mobile screen size trends and declares that small phone screens (smaller than 240 x 320) are dead and can be ignored,
- recommends 240 x 320 as the target size to develop for, and
- encourages user interface designers to begin thinking of how to design for wide-screen mobile displays, as that is the direction that mobiles are headed.
He suggested that:
It is obvious that 240 x 320 (also called QVGA) is on a roll. It is by far the most common and it is growing rapidly. If you develop, this should be your target screen size.
Looking a bit further into the future, the iPhone may not be the only phone on the market but everyone agreed when it was released that it raised the bar for a mobile web experience.
The competition is just now starting to catch up, which means developers have more and more pixels to play with. Hjerde previewed the screen dimensions of some more recent …
Live Demos: The SitePoint CSS Reference Goes Interactive
The popular SitePoint CSS Reference today added an exciting feature to its already impressive list — live demos.
This is a feature that was among the most commonly requested in our recent reader survey. It’s common knowledge that many beginner web developers learn best by doing. Now the most comprehensive reference for CSS on the Web comes with a sandbox in which you can experiment and learn in real-time.
The talented and wonderfully controversial James Edwards is the brains behind not only the code, but some of the quirky content contained within the example markup (if you understand all of the obscure song lyrics, book quotes or sci-fi movie one-liners then you’re doing better than I am!).
We’ve just launched this today, so there may be a couple of kinks that still need ironing out. Feel free to let us know in the comments for this post (or if it relates to a specific page, on the page of the reference site itself).
Try it yourself!
Google Invests Big In Clean Energy
Californian power company eSolar, which is focussed on building small-scale solar power plants, has raised $130 million in funding including $10 million capital from Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org.
eSolar said it would use the money from Google.org, Idealab and Oak Investment Partners to make and install pre-fabricated solar-thermal power plants near towns and cities. The company said its plants will generate up to 33 megawatts, typically enough power for up to 25,000 California homes, and that several of these plants could be connected to create a larger facility.
Solar thermal systems differ from traditional solar panel plants in that they collect heat from the sun and use it to boil water into steam, which spins a turbine to create power. One advantage of solar thermal systems is that the heat can be stored for hours, or even days, improving the plant’s ability to generate energy “on demand”.
It’s terrific to see some serious backing of a company driven to make a business of renewable energy, but one question comes to mind — is this an investment or a donation?
If it’s an investment, does it really count as philanthropy? I don’t want to take the wind out of the …
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