15
May
2008
Microformats are very embroynic at the moment, this is perhaps a teaser of the future. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Firefox plugin to automatically collect contact details from websites and store them?
Further to this why not on each 5 or 6 visits to a website, have the browser check to see if your address book is out of sync with the website. A simple one click interface could allow you to get the new updated contact details, plus any additional updates which the web content creators have uploaded to the site. Imagine that power?
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14
May
2008
Just found an interesting snag with the abbr design pattern when viewing some recent search results where I’ve used abbr for dates.
It seems that if the title attribute of the abbr tag is indexed by search engines, the dates are printed twice in two formats, presumably expansion of abbreviations makes sense for search engines. Let me chew this one over.
[edit:the day after]
Having thought about this, it does seem to be a flaw with search engines, or at least the emphasis should be on search engines to better understand the abbr HTML tag, why? Because abbreviations are usually written in brackets!
A recent example I found of an hCalendar date showed that Google in this instance actually printed out both the contents of the title attribute and the value in the tag itself which lead to a mangled date display along the lines of “2008-04-13April 13th 2008″. Imagine a proper abbreviation would read “Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)”.
However should the search engine suppress either the title attribute or the value in the tag? In theroy the engine should work as a screen reader in suppressing “HTML” and reading out Hypertext Markup Language instead, not both.
Coming full circle this may not be an issue with the abbr-design pattern at all but with the work around using span tags, but it should be noted that some search engines may turn semantic code into a bit of a mess, equally a developer who works around abbr issues with span classes may also make a mess of it.
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28
September
2006
I just found a nice workaround to get RSS content from a news source which may not publish RSS feeds. Why not use Google news? By stating the source id in the search box you can easily craft a search page which can be output to RSS … nifty eh?
I will be away from home for a week and would like to keep in touch with a news website, which doesn’t have RSS. I’ll only have a slow GRPS connection on my mobile phone, so getting an RSS feed for this site was not only fun but useful too.
Take a look at the search page for icBirmingham and notice you can subscribe to this content through the google news service. The resulting RSS feed I found is here. Never go without RSS news feeds ever again.
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13
September
2006
Not more new cool stuff to keep up with? GeoRSS, yes subscribe to feeds based on location, why didn’t I think of it?! See the site. So hmmm, how to encode xy coords into RSS feeds, maybe a wordpress plugin? Yes indeed there is.
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3
September
2006
I’m in the process of setting up my own planet!! This is a fantastic way of bringing together people who blog about a particular subject, like skin cancer.
Last night while meeting up with the guys I used to live with at Univeristy, Jono mentioned that he had seen some of the awareness stuff I had been doing on the moleaware site and gave me a run through something called a planet. A planet is a series of web scripts which trawll through a list of peoples blogs and brings a copy of their recent blog entries into the planet. Usually blogs have an invisible file, usually called an RSS feed, which you can hook into to be notified of new blog posts, a planet uses these feeds to populate the planets homepage.
I know there are many bloggers out there actively talking about their experiences with Melanoma, and possibily using those personal publishing spaces to raise awareness. Trouble is unless you are searching for a blogger who writes about melanoma, chances are you won’t stumble across what they have to say. As soon as Jono showed me a planet I suddenly saw that this would be a benefit to spreading the word about melanoma and early detection.
Many melanoma bloggers, either have no comments or in some cases you might find a melanoma blog with the first words reading “unfortunatly this person passed away this year” and that’s sad because that person had something to contribute, but maybe didn’t get the exposure to an audience. So I’m on the look out for blogs and in particular I would like to add to the planet people who really want to push this up the agenda, because there are so many myths about skin cancer and so many people with personal expereinces about it to bust the myths that we could really make a difference.
Maybe, just maybe some planet inhabitants might get the chance to publish at moleaware.org.
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15
July
2006
Ok so I’m getting into this whole geotagging thing, sitting here thinking about Google maps and Web Picassa and seeing the future of browsing online photo albums in the same way a few of us can already find websites based on physical location. I’m thinking that it’s the one big advantage Google would have over Yahoo’s flickr, which at the moment is miles ahead of web Picassa. Picassa is Googles photo managing suite, which recently had a limted test version of an online tool, linked in with the Picassa desktop software.
Why geotagging photos and Google? Well because if you are Google and you get your users to upload photos with a tag to say where they were taken, suddenly you could map those photos, so as a user you could browse by location. Going on holiday, want to check out the hotel? Perhaps you’ll be seeing a friend in a new city and want to check out some snaps before you set out? You put out a java application for mobile phones and suddenly users can browse the area they are in and see photos of places which they are thinking about going to see.
It would be a bold move for Google to open up their API and allow it to be used by flickr, but then again someone out there could write a mash up quickly enough to do this. One to watch for sure.
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12
July
2006
With PDF Adobe gave powerful tools to people without a clue about how to allow information to be easy to reach! A PDF is not a content management system, mind you some people pay thousands of pounds just to be able to attach a file thinking that’s what a CMS is.
I just got one message to anyone who runs a government website, any information website. Look if you have a map or a basic image to put on your website, just don’t put it in a PDF, what’s the point, it’s like wrapping a mini roll in tin foil just to make it look shiny. It’s an image so upload so it as a JPEG, there’s a way to embed an image onto a page so I don’t have to download a file, the image tag! While we are here why not take the text of the PDF, usually bullet points and put it in an unordered list which would also appear on the webpage, there really is no need to be having an attchment that you make us download, really stop it now, it’s annoying!
Yeah PDF for downloadable leaflets and things which are meant to be printed, by all means please do, but not for one image, and certainly not as the absolute only way of looking at a map of car parks in a town centre. It really is not the right thing to do, really!
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