Web 2.0 – chances are you’ve heard this buzzword before, if not from me, then perhaps from O’Reilly Media. In a general sense, it refers to the “new” direction the web is taking, being more user-content-centered, more social-oriented and featuring/implementing new technologies that make the Internet more interactive. But just how much of a difference is it really making, for the average user?
Continued
I was playing around with Google Earth a little yesterday (due to boredom) and decided to map out my running route after I discovered the “Measure” tool. It’s pretty neat, and hopefully not too inaccurate. (Unfortunately the overhead image map data for Kingston is pretty lacking, so you don’t really get an idea of what’s along the path. However, it’s still nice to plot out paths.
I recently updated to WordPress 2.0.3, basically as soon as I noticed it was available. It was touted as a “security fix” release, so I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade ASAP. However, it introduced a few bugs, that while not extremely detrimental, were nonetheless annoying.
Continued
There’s been a lot of talk about microformats lately, brought about the increasing presence of web-standards, awareness and development of design patterns and concern about open data formats for information exchange. Microformats are not something revolutionary, but they hold a simple, yet effective concept, that aims to take the best practices of the web and multiply them, thus, among other things, improve the way we interact with data on the Internet.
Continued
Kingston is a city that’s literally overflowing with churches. That was one thing I noticed that set it apart from other places I’ve lived in. It’s almost as if someone used that Simcity 2000 cheat that causes churches to pop up everywhere in the city, while they were designing Kingston. I’m not sure why they are so abundant here; maybe it has something to do with the age of the city (Kingston is one of the older Canadian cities), or maybe it has to do with a need to balance out the inherent immorality of a large student population. Whatever the reason, I decided to take a few pictures of the many churches that call Kingston their home.
Continued
Today was that time of year again: preregistering for courses from the coming year. Now, anyone from Queen’s will tell you that this can be a dreadful time, not only because you have to figure out what you courses you want to commit to for next school year, but also because of the outdated and awful QCARD system you must use in order to select courses.
Continued
Web accessibility is a hot topic nowadays. Many articles have been written about the topic, so that there’s no shortage of information should you want to design an accessible website that at least aims to be usable by all, regardless of any disabilities. This, after all, is a good thing, since if public buildings are mandated to be accessible by the disabled, shouldn’t public websites be as well?
Continued
I spent the weekend with friends up at Megagh’s (aka Meaghan) cottage, and boy, was it a fun, but sore weekend. Being with friends is always nice, especially after being cooped up in the lab with a bunch of computers all week. But, it’s even better when it’s up at a cottage with plenty of outdoor stuff to do. Brought my camera along, and managed to get some pics.
Two big companies, Microsoft and Yahoo, both recently released their new instant messenger clients. Microsoft’s client is now called “Windows Live Messenger”, and Yahoo’s is a more mundane “Yahoo Messenger 8.0”; however, both are heavily integrated into their respective company’s web services, with the overall aim of both offering more features to users and attracting them to services they may not have known about.
I recently read about how Google was the latest victim of search engine spam, or the intentional creation of useless pages in order to get a high ranking or listing on a search engine results page. The story was later Dugg, and you may have seen it on my “Recently visited” list. While Google has fixed this current problem, this type of Internet spam has been growing at a very fast pace for the past few years, for a few reasons, and will probably out-grow conventional e-mail spam in the future. It presents its own set of unique problems, many of which have yet to be solved by Google, or, in my opinion, other search engines as well.
Continued