Recently in Web Category

I've been thinking about starting a Toronto Free Software group for many many months (since around October 2009) and decided that I finally have enough time to do so.

In order to build up my skills I'm starting a new project with my cousin. We're calling it GoAugust and currently we're focusing on website design and have started designing website templates and will eventually work on blog templates for WordPress. The templates will be sold and we're making an effort to stick to free & open source software and we're also trying to use images and other works that use a Creative Commons license.

There is a proposal to allow the inclusion of Java applets into Wikipedia to increase interactivity. What this says to me is that the Web is not enough and that it is mainly a document system. Instead, the Wikipedians should build a proper desktop application for viewing Wikipedia articles and then separate it from the Web and HTML. This would allow them to display the information in a variety of forms and fix the flaws of the Web.

The first thing I would add is a way of linking to specific paragraphs or sentences. The second thing I would add is a proper discussion board system and possibly add an IRC chat component. For the chat component, I would also make it easy to paste snippets of the conversations into the discussion board. This is useful because you may have discussed an article with someone and then made changes to it, but everyone else would be unaware of your discussion unless they checked the discussion board and the discussion may have provided a rationale for why you made the change.

Java applets and more interactivity would be a fine addition to Wikipedia, but this is solving the wrong problem.

INS and DEL elements re-discovered and used for version control. HTML document's version history kept within itself.

HTML pages as containing structure and storing their contents in separate files. Easier for everyone to deal with and splits up your page into logical pieces.

So I was studying my marketing textbook and I realized that Free Software has an awful reputation because of bad marketing. The software is, for the most part, technically sound, however the image of it is awful. This then reminded me of EventCal, the Python HTML calendar generator that I wrote a few years ago. I still get emails about it once in a while, even though I'm not actively maintaining.

So instead of studying, I created a quick checklist on what a Free Software website should have in order to be considered helpful by users. I won't post that list here just yet, because I want to write up a few other checklists and notes on marketing.

Warning: I'm not editing this or re-reading it after writing it. This is a rant though I hope it contains something useful in it.

TechCrunch, a popular tech. news website, posted an article by MG Siegler on how "FasterWeb Wants To Make The Entire Web Up to Ten Times Faster In 2010". FasterWeb is a technology startup that is funded by a venture capital firm called YL Ventures. The article is brief and is not investigative whatsoever, there is hardly meat on the bones of it.

I just stumbled upon the Online Journalism Blog. My entry point was a post on how to make money from [online] content. An interesting topic because it appears that much of the money is made indirectly through advertising, events, etc. What was more interesting, however, was a post on the the death of the interactive presentation tool Flowgram.

A week or so ago I decided to finally sit down and try out the Compass CSS framework. When I first looked at it, I was dismayed to find that it required Yet Another Language to learn, but then I quickly saw its advantages when I started using it.

In the Human-Computer Interfaces class I have been taking for the last few months, I had to write up a software prototype for a restuarant ordering system. The goal was to design a user interface that allowed a customer in the restaurant to use their iPhone or some other smart phone to quickly order food.

For this prototype, I used Squeak Smalltalk, the Seaside web framework, and the Magritted meta-description framework.

I jumped on the micro-blogging/messenging bandwagon a while ago and if you're interested, you can follow me on identi.ca or twitter. The identi.ca feed is mainly for programming chatter while the twitter feed is more general...

Right now I am trying to figure out the Magritte description classes for use in Seaside (a web framework for Smalltalk).