Category Archives: Websites

Australian News Websites Are Web 2.0 Compliant

Internet, Websites

I was browsing through news.com.au and abc.net.au/news/, only to notice that they are Web 2.0 Compliant!

For those that aren’t aware what Web 2.0 is and how you can be compliant with it, I actually have my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. In the last two years or so, there has been a huge push for web applications, which act in a similar way to the traditional desktop application. One of the techniques which greatly helped kick start the web application phenomenon was a technology coined AJAX. Since that point in time, there has also been massive surge of community driven sites. If you could throw those two ingredients and a few other little things into a mixing bowl, you’d have what I roughly consider Web 2.0.

To keep this brief, I’ll give you a short list of some of the Web 2.0 and other hip and happening features they have:

In years gone past, news sites were very rigid and out dated compared to the current trends flashing around the internet. I’m glad to see the news sites are keeping up with the Jones; if they get lucky, providing some of the newer items such as podcasts might help them capture a market segment that they’ve never had before.

The Sheep Market

Websites

Today I stumbled upon a strange site named The Sheep Market. What is it all about you ask; I have no idea. What is interesting though, is to see how people mentally picture sheep and then represent that mental image digitally.

Essentially, the owners of The Sheep Market have paid a bunch of people online to draw a sheep facing left. They didn’t say what it had to look like, if it could or couldn’t be three dimensional – it just had to be a sheep. During the drawing phase, the ‘brushstrokes’ of the artist are captured and are replayed as you select the sheep.

One of the things I thought interesting is that an overwhelming majority of the sheep are a simple line drawing; while the minority have filled the background with black and used blocks of colour to represent their sheep. The second thing which was interesting was the speed of the brushstrokes or mouse pointer. Some of the users are very cautious and precise, while others bash out their sheep in a handful of swift movements.

The Sheep Market is a strange little site but I think it’s kind of neat.

Steve Irwin Dies & Kills The Internet

Internet, News, Websites

Steve Irwin, known around the world as “The Crocodile Hunter” has died today at the age of 44 in a freak diving accident in Tropical North Queensland. Steve was shooting an underwater video off the coast of Port Douglas, when he was speared through the chest by a stingray. Emergency services were dispatched, however they were unable to revive him.

As the news of Steve Irwin’s death swept across the country, users were eagerly clicking into their favourite news sites. The huge surge of traffic into news.com.au and abc.net.au/news/ caused both of the popular news sites to go offline for quite some time.

The death of Steve Irwin is a huge loss to Australia and the world. He was an incredibly energetic and nature fanatic, who would have done anything to animal and nature conservation. I think everyone would hope that his legacy and enthusiasm towards wildlife will continue well into the future, through either his surviving family or some other manner.

Dictionary.com CSS Makeover

Programming, Websites

Lexico Publishing Group have just released their new web site design which has been deployed over all of their reference.com domains, most notably dictionary.com and thesaurus.com.

The news that the sites were being redesigned was first broken by Jeffery Zeldman, one of the most influential people in pushing the semantic web and standards based design forward. Lexico contracted the Zeldman owned company Happy Cog Studios to work on the redesign. I think it is fitting that a high profile semantic web fanatic be involved with the redevelopment of a dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia.

This is my very brief critique of the new site:

  • I really like the new colour
  • I like the simple, now classic tabbed navigation between dictionary, thesaurus and reference dot com sites
  • Though not surprising, I like the fact that the new design contains less than 50% of the HTML of the previous design
  • I hate the massive horizontal banner on the front page, it just breaks the look of the site.
  • The front page feels cluttered and hard to read because of the multiple sets of small lists of links
  • I don’t like the use of the little images in the lists of links on the front page. I think they should have signified the important link through the link text weight or by changing the bullet point image.

Other than, what I’d personally consider a poor choice for positioning their primary advertising – I’m pretty happy with the new design. I’m sure that the people maintaining the site are going to be much happier they’ve now got a simple set of CSS to manage instead of embedded markup.

Transmission Restored

Blogging, Websites

As you might be aware, my site has been offline for the last day or so due to bandwidth restrictions. Since March this year, something has happened and the traffic per day to my site has increased dramatically.

I contacted the great people at AussieHQ who host this site and they were gracious enough to enable my account for the remainder of the month! This is the sort of sensible management that earns a web host a really good name in the industry in my opinion – so a huge thank you to the AussieHQ crew.