The Winter Olympics 2006 in Turin are going to break loose some time next week. In case you didn’t know. In any case I just found out about the new ‘identity’ of The Games. Poynter Online is running a small story about the visual identity: Knowing Your Audience: Lessons from Olympic Imagery
Where the story is going I don’t know. But you’ll probably see those graphics multiple times on television.
Over at Google Code they ran a survey, in December 2005, looking at a couple of webpages trying to find out which elements and their respective attributes are used most. And more importantly how they are used.
We took a sample of slightly over a billion documents, and looked at what elements were used on the most pages, what class names were used on the most pages, and so forth.
Pretty interesting read this Web Authoring Statistics study.
E.g. why would anyone use a <table>-tag and not put any <td> or <tr> inside? Beats me… Is it a remnant of MS ‘HTML’? Or someone deleting a table in a WYSIWYG environment? And there are more examples.
If you are planning to build or rebuild a site this year you may wonder at some point which browsers you should support. If not, you should! Just looking at your new design in IE 6 is no guarantee it works and behaves the same in any other browser.
Not that long ago the browser shortlist consisted of IE 6, combined with IE 5, IE 4 & Netscape 4. And maybe some other occasional ‘weird’ browser. But times have changed and are changing. IE 4 & Netscape 4 are ancient history, support for IE 5 has been dropped in most cases by Microsoft itself. And there are emerging new browsers, either driven by innovation or security issues.
So what browsers should you support today and for the upcoming year(s)? Simple question, simple answer: Check your visitor stats and build/optimise for what they use.
As of version 2.0 of WordPress you’ll get a caching feature, which means it’ll ‘remember’ the most frequent accessed static information from your blog. This way it’s supposed to not bother the database but make a ‘fast trip’ to the server to fetch these pieces of info. In the end this should make your weblog go faster, because the information is already there to present.
Unfortunately it’s broken. (more…)
It’s official! Google Earth for the Mac is here. While Google Earth for the PC was stripped off its beta status, they’ve also released the Mac version. You’ll need OS X 10.4 and up (see the requirements).
Get Google Earth for Mac (or PC)
Read the official anouncement and Stefan from Ogle Earth already has a review up.
Is it too soon to be asking for a ‘Pack for Mac‘? 😉
Directly after upgrading this weblog, little over a week ago, I felt it was a little bit sluggish. Compared to the 1.5 version I was running before. Maybe it could be just the webserver as I’m running on a shared hosting solution. Therefore one of the neighbours could be having a party… again. 🙁
But finding it slow on and off I decided to see how slow or fast WordPress 2.0 really is. This new incarnation of everyone’s favorite weblog tool supports ‘object caching’. Caching generally is a good thing. The results? Hmmm not good…
Don’t ask me how I got subscribed to Will’s Weblogg-ed. But reading today’s post on ‘Learning 101‘ leaves me with an ‘IKEA‘-feel to it. Especially:
- Use visuals!
- Use the filmaker (and novelist) principle of SHOW-don’t-TELL.
- Use “chunking” to reduce cognitive overhead.
- Don’t rob the learner of the opportunity to think!
- Context matters.
- …
To name a few. This makes you wonder why so many people are still figuring out how they will ever finish their newly bought ‘Billy‘… Hold on:
- Emotion matters!
- Since stress/anxiety can reduce focus and memory, do everything possible to make the learner feel relaxed and confident.
Maybe it’s time to replace the paper instructions with something else… *Surpressing the how-to-bolt-together-your-IKEA-furniture.blogspot.com-thought* *REAL HARD*
Now that I’ve taken some days off between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, this is a good time to look at and think about this site. Since May I started some things that are still unfinished. Not to mention the things I haven’t even begun with. Just to keep track on all of it, a to-do list would be nice. And in this day and age of blogging: Why not make it public? So there you go.
TODO*:
* in no particular order.
Oh no, another upgrade. Now I’ve got one more thing to add to my to-do-list this holiday. 🙁 🙂
Download WordPress 2.0
*Add to to-do: Call bosses to ask for another week off. 😉
Update: Although there have been some reviews/critiques up, Matt himself has posted a lengthy post highlighting the … ehr … highlights in WordPress 2.0. Personally I find WP2 despite its new caching feature(s) a lot slower presenting pages. I haven’t figured out whether that is WPs fault or the servers.
That is what the below job offering says. But I’m not quite sure what it is they’re building. Remember the Adobe & Macromedia merger? So it’s quite obvious that the the product lines of both