Moving On Up

Since this semester has a more focused topic (web design and usability) than the last (internet technology) I created a more specific website/blog for it. The website/blog will also serve as a bit of a test, more on that later (a good bit later). Thanks to anyone who has done any following.

new location: mywebdesignusability.com

yahoo pipes - Movie Trailers

Here is a mash up created with yahoo pipes that retrieves movie trailers. The pipe allows for some parameters to be used in the search, you will notice here that I am only returning trailers that have "comedy" in the title. The cool thing is that the list of trailers is searched on youtube and then the list is returned all as separate youtube videos...pretty cool, makes easy viewing on the iPhone.

Click Here to visit the Pipe

Video: Proxy Server

Proxy Server

iPhone Development - Web Style

Basic HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a bit of AJAX...boom, you have an iPhone App. Never would have guessed but just by styling your web page correctly you have an iPhone App. Take a simple web page created with HTML, open it up in your iPhone web browser...how does it look? Ok, but not great, and certainly not like a native App. Throw in some CSS, add a bit of JavaScript, and just a touch of AJAX and that HTML now looks like a native application. I wouldn't exactly call it creating an App...more like formatting a web page for the iPhone but just discovering this is pretty cool for me. Using basic web development I can now create a web page that has the look and feel of an iPhone App all without learning a new language or using a new technology.

Net neutrality

Net neutrality is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates no restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as communication that is not unreasonably degraded by other traffic.

The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for a given level of access, that the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.

Neutrality proponents claim that telecom companies seek to impose a tiered service model in order to control the pipeline and thereby remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services. Many believe net neutrality to be primarily important as a preservation of current freedoms. Vinton Cerf, considered as a "father of the Internet" and co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the web, and many others have spoken out in favor of network neutrality.

Opponents of net neutrality characterize its regulations as "a solution in search of a problem", arguing that broadband service providers have no plans to block content or degrade network performance. In spite of this claim, certain Internet service providers (such as Comcast) have intentionally slowed peer-to-peer (P2P) communications. Still, other companies have acted in contrast to these assertions of hands-off behavior and have begun to use deep packet inspection to discriminate against P2P, FTP and online games, instituting a cell-phone style billing system of overages, free-to-telecom "value added" services, and bundling. Critics of net neutrality also argue that data discrimination of some kinds, particularly to guarantee quality of service, is not problematic, but is actually highly desirable. Bob Kahn has called the term net neutrality a "slogan" and states that he opposes establishing it.

Find..ability

Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. Relating findability to the web or SEO, it means how easily your site can be found when doing a search engine search. How high are you ranked on a search? If you did not make it onto the first page of a Google search...the chances that someone will dig through the search results far enough to find your site fall drastically. Findability and SEO together bring together many web designs ideals...SEO deals with the things that a developer can do to make a site more findable; things such as header tags, the title tag, and key word ratio all seek to make a website more findable with regards to a search engine.

SEO

I was surprised by the impact that basic text can have. On page factors, simply what is on the page. The small tortoise example was amazing. SEO can be much easier than I originally thought; I tested this out on a website that I created (for testing only) and it actually worked! I changed the key words to text ratio of about 80% key words and added some images that also relate to the key word. With these changes Google easily found the site. Before the changes I would have to add more descriptive words to my search in order for Google to find it but after the changes the site came up on the first page using only 3 words. SEO can be a very powerful and effective tool when used properly.