Strangebanana has developed a webpage with a design, which is generated by random. If you don't like the design, you can just reload. They actually encurage you to save the design you like and use it when you develop your own home page. If you need some random content, you can get fake latin paragraphs using a tool developed by 4guysfromrolla.
Well there is a lot of acusissions going on in the Content Management world. Today IXOS bought Obtree. Obtree have had a bad 2002, so they probably need funding. Now they got an ok partner, which is in the same markets as Obtree, but with a closer connection to the customers.
Obtree suits IXOS good. Besides from the fact that the press release has almost taking the IXOS server down due to performance overload, they are now getting a fine product with a SAP integration module.
Obtree has for the last year (they increased the price with a factor 3 last may) been overpriced, so hopefully IXOS will be lowering the price in order to ship a lot more products.
There are quite a few fonts out there. I just discovered great comic fonts. There are also speech word balloons.
I also discovered the AcidFonts site where you can find the fonts from your favorite brand like Farrari, Kit Kat, Harry Potter etc.
I think I've said it one million times to customers and collegues, but I must state it again: Don't use frames - here is 10 more reasons:
10. iFrames is still frames and is not supported by all browsers
9. There are ribbon campaigns to get rid of it - they are ugly and why should good sites be infected with ugly ribbon gif's
8. Bookmarking requires instructions for most users
7. Also with printing
6. Some search engines won't play nicely
5. Big legal nasties could ensue if you're deeply stupid or just don't care
4. It continues to encourage bad webdesigners to do bad interaction design
3. The messy ucky frustrating I want to chew glass reality of working with them
2. Jakob says no way
1. You could owe $50,000,000.00 in retroactive fees to people like SBC. The patent is here.
You do have a change to vote for your favorite weblog of 2003 in the third annual weblog awards.
It also gives a great view of the trends in weblog design and links to a lot of great weblogs in the 30 categories.
Sorry, that there is no weblog awards for food - my new food log would have been up for a prize - except it is in danish.
There is a lot going on in the keyboard industry and new ways of entering data is approaching:
There is a lot of portals out there: MSN, Yahoo,.... you name it. Useually they are full of popup banners and other AdWare, but a new start has entered the sphere: MyWay.com.
It is fast, easy to configure just like I like my start page. You can even get a MyWay toolbar, but it replaces the google toolbar, so I think I stick with that.
I think this is a great example of a customizeable portal - you can even custimize the logo to be your own, ie. "Hørup's Homepage" or whatever. It is still very american, so sports results, stocks, TV program, movie releases is for people living in the US, but you can get the weather - it you can't live with Hørup's vejr.
Everybody have a GPS (almost) but useually nothing to use it for. If you have your coordinates, you can now geocode your website and let people know where in the world it is located.
If you just add a few META tags to your homepage, ping a URL, you are up and running.
If you use geourl, you can see sites near hoerup.dk.
A cool thing is that you can actually view the neighbor list in RSS.
Finally it is possible to use international characters like the danish æ,ø and å, but you need a plugin for your Internet Explorer Browser (sorry - no support for Netscape/Mozilla/Safari yet).
The Internet standard for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) is approaching completion. Currently the final IDN standard is being reviewed by the IETF, the standards organization for core Internet protocols like DNS and email. In anticipation hereof, the registry for .com and .net has – in cooperation with the registries of .jp (Japan) and .kr (Korea) – launched a solution for resolution of your domain names. Unfortunatly the registry for .org has chosen to wait with enabling a solution before the IDN standard has been formally approved.
I have already registrated www.hørup.org, www.hørup.com and www.hørup.net, but only .com and .net is working. It seems like email's is not yet supported - I have tried to mail jens@hørup.com from Outlook and my Squirrelmail, but no succes. The address is rejected and the mail programs claims that the server doesn't exist.
If you don't have the plugin you cannot go to a webdite like www.hørup.com, but the plugin actually converts the site name to a obfuscated URL like http://www.bq--abupq4tvoa.mltbd.com. If you have the plugin, you can actually try to make a mouse over on the obfuscated URL and check in the lower left corner of your browser (if the status bar is on) and see that it shows the correct URL with ø.
For quite some time I have been wondering, whether users are browsing full screen or if they are only using a window which only takes up part of the screen.
Often I am discussing with customers of we are going to optimize towards a 1024x768 or a 800x600 resolution, but if it is common to surf in a small window, this is important to consider when designing a new website.
None of the tools I currently have access to (hitbox) are only tracking screen size, so now I have build my own tool to track it.
The idea for my tool is also to be my stat tool, but that depends on how much space all this statistics will take up. I have now started tracking throughout this site and dubidu.
I about a month I will try to evaluate on my statistics and make it public.
Now a great plugin for outlook makes it easy to read your favorite blogs direct from outlook.
I have just tested out NewsGator and it is possible the greatest plugin for outlook yet!
It requires the .NET framework on your computer and an Outlook 2000/2002 and you are all set.
It you want to read the Hørup Technology log with NewsGator, add this URL: http://hoerup.dk/tech/tech.rdf
In an Antenna Battle Royale between a Lucent popsicle stick, a couple of Pringles Cans, our Coffee Can, a Hunt's Tomato Sauce can, and a 40oz can of "Big Chunk" beef stew, the winner was the Big Chunk beef stew, which actually was better than a commercial antenna extender from Lucent! Surpricing for $10 you will get a meal and a very good antenna, which will increase your WiFi range with up to a factor 8.
Read the complete shoteout here.
When you are surfing the net you will eventually get some strange software installed. Advertising software like gator etc. is a pain in the butt, almost impoissible to remove and very annoying.
I resently discovered Lavasoft Ad-aware, which can detect and remove this kind of unwanted software.
Matt Jones has just released a 86 (!) pages document, which describes the design process when redesigning the BBC homepage.
You can download The Glass Wall from his weblog, at least untill his boss discover it :-)
This is a great document showing how to do the design process when you have great time and ressources. I wish we could do this amount of work when doing redesigns.
For a long time, the only thing about portlets, that portal providors like IBM, BEA and Oracle has agreed on is the name.
Now, all the leading portal vendors has (almost) agreed on a specification that will define a set of APIs for Portals, which adresses areas like: Personalization, aggregation, presentation and security.
The official Java Specification Request is located here and is set to be released in may, 2003.
From the votes it showed, that nobody in the expert commity has voted no.
When you have users who rate stuff, they have been taught by Amazon to expect recomendations. For this the most common used way of generating recomendations is done by collaborative filtering.
A great demonstration on this is done by MovieLens and this is build on the theory located here.
If you are using Drupal CMS, there is a module for making recomandations. Another PHP/MySQL system is CoFIND where you also can download the source code.
I will try to test it - perhaps on my recipies, which around 40 unique users is accessing each day.
Battelle develops new technologies, commercializes products, and provides solutions for industry and government. They have just released their proposals for what new products which will occour in the present:
"When you turn on your personalized computer," Millett says, "it might automatically show you highlights from your favorite baseball team's game from the night before, show the current stock report on your own portfolio, and ask you if you'd like to order milk or eggs because you haven't bought any in the past week. Then it could go out and do that shopping for you, finding the best prices at all the local grocery stores."
The personalized computer will be as mobile and versatile as its user, sending and receiving wireless data and accessing information from remote sites.
"This innovative product is highly dependent upon three other conditions: regulation, energy price levels, and advances in electrical power systems," Millett says.
"Remember the Jetsons cartoon show where they would talk to neighbors on a television screen in their house. Same principle," Millett says. "When that cartoon was drawn, that was as far out as flying your own car to work. Now it's just around the corner."
"As the baby boomers move into and past midlife, they're going to create a huge market for products to hold back the hands of time," Millett says. "They want to look good and feel good. At Battelle, we think technology will allow them to look forward to active and comfortable retirements in their 80s."
I found the article here
I always try to keep up with what's happening and what new hardware devices and gadgets, which are emerging.
One of my favorite sources is "The Harrow Technology Report", which explores the innovations and trends of many contemporary and emerging technologies, and then draws some less than obvious connections between them.