Blog

Have you ever wondered how big the internet actually is?

The answer is: big. Really Big. And growing bigger every year.

2009 saw some amazing growth again, as shown in these stats release by entireweb.com

Due in part to the Movember campaign's well-designed website I'm currently growing a moustache to help raise awareness and funds for men's health issues

The Movember campaign is a good example of how social media can interact well with traditional marketing.

As a participant I can log in to the Movember website and add photos of my mo's progress while also commenting on other members and interacting with the rest of my team. My personal profile page is aptly named my 'mospace' page.

A running total of donations for both myself and my team is encouraging and also makes it a little competitive. Which men like, as a rule.

There are also options to automatically update my facebook and twitter pages if I want to.

I was lucky enough to get a hands-on play with an XO laptop at last night's Geelong web tech meetup.

The XO is a small, robust laptop computer that has been specifically designed for the "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) movement.

The OLPC project has a vision of getting a simple, rugged laptop into the hands of every underpriveleged child in the world to enable education and opportunities that they would otherwise not have.

The laptop itself is impressive, especially considering the mere $180 price tag. It's sturdy with a solid casing and a small screen that's made to be hardy and easily carryable. It's waterproof and dustproof and uses very little power, lasting around three hours under average usage.

What's all this fuss about Google Wave?

It's Google's latest collaborative tool and the buzz in the last week or two has been over preview logins that have been handed out. A couple of us here at Choc Chip were lucky enough to receive previews (thanks Elbert!) and have checked it out.

I must admit that for the first ten minutes after logging in I still couldn't see the power (or the point) of this new technology. How does it work? More importantly, what can I use it for?

A bit of experimentation and the search term "with:public" helped a lot, and my early impressions are below.

But first, if you're not even sure what Google Wave is, this quick video has a simple explanation and overview.

If you live online you're probably using Firefox, arguably the best browser around and the world's second-most popular after Internet Explorer.

People love Firefox because it is free, open-source and very customisable.

Mike at SeeCure IT is a power user of Firefox as well as a friend of mine. He uses Firefox with all sorts of customisable addons, and he recently wrote an article about 12 of his favourites. Here they are.

Google released a new version of its search engine earlier this month which promises to make searching faster and more accurate.

Code named 'Caffeine' the new technology takes place behind-the-scenes, so there should be very few immediate changes but the increase in speed and flexibility means that future upgrades can happen more efficiently.

Google's Matt Cutts explains, "We're shooting to get results identical to previous version. We'll open up a few datacenters with it first and then roll it out."

"Caffeine will be more powerful, flexible and robust - allowing Google to index faster."

"(Caffeine) builds a powerful foundation for including any changes we want to do with indexing. Not so much for taking advantage of semantic, real-time indexing, but for getting good infrastructure in place for growth and unlock more power."

Email is a cheap way to reach large numbers of people. We suggest that every business should have an email list that they send to regularly as part of their online marketing strategy.

But when does sending email become spam?

Spam is essentially unwanted email. If you make sure your readers are recieving quality content, know who you are and have the opportunity to unsubscribe if they want to, then there will rarely be any problems.

The Spam Act 2003

In Australia the Spam Act 2003 makes it illegal to contact anyone by email without their prior consent - which means that any email you send to someone without asking them first could be considered a breach if interpreted strictly.

Drupal is a CMS (Content Management System) that we use so that you can edit your own website.

However, Drupal can be used for much more than this simple task - it's so powerful and flexible that entire complex web applications can be built around the Drupal framework.

This 57-second video from PingVision is a (very) brief introduction to Drupal.

Bing is a new search engine created by Microsoft as the latest tool in its campaign to take control of the web. But can it outshine Google?

At first glance, Bing appears to be based so closely on Google that it's hard to spot any real differences.

The design itself looks like Google, despite the added background images. Yes, there's the search box. Yes, there's the go button. Yes, there's the links to other types of content searches, like image and video.

The returned results page is even displayed in a similar fashion to Google's results.

Business Victoria is running the largest ever small business festival in Victoria this August. 'Energise Enterprise' will comprise over 400 individual events focussing on helping businesses thrive in tough times.

Highlights include:

IE6ify, Elbert F's most recent home-grown creation, has gained popularity so much that it's now drawing over 5000 visits a day simply from social websites like Twitter and Facebook.

This site will appeal to all the web designers out there who still have to make sites work with Internet Explorer 6: the 'IE6ify' bookmarklet will break any website in any browser, no matter how standards-compliant!

As Elbert says on the site:

After years of observation and reverse engineering I am proud to say I have been able to reproduce the IE6 algorithm to break even the most standards-compliant websites.

Google Wave is an amazing new technology that has the ability to change the web far more than anything else I've seen.

Wave integrates lots of different ways that people currently communicate on the web, pulling together email, Instant Messaging and social sharing websites. But far more than just lumping them together, Google Wave promises to redefine the way we use these technologies so much that they won't be separate at all.

The smoothness of operation looks amazing - everything is realtime, so you can see the other person typing on your screen, and you can type into the same area at the same time. Then sharing a video is as simple as drag-and-drop the media file into the same window.

From the Google Wave website:

In web design we use a 6-character hexadecimal code to represent each colour, it's a little technical if you haven't used it before but every web designer will understand what I'm talking about.

Using hex for a colour means that we use a string of 6 characters made up of numbers 0 - 9 plus the letters A - F to create each colour.

This week I was thinking about how we can use the letters part of this equation to make colours that spell a word. This is geeky on two levels: a mix of web-design geek and anagram geek.

Below are some of the words that I came up with that can be created as colours. I could only think of a few that work properly, and a few more that slightly cheat by being combinations of two-, three- and four-letter words.

It's fun: the colour "beaded" could be used for a jewellery site, while "facade" should always be used for those scam phishing sites that pretend to be someone else.

Internet Explorer 8 was officially released by Microsoft a few weeks ago, meaning that many users who allow Windows automatic updates will now have it running on their system.

If you did not recieve it as an automatic update, you can download it free from Microsoft.

Why upgrade?

The problems with Internet Explorer 6 have been widely documented, but unfortunately many users still seem to have that version installed on their Windows XP system. What this has meant in the past is that as web designers, we have to work around the problems with IE 6 to make sure that our designs still work with that browser.

We launched the official Great Ocean Road website for the Geelong Otway region a few days ago, and it is already meeting with approval from tourism authorities and readers.

The Great Ocean Road is one of our state's top tourism destinations and this new site, produced for Geelong Otway Tourism, is designed to showcase the region and provide information for consumers on accommodation, things to do, destinations, festivals, and other tourist activities.

Drupal has become a growing force in building Social Websites and sites that have a high level of user interaction.

A recent article by the National Wildlife Federation hails using Drupal as one of the Top 10 ways to change the world using social media.

Microsoft is giving away free copies of the new Windows 7 operating system in an attempt to respond to criticism of Vista.

Windows 7 is said to be faster to load, simpler to use and smarter in the way it learns from your common behaviour.

The Release Candidate is a 3GB download from Microsoft, and feedback received during its use will guide the final changes and bug fixes made before the official release. Using the software will be free over the next 12 months, after which you can decide to pay to keep it or revert to your current version.

Watch this video to see some of the cool new features of Windows 7:

I spent some time over the Easter weekend pulling together DailyKu - a website that delivers a daily haiku poem via Twitter.

The concept is simple: gather a database of haiku poems written by the original Japanese masters in the 16th to 18th Centurys, then write a script to post one per day to a Twitter account automatically.

If you're on Twitter, follow DailyKu and check it out!

If you come across this post and you're hoping to get a position as a web designer, read over the advice below to make the most of your contact with a potential employer.

The practices of applying to advertised positions and also sending your resume to likely employers are good ways to start. From my recent experience in hiring a new team member, let me tell you what I have noticed works when it comes to your initial contact.

1. Include examples of your work

Yes, this is for you recent graduates who send me resumes at the end of every semester. Resumes that are beautifully typed, have headings and bullet points and everything else, but don't include any examples of graphical or web work.

I don't mean to be harsh but if you want a job as a web designer I am going to base my judgement of you almost exclusively on your work examples. If you can't even put a simple portfolio online, then I'm sorry but I can't even consider you for the position.

Choc Chip multimedia is proud to welcome lead web developer and programmer Elbert F to our team.

Elbert is a talented and creative developer who I was lucky to meet at the last Geelong Web Meetup. Not only is he a gun PHP programmer (the language we use to build our websites) but he is adept with many other web languages, has created his own sophisticated CMS, is a Twitter superstar and gets interviewed by web development magazines.

I enjoyed university immensely when I was studying and I have often thought of going back - but the thought of years of night classes, endless homework and the cost have made it impossible.

The internet has always been a source of information and learning, and recently two sites caught my eye that purposefully take online education beyond tutorials or encyclopaedias and aim to provide structured, high-quality content that bears more resemblance to a traditional university experience - but without the hassles.

Academic Earth

Academic Earth is a new website that shows lectures from universities all over the world on video, including Yale, Berkeley, Harvard and MIT. More courses are being added all the time so personally I'm hoping there'll be some PHP units among them.

Coming up with a great idea for your new online business is only the start of the road - you've got to build the website, market effectively, handle the community, grow and then figure out how to make income from it all.

But as the table below shows, there can be big rewards if you can sell your site to an established business looking to expand.

DrupalModules.com is a classic 'mashup' website, combining module information and downloads from the main drupal.org website with the ability to review, bookmark and vote for your favourites.

What's a mashup? From wikipedia:

In web development, a mashup is a Web application that combines data from one or more sources into a single integrated tool. The term Mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently done by access to open APIs and data sources to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data. An example of a mashup is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct Web service that was not originally provided by either source.

If you're a web designer or are interested in web technologies and social networking tools, join the Geelong Web Technology Meetup Group and come along to the next get-together.

A loose connection of web designers and users from the Geelong region have gathered informally a few times over the last 12 months for a good time discussing our passions and learning from each other. We're now getting slightly more organised and plan to get together regularly, every month or so.

The internet has a short but interesting history, starting well before Tim Berners-Lee invented the 'web' as we know it now. The whole story of the development process is shown in this animation created by German designer Melih Bilgil when he was a student.