Xooxia Development

We all get used to our favorite browser and it’s tough to get anyone to change to something new. (Otherwise, not a person in the world would be using IE!). I’ve been using FireFox for quite a while now for a few reasons. For one, the enhancement capabilities with add-ons. I use Firebug, the web developer toolbar, etc. on a regular basis. When I got up this morning, I never thought I would be testing another browser to replace my beloved FireFox.

However, I was looking over my new feeds for the day and Smashing Magazine had a list of ‘Interesting browsers you have never heard of’ and found one that I thought I’d take a look at.

Flock - The Social Web Browser

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Wow, when you think of anything that has had a huge impact on the web-savvy community, you’d have to first think of Social Bookmarking. It’s the equivalent of calling all of your friends, relatives, adversaries, acquaintances and everyone else in the world with an internet connection and telling them that you’ve just read a great story, then reading the story to them and letting them offer their comments. However, you don’t have to sit on the phone, coffee in one hand and donut in the other, talking for days on end to get your message out. Social Bookmarking was conceived from the well-known ‘Favorites’ folder on your PC. If you’re saving a page to your favorites, wouldn’t your friends be interested in that page as well? Wouldn’t others? What if there was a way to save all of your favorites with comments and allow all of your friends to see what you’ve saved - and then make comments of their own? That’s the whole notion of Social Bookmarking. … Read the rest of this entry »

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When writing web content, use the ‘Inverted Pyramid’ technique

There is a profound difference in the way content is written for the web versus content written in papers and research. Web users have become accustomed to scanning through content and if not quickly becoming satisfied with the information, they click elsewhere. Therefore, it is extremely important to employ the ‘Inverted Pyramid’ technique when writing content for the web.

What is the ‘Inverted Pyramid’ and how is it different from the traditional style of writing you learned as a student?

In traditional writing, you start laying a foundation at the beginning of the writing. You then provide details and explanations and then eventually grow to the conclusion of the paper. The ‘inverted pyramid’ technique, as used most commonly by journalists, is simply providing … Read the rest of this entry »

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My primary inspiration to develop this quick little tutorial is to aid the members of the College in creating content for the website that is keyword rich. However, this should be useful to anyone that is just beginning with Search Engine Optimization and keyword research. I’ve chosen to use the FAQ format with this tutorial as it is the quickest way to be sure I’ve answered questions that I’ve received regarding writing content for search engine optimization. … Read the rest of this entry »

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Google has released version 0.5 of the OpenSocial API. It’s basically a standards based method to write gadgets that can be available to any site that implements the API. What this means for developers is that you’re able to write a gadget once and it can be included in various sites that use OpenSocial. I’ve been tinkering with some of the patterns relevant to social networking, even beginning a small project with a co-worker, and have just begun researching OpenSocial.

In a quick example of what OpenSocial can be used to develop, let’s say that you are a member of an online social network. We’ll call it myNet. Within myNet, you have listed about 45 others as ‘friends’ in your network, so you’re able to send/receive messages to each of them, see what news stories they have commented on, see what pages they’ve recently bookmarked, etc. You have quite a bit of functionality available in myNet. The developers within myNet have given you quite a few options that you can customize to meet your needs. However, you’re also a member … Read the rest of this entry »

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One of the concepts that I find very intriguing today is that of inline editing. Inline editing refers to being able to view a website normally and change the content directly on that page. This concept has been used via data grids for a while now, but is starting to become a more common way to update regular xhtml content on a web page.

The most common way to have a layman update content on a site is through an administration page. That is, the user will log in to the admin section of a site, choose the page to edit from a list of available pages, and then update the content through an online form and submit those changes. The changes are entered into the database and the next time the page is loaded, the server-side code pulls the new content to include into the page.

There are two obvious drawbacks to this set-up. … Read the rest of this entry »

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