A while ago I posted a link to a Comedy Central South Park character creator that I used to design what I would look like if I were on South Park. Today I discovered another great time waster that lets you build yourself as a plastic model, simila to the Lego people that we all used to love. Chekc out Reasonably Clever‘s Mini-Mizer for more fun.
Edit: The presentation will be on Monday, November 7, 2005. The original email I received had the date wrong and I didn’t bother to check. 🙂
I got an email from one of the HighEdWeDev organizers yesterday informing me that my presentation proposal has been accepted. I’ll be presenting a one-hour session in the Technical: Tools & Security track entitled Bringing True Interactivity to Web Applications with XML Requests. Below is the abstract that I submitted:
The web’s page metaphor works great for static data—but let’s face it—when it comes to interactivity, it falls short. Submitting a form and waiting for the page to refresh isn’t much more advanced than submitting your paper expense report and waiting for your bursar to send you a check through interoffice mail. For years GUI-based applications have responded to our key presses and mouse clicks and provided us with hints, shortcuts, and error checking—without refreshing the screen or making us wait, so why can’t the web be the same? This presentation will introduce you to the XMLHttpReqest object and will show you how to make your web pages interact behind-the-scenes with server-side scripts to provide complex data validation, data lookups, and a true interactive experience for your users.
My presentation is scheduled for Monday, November 7, 2005 at 2:45 p.m. If you’ll be attending the conference, be sure to check it out. If you can’t make it, I’ll be posting my handouts and examples on this site—stay tuned.
I just discovered a cool new WYSIWYG editor for web browsers called TinyMCE. It is entirely driven with JavaScript—no special plugins or applets required—and it replaces <textarea> tags on teh page at runtime, so it integrates seemlessly into existing apps while non-compliant browsers continue to show the textarea.
With about 5 minutes of work I was able to insert TinyMCE into my WordPress admin page. Did it work? This post should tell you that.
In recent posts to The Daily Report such as Tag Clouds are the New Mullets and Remove Forebrain and Serve, Zeldman has blasted tag clouds because of their tendancy to make popular topics even more popular while making less popular topics disappear into obscurity. Tag clouds are lists of links to related topics that have become popular on sites like Flickr. In Flickr’s case, users create tags, or keywords, to describe their images; a tag’s popularity is measured by how many people use it to describe their photos. As a tag becomes popular its visual style on the page changes (often growing in size or boldness) or it receives a higher standing on site some other way, causing more people t use that tag and thereby causing a vicious cycle where the tag become even more popular. Less popular tags, by contrast, lose their popularity until they fall off the list, never to be heard from again. In theory unpopular topics become lost.
That got me thinking. What would happen if we highlighted the least popular topics and forgot about the rest? Theoretically this would cause unpopular topics to gain popularity, which would in turn drop them off the list. That would make room for new topics on the list, keeping it fresh, and as those became popular they’d fall off, allowing the previously popular but now unpopular topics to come back. Plus, popular topics should be more expected, so they’d be more likely to be the topic of searches or other retrieval methods, and wouldn’t be as likely to get lost.
Confused yet?
I never thought that I’d go home to go to an RIT hockey game, but it looks like I’ll have the chance on November 26. RIT bigins thir first year playing Division I games next season and their schedule has them pitted against American International College in Springfield on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Since I’lls till be home from Thanksgiving and this will be one of RIT’s first D-I road games, I’m definitely going to have to go cheer on the Tigers that night.
Hmmm…I think I’m going to need to get a big huge RIT flag or something to take with me. Watch for me on the local news…