Unintentionally Blank

I just signed up to StumbleUpon, I have been using del.icio.us more and more recently, I occasionally Digg worthy sites and I have a small MyBlogLog community. Sites and services like this are great fun, useful and part of the whole web 2.0 experience. Having been pretty quiet online, save for this blog and a few comments I make on others’ blogs, I am not really a member of any community. This means that I have been missing out on one of the main ingredients in this social Internet: friends.

I’m not complaining about being lonely, I just want someone to share my bookmarks with, someone who might enjoy articles that I digg, someone to guide my stumbling, even a few more members in my MyBlogLog community. So go on, add me, make me your friend on any of the above and let me share more of my experiences with you.

It’s not all selfish though, I want to see what you have bookmarked, what you digg, what you like to stumble. I’d like to join your community, read your blog and be your friend too. Web 2.0 is the social web and I want to play a bigger part in it.

While we are on this topic, if you have any tips for how to use these services not to increase traffic, but to get a better experience of the web, please leave me a comment. I’d be very interested to hear how you use any of the sites I mention above, or whatever your favourite web 2.0 site is.

I don’t have the best job in the world, I’m not currently employed in something I wish to do for very much longer, but every day I spend there gives me more experience, makes me understand business a little better and makes me worth just that little bit more to my next employer. The other day I took a big step up.

Most of my day is spent solving problems. We have a new human resources system with a load of problems (mostly user error, but I’m not going into that right now) and my job, along with the rest of the team is to fix these problems, improve the system and eventually realise a project that has been ongoing for a number of years now. Basically, I am part of a help desk, so I now know about things like Service Level Agreements and occasionally hear about change management. Most of it goes over my head and I continue to work away at the problems suffered by individuals or groups using the system. Until this week that is.

Continue reading “Responsibility And A Step Up The Working Ladder” »

Fadtastic reports that only 94 (22%) of sites belonging to W3C are valid.

Admittedly, having valid HTML is not the most important thing in the world (even though it should be). However, for the W3C, the organisation who makes the standards, there should be some sort of leading by example. The fact that a quarter of the sites had no DOCTYPE declaration and 24% had more than 50 errors is worrying. Still, the article does show how the member sites are improving (slowly) over the years.

Josiah Cole rants about what not to do when building a website and gets it right all 19 times.

I particularly liked this article as I read it after seeing one of the worst websites I have ever come across today. The Halo 3 website fails on several of the points Josiah makes, including 2, 7, 9 and 14. The site makes you load a flash page which has no content on just so that you click a link to find out more which turns out to be a static HTML page. What an experience!

Wordpress 2.1.3 (and 2.0.10) have been released.

I upgraded today, it was painless and will keep my blog safe.

It’s April 5th somewhere in the world, so Naked Day is upon us.

See how nicely my content works, even without all the prettiness of my stylesheets. I think Unintentionally Blank looks good naked, what about you? Are you taking part?

April 5th is CSS Naked Day! What does this mean? If you visit Unintentionally Blank, or any other of the sites on the Naked Day List on April 5th you won’t see any of the design that we all put so much effort into. Instead, you will see the bare HTML.

Why Would You Do That?

No CSS? Won’t that make the site unusable, unreadable, unbearable? The simple answer is, “No”. As this site follows web standards and uses semantic markup, you will still be able to use and read this site as intended. It will all be in black and white and standard fonts, sidebar underneath the main content and none of these fancy gradients, but the text will be there, the headings will be obvious and the underlying structure of the site will shine through.

The aim of the exercise is to prove the benefits of separating content from design, the ability of markup to describe a site in a perfectly readable way and being a bit of a geek. I’d have taken part last year, but this blog was merely a twinkle in my eye then. Still, I remember reading about it last year and wishing I had the ability to take part, not just the site, but the markup too. This year both goals have been achieved and I will be proud to be naked.

Join In!

Is your naked <body> good enough to take part too? Are you going to strip off this week? If you are proud of your code and want to support web standards, join in. If you’re using WordPress, there’s even a Naked Day plugin available.

Come on, let’s get naked!