Unintentionally Blank

Today the City of London unveiled it’s wi-fi network.

The mesh network covers 95% of the City of London to provide wi-fi access to 350,000 people. There’s only one problem, it’s not free! It is, however, a step in the right direction for the free wi-fi that we all hope for. It can’t be long, Norwich has it, Manchester are planning it, I only wonder what the likelihood of a free service is when paid versions are sprouting up now. At least here the first month is free, I might take my laptop to work this week. Then again, I might just stay at my desk at lunchtime and use the Internet there!

Andy Rutledge takes a look at a few similar looking sites.

You would have thought that the marketing arms of each of the featured clones would have noticed that their sites were almost identical to their competitors. Then again, maybe they haven’t changed out of admiration for each other’s design ability. Whichever is true, I would like to see the result if one, like Andy suggests, steps out of line and makes for some originality. Andy only picked up on American department stores, but check out Next, Debenhams, House of Fraser and John Lewis. Again, like Andy suggests, take a logo and put it on another site. You couldn’t tell the difference!

Once more, Gack Ink is open for submissions.

The little Bring Your Own Blog network is growing in both numbers and personality. Get on board now.

Google’s webmaster central reports that it is now even easier to tell them where your sitemap is.

All you have to do now is add the following line into your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
Easy as that!

Gack Ink, the bring your own blog network, announced the latest blogs to join.

Welcome to Denise Kincy Grier’s Writing Journey, Home Office Women, Live Life - Organics and Your Health, The Pleasure of Being a Woman, Middle Zone Musings, Grow Your Writing Business and Work at Home Revolution.

Dawud Miracle demonstrates exactly why you should never use “click here” as your link text.

Apart from destroying certain SEO properties of a link and failing no less than two (that I can think off from the top of my head) points in the WCAG 1.0, it makes a post look ridiculous. Thanks Dawud for making it painfully obvious that you should consider your anchor text every time you link.

Win a Microsoft Zune

John Chow, who’s blog helps you make money on the internet, is giving away a 30GB Microsoft Zune. All you have to do is link to it, like this! It’s worth a go!

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?

According to the BBC, IBM are set to release a web browser specifically for blind and partially sighted users. The aim of the Accessibility Browser is to give access to and control over multimedia content embedded in websites to those who can’t use a mouse for browsing.

Screen readers and self-talking browsers are not able to deal with video and animation, some of which starts playing as soon as a page is loaded.

This often interferes with the synthesised speech output from the screen-reader software.

Using the A-Browser, a vision-impaired person can control media content by using predefined shortcut keys, rather than having to look for the control buttons using a mouse.

Continue reading “Accessibility Browser From IBM - Helps Blind “See” Web Video” »

Master of search and advertising, Google certainly doesn’t waste time in it’s business ventures! On Friday, I was surprised to read the unsubstantiated, and self proclaimed 40% likely, rumour that Google was to buy YouTube. Now I see that they have paid $1.65 billion for the social video site.

So what of Google Video? What does this tell us about Google’s current strategies? First search and advertising on Myspace now they buy up another popular social site, have they run out of ideas or did they miss the web 2.0 boat and decided to throw their money into catching up? What do you think?

Then again, $1.65 billion… if only I had that much to spend.