Unintentionally Blank

Just over a week and a half ago the BBC launched a new home page and I just wanted to say how impressed I was with all of it! Not only is it a huge departure, in my opinion, from the previous homepage, incorporating web 2.0 style drag and drop and customisation, it is also a magnificent piece of coding.

Why?

Well, please don’t call me an asshole, but the page validates as XHTML (even the Flash clock in the top right hand side, more on that in a later post). Not only that, it also, unlike some big websites, works without JavaScript enabled (though it makes excellent use of my current favourite library, jQuery and the effects plugin Interface). With accessibility in mind, the two features above are a good start, also all images had relevant alt attributes, form inputs have relevant labels, there are links for accessibility help for the whole site and display options to change the colour scheme and size of the text. I even visited the site on my mobile, using Opera Mini, and everything worked very nicely.

I Am Impressed

Back in 2003, Molly Holzschlag rubished the BBC for their site’s conformance to standards after reporter Andrew Sinclair claimed “Some get it right: the BBC website is considered to be one of the best for people with disabilities”. It has been a long time and I don’t know what version of the site she looked at then, but the new home page should change her mind now.

The BBC has changed up its home page, the main page and flagship of their whole site, and they have done it very nicely. The rest of the site is still the same, but I would like to think that, after launching the front page, there is a lot of work going on in the background to bring the rest of the site in line. For web standards this is pretty huge, I am sure a lot of sites look up to the BBC for guidance and inspiration. To see such an important, highly trafficked and well respected site come out with a valid, accessible home page shows everyone that it can be done.

What do you think of the new BBC home page?

The MyBlogLog feature of auto joining a community once you had visited it enough times is back. This is a great feature as it gives an organic growth to communities, joining people up to yours if they happen to visit it a number of times but never remember to click to the join the community.

It Half Works

I received an email notification this morning that I had auto joined two communities, Momgadget and The Wrong Advices. Sure enough, they both show up in my communities, but there is no sign of me in their communities.

I appreciate that there is a lot to be done, sorting spam, moving to Yahoo, etc. and I am glad that things are moving forward. I was particularly happy when they put a few more measures in to stop gaming MyBlogLog. I was just sad to see that a previously active feature has been announced again and doesn’t work.

Come on MyBlogLog, I like the service, keep up the good work and sort this out!

In other news, I will be finishing the second part of how to style the MyBlogLog readers list soon, but everything is busy, busy, busy at the minute!

Edit: It seems to have worked now, I am now a member of both the communities I mention. I wonder if there is a time delay on appearing in your communities that you auto joined or if it was a bug that the team have quickly ironed out. Either way, I’m glad to see it’s working now!

Over a month ago I signed up to Spotplex, a web 2.0 site that TechCrunch called a better Digg. I gave my own first impressions on the Spotplex service at the time and settled down to see whether it would develop into a useful popularity site, capable of unearthing interesting articles and driving traffic to worthy sites, or whether it would slip away quietly and concede defeat to the already established services. So far it has hardly made a splash, but Spotplex is not giving up just yet as it unveilled two new features to it’s users today.

Continue reading “An Update On Spotplex” »

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.

Digg has had a hard week. What with Technosailor’s (anti) Digg Week and Wired news, admittedly arguably immorally, exposing the ability to buy diggs. Now they have a new competitor, one that can’t be bought and won’t suffer from Digg’s other flaws. Spotplex is a similar system, but it ranks articles on how many page views it gets in a certain time period.

What is Spotplex?

Spotplex provides internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count. In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. It is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe.

Continue reading “Spotplex - First Impressions” »