Hyperviews Online

The Canada West Coast chapter of STC has launched a new site on the Expression Engine publishing system.  http://www.stcwestcoast.ca

Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association. 2007 LITA National Forum: Technology with Altitude: 10 Years of the LITA National Forum. Denver, Colorado, USA. October 4-7, 2007.

Presentations will have a technological focus and pertain to libraries and/or be of interest to librarians. The scope of the conference call for papers included:

1. Social Computing: social tools, collaborative software, gaming technologies…

2. New Media: wireless connectivity, iPods, handhelds… (more…)

Thanks to Online SIG member Eileen Potter for these links.

You can set up an audio blog, a talk show online, at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ The “Writing” category has ]interviews with a “top, new poet” in Texas as voted by the Dallas Literary Society and a place where people can call in and share their writing with an audience.

Digital grafitti characterizes messages left “in mid-air,” tied to GPS coordinates for a given location and seen only when looking at that location through a special device. Look through it and see messages from other people, internet addresses, drawings, any messages entered on the device at that location, floating all around you). How will that change technical writing and copy writing? Eileen suggests we imagine creating content for a travel guide with this technology.
http://unrated.wordpress.com/2006/11/08/digital-graffiti-leave-messages-in-mid-air/

If you need to format XML code for easy reading or for printing, you can download a style sheet to do that. The article has full details of how the style sheet was developed. The style sheet is at the end.

A report appeared today on Search Engine Watch that is especially useful because it distinguishes among various types of disabilities and the assoicated requirements for accessibility.

The site http://www.htmlgoodies.com/, maintained by Joe Burns, provides resources and links to additional ones including a forum on web design.

Max Kiesler has assembled comprehensive information on accessible AJAX applications: “How to Make Your AJAX Applications Accessible - 40 Tutorials and Articles.” Karen Mardahl provided this information.

In July, 2006 a discussion arose on an STC list about whether or not to include a Go button with a dropdown list. In response Whitney Quesenbery pointed out an article originally published in the January, 200s issue of Usability Interface, newsletter of the STC Usability and User Experience community: “Should a Go button be included with a drop down list?” by Vannesa Mosher and Steven Weintraub. The article summarizes a list discussion of the same topic.

Open Source Software (OSS) refers to any application for which the source code is distributed. A definition is available online.

Many organisations work with both Open Source Software and proprietary commerical software. Open source content management sytems have the advantage of supporting open standards and thus being easier to integrate with other open source and with proprietary systems. The international association for Open Source Content Management has more information.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has “validation pages,” where developers can enter a path, file name, or free text for HTML or CSS to be checked for conformance to the standard. If the code passes validation, the site can display the W3C logo.

Scoop is a content management application used by journalists to produce major newspapers and magazines. The main editing tool is Scoop Edit for print or Scoop Headline for web. All edited material is stored in a central database, on a file server, a SQL server, or both. Scoop eLibrary provides archival searching for old articles. This system is described fully in an article on the Swedish producer’s site.

Scoop is also the name of a blogging application used by many popular sites. This application allows site users to make posts and comments, and has special ranking features to support discussion by a community. Thus topics stay on the main page because they are important to users of the site. There are also categories, created by site administrators, which allow for retrieving posts by topic, and navigational lists of posts made recently or by frequent posters.

W3C Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 was published on June 27 as a candidate recommendation.

Sun Labs reports researching methods of searching for music by how it sounds, or its acoustic content, They envision a system, “Search Inside the Music.”

Using this technology people would be able to find and organize music based on lyrics, musical theme, melody, tempo, rhythm, and instrumentation. Searching by these characteristics would find music that “sounds like” the music someone has in mind. The intent is to ultimately allow someone to hum a few bars and find a recording in that way. (more…)

A service called Grokker is available as a demo to search Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Amazon. Although the demo does not search everything on the Web, it’s a useful tool in research, helping to aggregate results that are meaningful to the searcher.

This article is reprinted from Ragged Left, newsletter of the Berkeley chapter STC, September/October 2005. It is the review of the chapter’s August 2005 meeting by Ron Sands.

At the August 2005 Berkeley chapter meeting, Dana Chisnell of UsabilityWorks gave an interactive presentation on evaluation of usability using heuristics and personas. The presentation summarized the findings of two research papers she co-wrote with Janice (Ginny) Redish of Redish & Associates, Inc. Their research was commissioned by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). All quotations in this article are from the paper “Designing Web Sites for Older Adults: Expert Review of Usability for Older Adults at 50 Web Sites,” which is available for download at the AARP web site. (more…)