Siolon

I don’t post videos often, but this video is worth mentioning. It’s done by a cultural anthropologist on the evolution of the web to a more collaborative, interactive, “Web 2.0″ environment. (read more...)

My roommate asked me to create a website for his upcoming wedding. Well, I decided it would be a good opportunity to attempt to host my own website. I didn’t know where to begin, but I knew what I had. I had an extra computer that had a 2.4 GHz processor, 512MB RAM, and a 160 GB hard drive running Windows XP Professional SP2. Now, you don’t need two computers to do this, but I had the luxury. There is a little bit of leg work, but I promise that you will learn a ton; and it (read more...)

The subtitle to this essay is: “A Closer Look at the Hidden Drivers and Enablers of the Second Internet Revolution,” and it does give an interesting analysis on why PHP is ideal for “Web 2.0″ applications. The following reason is given: “But what makes PHP so attractive for Web 2.0? It’s the same features that make Web 2.0 itself so attractive: It’s easy to learn, easy to use, lightweight while offering full functionality and it can easily be extended. Modules and libraries make PHP work with a large number of APIs and other Web 2.0 technologies. For example, there are (read more...)

I remember when I first learned of AJAX, and I remember thinking: “I’ll never figure that out.” Well, remember when you never thought you’d learn how to remove the underline on your links with CSS? That proved easier than we thought (we later found out that CSS is an amazingly powerful presentation language). We need to cut through the needless language and get to the meat of AJAX. We don’t need to worry about what the XMLHttpRequest object is at this point. Often designers only need to know enough to duplicate an effect and not (read more...)

Every web designer has a top 10 list of things that piss them off in web design. I helped teach a class on introductory web design, and I constructed the following list to hopefully keep those students from making the same mistakes I did. 1. Be cognizant of other viewers and demographic. When we design for the web, we must understand that the majority of the time your website will not look the same as you see it on your screen. Web design is a difficult field, because the designer has some many constraints in designing their sites. Here (read more...)