Recently in web Category

Western Pennsylvania Health Information for Deaf, Deafblind and Hard-of-Hearing website launched in evening of May 27, 2009.

The website address is: www.healthbridges.info.

The description:

A newly developed website seeking to provide reliable health care information to people who are Deaf, Deafblind and hard-of-hearing, in a format that is accessible to all. In addition, it is our desire to encourage effective communication between healthcare providers and patients by educating both about individual perspectives, rights, and obligations in the healthcare setting.

All of you know who I am writing in very blog here, I developed healthbridges.info site with a team of our deaf task force in Pittsburgh. The site is 100% powered by WordPress, web publishing platform, to ease my development work in my spare time.

I learned something new in my web environment which I never thought of: Deafblind. My priority goal is to have this website is 100% accessibility. I used the free evaluation web tool, WAVE - Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool to track down the accessibility errors and fix in our web site to ensure this is full accessibility for all - especially Deafblind.

I am very grateful to have my learning experience with group of deaf task force, shared the feedback, discussions, and challenges.

This picture above is me and Charles the StarKist Tuna were taken in my Blackberry Curve 8330 camera. I decided to upload this image directly into my Facebook and my Flickr from my Blackberry Curve. Until I visited both sites, I noticed the differences of quality in the picture.... check on your own time to click the image above to see the full picture.

It is obviously that Facebook image is jiggy. Could this be a blame from Facebook BB apps for uploading the mobile image?   Judge yourself!

Being as web developer, my job is to test the layout content on four different browser platforms: Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), IE7, Firefox and Safari to make sure this layout page are all same. If one out of four is different, a glitch or odd function, which are not supposed what I am looking, I had to fix this damn problem. IE6 is the leading problem, and so are web developer's nightmare. This is the reason I hate, hate, hate IE6.

I am currently working five web projects in my spare time. I chose one out of five, Pittsburgh Association of the Deaf clubhouse (PAD) website with Google Analytics to do my analysis based on visitor's stats. I snooped to look the browser capabilities what the visitor uses different browser platform. Here is the chart of most popular browser for the visitors to use web browser:

The first-place IE6 and IE7 combined together in one - the mammoth 74.16 percentage, dwarfed the rest of browser platforms. The second place, AvantGo is a web page & file synchronization service for PDAs and smartphones such as Sidekick and Blackberry. The third place, Firefox 2 is my number one favorite web browser choice for tech savvy.

IE6 has been around since IE7 launched two years ago, because of existing Windows XP comes with IE6, and no one cares to get into Windows Update to upgrade the version to 7. Read the web log entry in 'Save the Developers! Stop Using Internet Explorer 6'. The entry mentioned IE6 have lack of security vulnerabilities, non-standard features & functions and not compatible with other browsers.

Why PAD visitors still using IE6? I don't mind to write the code to detect the visitor with older browser (such as IE6) to block, and force the visitor to switch the list of most recent version of modern browsers. But bad idea, these could be abuse and not friendly for redneck and dummy visitor enough to understand the terminology of computer technologies and Internet. Who wants to deny me?

Microsoft, please help! When will we see IE6 disappear? If no IE6 then my job could be easier to develop websites...

I noticed the differences font format between PC and Mac web browsers while I inputted my "Happy's <3 Day" in my Twitter to post the status in Facebook.  The <3 change into a heart icon in Facebook:

Windows Vista; Firefox 2.0 and IE7 browser.

Imagine to slam my head down what life would be like without computer and Internet, this information is truly revolution and evolution. This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information - created by the same author, terrific Prof Michael Wesch of KSU made 'The Machine Is Using Us' (posted on 2/6/2007), and we couldn't live without technology to manage the information.

Welcome to Technology era!

If you have not seen the film of Project DeafRead Family, check this out! This project is all about connecting to the people around globe, carry the piece of DeafRead logo in the front of video camera lens one place to another.

In the Halloween party, you might have recognize the group of Deaf and CODA children passing the DeafRead logo in the video clip, this is me who I recorded the video. I thought myself the fun part to share with you two unedited clips:

Take #1:

Take #2:

Oh, also I forgot to tell you one thing - DeafRead likes the photo to celebrate the Halloween.

Move over, MySpace. Facebook is now my favorite social networking site of 2007, with dozens and dozens of people and friends who I know from my college, high school and local. They always good to know how are they doing in their lives. Within last few months, Facebook launched a new component, Application. I became addicted with those feature, and glued up on my seat to find the killer application to play around:

Here are list of top ten (in alphabetic order) I do not want to miss this application:

Digg - This application displays your five most recently dugg stories directly to your Facebook profile.

DogBook - I happen to love dog and never own one. This features the dog profile, dog friends, and dogs who I know.

Flickr Photos - allows select your most recent Flickr photos to share into Facebook news feeds.

Graffiti - Draw on the wall to bring your creativity.

How Many? - An interesting statistics to collect gender, political and relationship status from your friends'.

My Flickr - Another one. This app display my photos according to certain criteria such as: Tags, Interesting, Date Range, Photo sets, and all sorts of other sorting and features. (I'd like to have TWO Flickr apps in one place)

My Heritage - Anyone want to know what is real me?

Trakzor - Enable you to track your friends profile and see who's watching yours.

Twitter - See what you and your friends are up to on Twitter and update your Twitter status, right from your Facebook. Seriously, this is application is the reason I started to use Twitter on a daily basis.... in public inside and outside.

Where I've Been - let the buddies know where I have been on the globe.

Very simple and time-saver, I can type and post it right away in less than a minute, instead of thinking of 'as term of my journal' to write the very long essay in this main blog here. Likes to drop the link of joke or two, digging the networking, make a plan or two and hit the road.

I read the good article per mamamusings's article about Twitter criticisms:

The first criticizes the triviality of the content. But asking "who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day" misses the whole point of presence. This isn't about conveying complex theory--it's about letting the people in your distributed network of family and friends have some sense of where you are and what you're doing. And we crave this, I think. When I travel, the first thing I ask the kids on the phone when I call home is "what are you doing?" Not because I really care that much about the show on TV, or the homework they're working on, but because I care about the rhythms and activities of their days. No, most people don't care that I'm sitting in the airport at DCA, or watching a TV show with my husband. But the people who miss being able to share in day-to-day activity with me--family and close friends--do care.

The second type of criticism is that the last thing we need is more interruptions in our already discontinuous and partially attentive connected worlds. What's interesting to me about Twitter, though, is that it actually reduces my craving to surf the web, ping people via IM, and cruise Facebook. I can keep a Twitter IM window open in the background, and check it occasionally just to see what people are up to. There's no obligation to respond, which I typically feel when updates come from individuals via IM or email. Or I can just check my text messages or the web site when I feel like getting a big picture of what my friends are up to.

My main concern myself is about my personal privacy, since my Twitter account is open to public, I had to be careful for avoiding any of my sensitive information.

I find most fascinating myself reading the one line friends' who-I-know or even strangers across the social networking, that make me coming back easy to post. Very easy.

Found via Grant Laird Jr. Blog <- Noesis <- Jared's Rambling Thoughts. Credit goes to Grant who found this video with subtitled first. Thought I MUST post this in my blog, to remind EVERYONE including my Deaf folks what RSS is all about.

If you or I have ever had trouble explaining why someone should get into RSS, or even if you’ve been on the fence about trying the technology, the folks at CommonCraft have released a great resource of video that explains RSS In Plain English; and DotNet have added the subtitled version on this video.

I find this three and half minutes video very informative with subtitled (yay!), to have web idiots, newbies and grandparents to understand. Looking for my big, bold RSS orange icon on right sidebar in my blog to subscribe.

Bloglines is in my blood, and terribly addictive, I couldn't live without this to subscribe from numerous of blog readers, including DeafRead, customize feed through Alexa's Top 20 web traffic rankings including Flickr, CNN and eBay (!).

I am kinda disappointed that few of my folks (such as non-web savvy) still don't get it [RSS], they still prefer to visit websites on their own time frequently, use email subscription or distribution lists in the old fashioned way.

One day, I went back-end blog administrator to analyze the visitors filtered the search words in DeafJoke.TV website. I looked few visitors are trying to find the keyword search word, oral through DeafJoke.TV internal search engine powered by WordPress. The search result for oral is Zero. None.

As I aware there are few video clips identify as oral, and the text-based does not have the word, oral in DeafJoke.TV archives. The search engine cannot filter the video clip format and image format to identify what are in there. How can I solve this to know what's video / image is in there from search engine?

The short, sweet and one word answer: Tag. The not-so-long answer: From wikipedia definition of Tag:

A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (like picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information it is applied to.

What does tag looks like in my very entry here? I applied this on my personal idea: web, technology, search, metadata, definition.

Where can I find tag[s] in my blog? There are multiple ways you could self-service to find: internal blog search field box or in my tag cloud page - displayed all of tags in alphabetical order, setting popularity in order by using smaller font size to larger font size. Take a look an idea from most popular tag-clouds sites:

From left to right: Del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati cloud tags.

I built my first tagging system inside my personal blog, generated by Movable Type blog management system. However, Wordpress (WP) does not include the tagging system but they offers a WP plug-in, Ultimate Tag Warrior, it need to get this plug-in installed manually.

The most popular blog web tools, Blogger, also support tagging. What about Xanga? Yes, they uses 'label' which are same meaning as tag. Take a compare the inputting the tags in blog application page (new entry / post):

Blogger

Movable Type

WordPress

Xanga

Conclusion: After setting up Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in in WordPress for DeafJoke.TV blog site, then oral can be found in search results.

Tags come handy in search engine. It is not necessary to have tags in your blog, but it is more useful if you post vlog or pictures in your blog site. If you build tags, they will come.