Sunday, March 25. 2007
Innovative/Productive Workspaces
I'm currently working on the report for the latest project of my MSc. As well as causing the recent absence of posts on this blog it is also causing me to spend hours working at my desk at home. Sadly, I can't honestly say my workspace was designed for this.
One of the problems with living in rented accommodation, especially when you often move on to somewhere new every year, is that you can't really customise the space to your needs. I'm almost as well off here as I've ever been as a student. The bed, storage and couch in my own room (that's something new) are all about as good as I could hope. The desk just doesn't meet my needs though.
This added time at my desk has set me to thinking about how it could be better. Most people with more than a passing interest in the internet will probably be familiar with the working conditions at the Googleplex and to a lesser extent Yahoo. A gym, a canteen serving edible food, the freedom to go seemingly wild in your own little space and of course those essential spacehoppers.
Can I get close to this?
Continue reading "Innovative/Productive Workspaces"
One of the problems with living in rented accommodation, especially when you often move on to somewhere new every year, is that you can't really customise the space to your needs. I'm almost as well off here as I've ever been as a student. The bed, storage and couch in my own room (that's something new) are all about as good as I could hope. The desk just doesn't meet my needs though.
This added time at my desk has set me to thinking about how it could be better. Most people with more than a passing interest in the internet will probably be familiar with the working conditions at the Googleplex and to a lesser extent Yahoo. A gym, a canteen serving edible food, the freedom to go seemingly wild in your own little space and of course those essential spacehoppers.
Can I get close to this?
Continue reading "Innovative/Productive Workspaces"
Friday, March 9. 2007
Part 3: Frames
This is the final instalment in a three part series. In part 1 I briefly outlined how to prevent other sites displaying your web pages within frames. In part 2 I talked about how to allow exceptions for the rare situations when you want to allow sites to display your web pages in frames on there site.
In this final post I'm going to discuss how to detect when your web pages are displayed in frames in other sites. Continue reading "Part 3: Frames"
In this final post I'm going to discuss how to detect when your web pages are displayed in frames in other sites. Continue reading "Part 3: Frames"
Site Tour
A few days ago I stumbled upon an interesting little tool to generate site tours for a site. I haven't really dived into the functionality yet but it is definitely something I expect to use in the future.
It seems such a brilliant idea that I thought someone else would have done it as well but a brief search on hotscripts and the like brings nothing up. I would be interested to see whether anyone has implemented this in another way but apparently not.
The library for the tour wizard is called Amberjack. It's small at just 4k, LGPL licensed and setting it up couldn't be easier. There is a form on the website where you enter the urls you want to highlight in the tour and from that you get a snippet of html code which contains a placeholder for the html which forms the commentary on the tour. After that all you do is insert the html on the pages that form part of the tour and you're ready to go.
The only qualm I have with the default setup is that the html links back to the amberjack site for the javascript library. Personally I would much rather host that file locally.
Overall it looks like a really nice way of engaging with your audience and demonstrating what your site can do.
It seems such a brilliant idea that I thought someone else would have done it as well but a brief search on hotscripts and the like brings nothing up. I would be interested to see whether anyone has implemented this in another way but apparently not.
The library for the tour wizard is called Amberjack. It's small at just 4k, LGPL licensed and setting it up couldn't be easier. There is a form on the website where you enter the urls you want to highlight in the tour and from that you get a snippet of html code which contains a placeholder for the html which forms the commentary on the tour. After that all you do is insert the html on the pages that form part of the tour and you're ready to go.
The only qualm I have with the default setup is that the html links back to the amberjack site for the javascript library. Personally I would much rather host that file locally.
Overall it looks like a really nice way of engaging with your audience and demonstrating what your site can do.
