Things in the web community have been getting rather exciting over the past few weeks. People are coming up with new ideas and leaps are being made forward in the areas of usability and accessibility.
The first thing that is extremely exciting is the old tool XMLHttpRequest. Google is (at the time of this writing) playing with it in there labs and have implemented it rather well. Others have also been playing with it using their install of Moveable Type whereas others have already begun using it in their web apps.
For those of you that have no idea what XMLHttpRequest is - it’s a way web developers can develop sites more like desktop software. It allows us to run things in the background and let a web surfer do things on our site without forcing them to refresh the page. Things are instant.
The other exciting thing that is happening is the fight against “Comment Spam”. A few days ago a report was written by Six Apart, the group that brought us Moveable Type. In this report, it walks us through quite a bit of information along with tactics to take in order to avoid SPAM.
Then, just yesterday, Google announced on their blog the strategy of not searching/indexing links that have the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks.
Quote from Google Blog From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
The idea has been taken so well by the community that thousands of people from large companies to individuals have already implemented this tactic. Yahoo and MSN have also pledged to not follow sites with this attribute in it as well.
As stated however - this doesn’t stop sites from being spammed but it does stop the reason why SPAMMERS are trying to put their information on our sites.
theParagon.ORG network has already taken huge strides in avoiding comment spam and in the next couple days a few rather large leaps will be taken to almost completely stop it on all sites hosted on theParagon network. I will be rolling out fixes to other friends and family these fixes once they have been completed on my end.
So these are just a few things that have already made 2005 very exciting. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
posted on January 22, 2005| 10:18 AM EST
A few days later I’m finding myself extremely tired and have seemed to lost my well planned out sleeping schedule. Waking up a few times a night and not really knowing if you’re dreaming is slowly becoming the norm.
Adding fuel to the fire - last night I must have ate something I shouldn’t have and ended up with stomach pains the whole night and well into the morning. Around 11am or so my body decided whatever it was I ate had to leave and in a rather quick, hunched over run to the bathroom led me into a couple minutes of hugging the toilet. For those that know me - this is also my first time throwing up.
Hours later things are much better but the thought of shoveling more food into my delicate stomach is far from my mind.
Baby Jessica is however doing wonderfully. Today she slept long enough for both Jodi and I to catch up on sleep we lost the night before. In fact, right now, she’s sitting in a little baby chair sleeping preciously away to background music of Baby Neptune.
posted on January 16, 2005| 5:32 PM EST
Some pretty monumental things have happened to me this week and I haven’t had one chance to hop on my computer and let you all know.
If you haven’t already heard from my lovely wife - we had a baby girl on January 12, 2005 at 3:42pm.
She’s a cutie with large wondering eyes and deep dimples when she smiles.
I really don’t know what to say about the whole event because I’ve explained it so many times to those of you that visited us in the delivery room after the event.
I’m extremely excited to now be a dad but it hasn’t fully hit me yet (that I know of). I am much more protective of my two girls I’ve noticed and they both have taken so much of my attention these past few days that I haven’t even wanted to get on my computer and catch up on my hundreds of unread RSS feeds. Which for those of you that are in the know - unread RSS feeds eat deeply away at me until I adhere to their bits of information.
Even though I don’t have much to say here - I did manage to put together 27 thousand words together over here.
posted on January 15, 2005| 1:28 AM EST
The baby is coming some day soon (no - not right now) and I have some reading up to do. I like to be a prepared for when things happen and thanks to Jodi and all her baby learning - she’s provided me with 2 very good articles to read up on.
posted on January 6, 2005| 12:07 PM EST
Over the New Years Holiday weekend Jason Perton jokingly said someone should put together a website that organizes/shows all of the upcoming weddings this summer.
Well, I had a spare hour and a half and thought I would throw something together.
Not all the information is in there but hopefully those of you getting married will add your information by clicking on “Add/Change Information”. This will be very helpful to everyone but mostly to me in trying to keep all these dates straight.
2005 Wedding Site:
http://www.theparagon.org/has/weddings/
Just a quick note for those of you that may try to find the Wedding schedule later on. It will be living in theParagon “Extra” section for the time being.
posted on January 2, 2005| 1:09 PM EST
