Glen Scott - Keeping it simple, since 1977

The BBC News site has undergone a redesign, and they have published on their blog some of the thinking behind it. The key point is that they have listened carefully to user feedback:

…we did some research asking you what you thought we should change about the site. Many of those we asked said leave it alone - don’t change a thing. But it was also clear from the feedback we got that there were others who thought the site design could do with a bit of a revamp – something we’d been thinking about doing for a while.

I personally think it’s a big improvement, with the content having more room to breathe. However, you can’t please everyone judging by the comments on the blog…

I can’t stand the new layout. The old design meant that my browser window did not have to fill the width of my screen. The new design does. I hate it.

• BBC News
• BBC NEWS | The Editors - Refreshing Changes

Search results on Yahoo now include the HTML lang attribute which has important consequences for screen readers:

If you do not see the text but you get it read out to you then the pronounciation is very important. Visually impaired surfers use screen readers to tell them what is on the current page, and by defining the language, you make this a lot easier. Screen readers have different voices for different languages with the correct pronounciation rules.

Yahoo! search results now with natural language support

This evening I upgraded WordPress to version 2.5. All seems good so far, but please let me know if you spot any oddities.

Very geeky, but very cool: watch Star Wars in your Terminal:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

• FuseCal - The Web’s Events in Your Calendar
  I was thinking about this just yesterday: how do I keep my web-based calendar synchronised with iCal. This looks like it could fit the bill.
  (tags: ajax cool free google mac software tools web web2.0 web20 website)
• The Best Unit Testing Resources: Beginner to Expert : Codeulate.
  A good starting point for learning about the good practice of unit testing your code
  (tags: blog coding dev development links programming software)

Interesting article from The Economist on how social networks may be falling into the same trap that AOL and Compuserve have done in the past.

Two of the biggest online phenomena of the past couple of years—social networks such as Facebook, and virtual worlds such as Second Life—look an awful lot like AOL did in 1994. They are closed worlds based on proprietary standards. You cannot easily move information in and out of them: try shifting your Facebook profile to MySpace, or moving a piece of clothing or furniture from Second Life to Entropia Universe.

Ringside Networks are addressing this problem with the “first open source platform” for social networks, Ringside Social Application Server.

• Internet communities | Break down these walls | Economist.com
• Ringside Social Application Server

If you ever have subscribed to an RSS feed and then subsequently been overwhelmed by irrelevant content, then Feed Rinse might be for you. It allows you to filter feeds based on keywords, meaning that you can be a lot more specific about the content arriving in your feed reader.

Feed Rinse

To make it easier to navigate pages using the keyboard, go into Safari Preferences and under the Advanced tab, turn on “Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage”. Now you can use tab to go forward through links and form elements on a page, and shift-tab to go backwards. Follow a highlighted link simply by pressing return.

The new beta 3 version of Messenger for Mac allows you to make voice calls to other Messenger users for free:

Mac Version - Yahoo! Messenger

Last November, OpenSocial was created to help build infrastructure for the social web. OpenSocial provides a common mechanism for developers to easily hook into many different social networks and extend their functionality.

Official Google Blog: OpenSocial continues to grow: Welcome, Yahoo!