Live streaming from The White House

I started writing this post when I started streaming the live video feed of President Obama's joint session of Congress on 2/24. I stopped fifteen minutes later because the whitehouse.gov bandwidth is shot, and I couldn't watch the address. :(

The site also uses Flash Player 10, which isn't installed on my computer. I tried subscribing to the RSS feed, but the link is broken. There is also a White House blog and a White House youtube channel.

The Washington Post also noticed the shortcomings of the website and did an article about how the Obama campaign team utilized technology throughout the campaign, and how the Obama Administration would like to utilize technology now. It also discusses the bumps in the road the Administration's web team has encountered. Check it out. :)

Quick Web Typography Guide

Contrast - Make sure that most of the text on page is dark on a light background. You can use light text on a dark background, but only do this for headings, links, and only a few words, because it is more difficult to read. If you can't tell if the contrast between your text and background colors is substantial enough, take a screen shot of the font and colors in use, and convert that image to gray scale.

Size - Make sure your text is large enough to be easily read by old people on a 15 inch MacBook. Don't make people squint and find their glasses. Make your site easy to read.

Hierarchy - Coordinate serif and sans-serif fonts, caps, italics, underlining, bold, contrast, size, and font styling in order to create a visual hierarchy for the reader, and provide text organization.

Space - Use white space both between lines of text and blocks of text, like paragraphs or columns, in order to focus the readers gaze on the content.

-summary of A Guide to Web Typography

Flashcard update!

I four-pointed my Spanish exam because of that site. Woop!

Blog Design

This site has an awesome post about designing blogs well. Some highlights include

• Readability and text styling, including lists, padding, paragraphs, use of bold, and sub-headers
  
• Useful sidebars
  
• Unique themes: artistic/creative, typography-based, colorful, interesting headers
  
• Comment design
  
• Effective, usable navigation
  
• Images in posts
  
• Footers
  
• Color design
  
• Subscription areas / social media integration

I thought the site gave good examples of some things to consider when designing (or re-designing) a blog. I'm kind of in the mood re-design now.

Generators

When web authors/designers create generators, it would be helpful if they described what factors lead to the end product. I've come across a few in the past few days, and I wonder if the code just generates a random product, or if inputted factors affect the output.

On that note, this Color Name Generator
comes up with what I assume to be random could-be color names from a never-updated list. So if you're not feeling linguistically creative when coming up with color palettes on ColourLovers.com, this site can help you out in naming your palette, if you want to actually utilize the palette in future designs.

Cyber flashcards!

I was studying my vocabulary for my Spanish exam yesterday, when I decided I should make flashcards. Even better: internet flashcards. After Googling something like "flashcards" and comparing a few flashcard sites, I found Quizlet.com. I searched for my textbook name, and I found "flashcards" already made for each chapter! You can flip the cards just to review, or it can keep track of which cards you know, and which you don't by analyzing the answer you put in the program. You keep answering the cards (questions) you don't know until there are no cards left. There's nothing to download, but you do have to register. There's a test feature that makes written, multiple choice, matching, and true/false questions to answer, and there are two "speed" games. You can create cards, import cards (from a text or Word file), copy other users's cards, and share cards in croups.

Check out this game with my Spanish vocabulary!

Steak 'n' Shake

Just wanted to note that the Steak 'n' Shake website sucks. The navigation is terrible, the fonts should be sans-serif, they don't have store hours posted, and I think it's ugly. And it takes a long time to load. Also, they don't have nutritional information.

Coding resources

Although HTML Playground lacks swings and slides, it is an extremely helpful and useful tool for those learning HXTML and CSS. The page lets you select a tag (like div>, then explains what the tag does, shows an example of how to use the tag in code, and shows what that code produces, all on one page in four different areas. Additionally, you can click on any tag in the example code, and modify it's attributes (align, border, color, width, etc) using dropdown menus and buttons. Definitely check it out.

MyCelly.com has free, simple CSS layouts. I looked at some of them, and I'm starting to get the idea of CSS. OpenDesigns.org has free CSS layouts that are actually visually appealing.

Also, this site has aspects to take into consideration when designing websites and pages in order to make pages accessible to those with disabilities.

Have a good weekend!

Therefore purple means....?

There's a new study reporting that seeing red makes human accuracy and memory increase, and that seeing blue enhanced the study's participants' creative skills. So, if you want people to remember something specific on your website or page, consider making it red. On the other hand, if you run a creative site for writing, art, or brainstorming, blue would be a great color to enhance the creative ideas you generate.

"The study... said nothing about mixing red and blue to make purple." Bummer. :(

Credit: NYTimes.com

Love colors?

Oh my God. ColourLovers.com. I registered.

To make a palette of five colors, you can pick colors by hex, RGB, CMYK, and/or HSV values. Or by using one of the three sliders or black/white/color field. You can then use that palette to make patterns using the sites selection of vector patterns, including plaids, retro themes, stripes, and more ornate designs. Check out my palettes!

You can also see other users palettes, and search by hex or hue.

Also, they have a really cute favicon.

G-Stalk, from Google

Google just introduced new software yesterday that allows users to turn on an application on their cell phone, and Google will share the user's whereabouts with family and friends on a map. The new software, called "Latitude" updates the users location and then shares the user's location with their Latitude friends on a map. Users can see where their friends are in order to meet up, or to stalk them.

The implications for this are frightening. This seems like the next step in our government's progression toward 1984-style Big Brother monitoring.

If you reduce my language, Big Brother, I will cut you. This is double un-good.

How much technology is too much?

Change.gov = WhiteHouse.gov

WhiteHouse.gov now has a blog!! And a weekly video address that you can stream or download that is about five minutes long. A person could feasibly download an MP4 of the president's speech, and listen to it in the car or while walking to class. Talk about getting information to the constituents and political transparency.... I love it! :)

Also, Change.gov now is pretty much just a link to WhiteHouse.gov.

Check out WhiteHouse.gov 's new design, navigation, and content. I'm way impressed.

RSS feeds = ♥

With Google Reader, I no longer have to go to several sites each day to check for updates. The updates are fed to my Google Reader, and when I log in to Google Reader, it has all my feeds listed for me, with which ones are updated and how many updates there have been. Where ever you see this icon: , you can click and add a page's update feed to your reader program. This blog has a reader, even, so if you wanted to, Joy, you could use Google Reader with your Google account, and get your students' blog updates fed to your reader.

I love my Google Reader. :)

Food for thought.

"Just as I imagine musicians to constantly hear music in their heads, painters see visions." - Alex Grey

If we are artists, designing beautiful sites, sources of information, reference, and leisure for our users, and we use website design as our creative outlet, we should always be using the creativity around us to inspire our work. Alignment, navigation, graphics, colors schemes, fonts. Every aspect has to be thematic in order to make a cohesive, memorable website that users enjoy going to, and return to in the future.

Food for thought.

Groupboard.com!

So in my younger days of doing HTML (I don't know XML or XHTML because those hadn't been invented when I was coding), there was a popular Java applet called Groupboard that everyone had on their expage.com personal websites. I will include the applet here:



Explore, interact, chat, and draw. You can be anonymous or pick a user name. No registration needed. And the board opens up in a new window, so you can view two pages at once, and hyperlink your chatting friends.

Now it seems like forums and messageboards are more popular, and instantaneous interactions (like AOL's AIM Chat and chatrooms) are more for singles to meet up and for people to use webcams. That kind of thing.

But chatrooms, if held semi-privately, can be a beneficial webspace to interact with others. More simplistic than a program you have to download, with features the user doesn't need, Java based text-and-graphic applets convey information in a very simplistic fashion that leaves the user focused on the content, as opposed to the method of communication.

Until next time.