Recently in Web stuff Category

If you do any web design or development you may know of this product. Aptana Studio version 1.0 was just released with a $99 professional version and a free community edition with "where all core features and capabilities are developed." It is cross-platform and The community edition includes: "CSS Preview, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Formatting, Code drag and drop, visual ScriptDoc Explorer, Enhanced Dynamic Help System, and Tons of User Interface Polish."
The professional edition includes: "JSON Editor, Internet Explorer Debugging, Remote Project Creation, FTPS and SFTP Support, Reporting Engine."

There is a good review in a blog I follow called HTML Primer.

My students are on the user interfaces module this week and one assignment is to review bad websites in terms of criteria identified in Web Pages That Suck. One of the worst sites I've ever seen was reviewed by one of the students. It is from a Tucson real estate website. Look at the linked screen shot and see if you can spot the horrendous mistake on it. There's many many more on this site, but this one takes the cake! (I added the black bar to protect identity of the innocent realtor)

There is a short article in the August 11th issue of Science by a stable of authors, including Tim Berners-Lee who is the lead author. The article, "Creating a Science of the Web," is available on Science's website.

A couple of the points that I took away from reading it are: 1) although the Web is an engineered space humans create the pages and make the links. Since humans are involved, the content that appears is affected by "social conventions and laws." 2) because researchers are dependent on the Web it is important to develop a methodology to identify emerging trends and to develop better mathematical modeling for the Web; 3) there is a significant challenge to accessing data resources--"most of the world's data are locked in large data stores and are not published as an open Web of inter-referring resources." Therefore we face social and public policy challenges to accessing and sharing data.

There is also an interesting graph that presents the Web yesterday and today. Check it out.

Shortly after spring break ended and I put the finishing touches on my summer IRLS573 course, I revised my information pages for faculty interested in instructional blogging, podcasting, and faculty websites.

In the process, I revised the Blogging @ the LTC pages and Best Practices & Case Studies pages.

If you know an instructor or member of the UA faculty who might benefit from any of these resources, please pass this information along to them.