Chad's News

I just did a Google search on my name and was pleased to see that my personal website, www.cloman.com came up as the number-one result. The remaining nine results were all profile information from various websites that I belong to. In the past, my cloman.com page has been eclipsed by these other sites. The linked article, however, gives a simple piece of HTML code that tells Google which web page you consider to be the primary source of information about yourself. The trick is to add this attribute to the appropriate link(s): rel="me"

Link: http://marshallk.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Back in the day, companies would advertise their AOL keywords in print and television. But AOL has been in decline for years now, and having an “aol.com” email address is a sign of being behind the times. In the linked article, the writer discusses how she feels about using her AOL email in a professional capacity, and I have to agree with her. I’ve had the cloman.com domain since 1999 and simply forward its messages to whatever mail client I’m currently using—in this case, gmail. This gives me a certain amount of portability, as well as some tech world street cred.

Link: http://www.chicagotribune.com/…
(via Slashdot)

There are advantages to using cloud computing services such as Google Docs, but there are also some definite disadvantages. Chief among these are the potential loss of access to your data, and getting what you pay for.

Link: http://it.slashdot.org/…

Amazon has added MySQL database functionality to its growing list of cloud-based web services. This could be useful, as you wouldn’t have to migrate your database when you move to a new web hosting company, and upgrading database servers would be a thing of the past. I’m not sure how well it works performance-wise, and there are potential security issues if you’re storing sensitive information. Also, there’s always the possibility that the service will suffer outages that could bring down your operations. So I’m not sure this service will be heavily utilized.

Link: http://aws.amazon.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Some of the most promising new features in upcoming web standards are being sabotaged by licensing, copyright, and patent issues. About a month ago Chad’s News wrote about the HTML 5 <video> tag. Since then, it came to light that the major browser vendors have irreconcilable differences over which video codecs should be used, mainly because of licensing and patent problems. The editor of the HTML 5 specification has given up and decided to remove the portions of the document that identify standard audio and video codecs. This is a significant blow to the advantages of having a <video> tag, and make the tag much less useful.

Then there’s the @font-face attribute in CSS 3. Currently, web sites are very limited in regards to which fonts they can use, because the fonts must be installed on the user’s computer. Microsoft addressed this problem in 1996 by creating 10 core web fonts that could be freely used by all browsers. You may not realize this, but nearly every web site in the world uses these fonts.

CSS 3 adds the @font-face attribute, which allows the web site designer to specify a font that’s physically located elsewhere on the internet. The problem here is licensing and copyright. The people who create fonts don’t give them out for free—they want to be paid for their work. The potential for font piracy is huge. Fortunately there appears to be some potential solutions. But if this issue cannot be resolved, then we’re back to the 10 core fonts.

The <video> tag, the <audio> tag, and the @font-face attribute were all created to address deficiencies in the current HTML and CSS standards. Unfortunately, they may be crippled from the start by licensing, patent, and copyright issues.

For web designers, dealing with images is simple. You just use the <img> HTML tag, and the browser knows how to handle it, whether the image type is PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, or whatever. The same cannot be said for video content. Adobe Flash has become an informal standard, but even then you have to use the nonstandard <embed> tag with lots of vendor-specific information, or the horrible <object> tag that’s official but even more cumbersome. HTML version 5 hopes to do away with all this by making video content as easy to handle as images are today. The browsers will have built-in codecs to display the video, and all the designer will have to do is use the <video> tag. No more browser plug-ins for Flash, Silverlight, or JavaFX.

This is only one of HTML 5’s new features. For instance, there’s an <audio> tag for (you guessed it…) audio content.

HTML 5 is still in draft form and won’t see widespread use for years, but some newer browsers already support certain features. And it will make life much easier for web developers.

Link: http://www.infoworld.com/…
(via Slashdot)

How well do you know your web-related acronyms? I got 18 out of 20 correct. And I have to admit I’d never heard of “YUI” before.

Link: http://www.elanman.co.uk/…
(via digg)

Here’s another example of why it pays to be careful about what you post online. This man lost a lawsuit because his Facebook entries showed that he had not actually suffered the damages claimed.

Link: http://www.cbc.ca/…
(via Kim Komando)

Twitter is a popular micro-blogging site, where you can post short messages (tweets) about yourself. But users are starting to see a new type of directed, unsolicited advertising based on their posts. For example, say that you tweet about having an ear infection. This is monitored by someone, and you receive a message from a medical company suggesting that you try their product to help with the infection. It’s an advertisers paradise, because the messages are directed to those most likely to be interested in the product.

Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

The creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, predicts mobile devices are the future of the web, especially in developing countries. Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we’re way ahead of the curve on this. Browse Chad’s News with a phone, and you’ll automatically be transferred to our mobile site.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…

I recently joined Facebook to play online Scrabble (R.I.P. Scrabulous), but I found it was a great place to connect with friends new and old. Social networking is quite addictive. On Christmas day, Facebook had a 4.65% market share of the entire internet, putting it in second place behind Google. Facebook’s popularity is such that a judge allowed legal papers to be served via the site. So if you haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon, give Facebook a try. And feel free to add me as a friend.

When buying over the internet, if the seller asks you to pay via wire transfer, then it’s most likely a scam. This is because wire transfers cannot be canceled or disputed. The best practice is to use a credit card for internet purchases.

Link: http://consumerist.com/…