The nice thing is that you can replace the ‘.html’ with .json or .rdf – while the html only has a link to the related list, the json and rdf expose other links and relationships, such as the department.
Way back I wrote a piece about the changing model for library catalogues, you can see it here. The main premise was that trying to maintain records in a Library Management System (LMS/ILS) for all the items you want your users to discover is no longer feasible. This is especially true in this here digital age, trying to maintain records for all the e-journals a University has access to is an almost impossible task, and LMS were not designed for thousands of MARC records to be dropped and then re-imported (i.e. sync’d) with another source. And what about all the free stuff, is an e-book not worth being discovered by users because it is free?
So let the LMS be a record of what your library physically holds, and your discovery service a place where users can find (and see how to access) resources that are of interest to their research and work. The former being just one element (albeit a major one) of the latter. Meanwhile your LMS physically holdings can be shared with other discovery systems (such as union catalogues) to show what your library physically contains.
It’s hard not to think of nostuff.org and not think of blazing web standards.
So I had a go at updating the template for this here blog to make it all html5. Turns out this is quite simple.
It seems you can probably just replace your doctype with
<!DOCTYPE html>
and you’ve got yourself a html5 webpage.
The W3C validator proves it so. From there I added some of the new section elements such as header, footer, nav, aside and article. It seems that these can apply to the page (i.e. the page’s footer) or a section (the footer of a blog post, where it shows tags and date published etc). I used various sources on the web, via Google, including a few articles, and sample sites.
So nostuff mostly validates as html5 and makes use of some of the elements above, though this doesn’t affect anything visually at the moment (I think, I really don’t have much of a clue as to what I’m doing).
I’ve created a gzip file of the theme here. You’re welcome to download and use it, though it’s not really designed to be shared (includes my analytics/adsense codes etc).
Now one of these days I will finally get my ‘moving flat’ epic published, in the mean time you can read my how to buy a property guide. It really is worth every penny.
Part of this process involves buying a sofa which doesn’t suck as much as my current sofa.
Of course, I’m doing this the proper way of procrastinating and constantly looking at websites and not deciding anything (look out for my exciting new book of the same name, the ultimate manager’s guide).
One of the sofa’s which was luckly enough to make the final rounds (i.e. got to perform in front of Simon Cowell and co), was this one, called – cutely – Oscar. Simple lines, modern look, sofa bed. From Furniture Village, which seems to be DFS’ more mature cousin, though this perhaps doesn’t say too much.
All fine and good.
Then the other day I visited Engadget.com, not a site I normally visit but a link had caught my eye on Twitter.
Engadget screenshot, with interesting ad
Notice that ad? A bit like travelling to furthest Siberia, walking in to the dodgyist bar and finding your nan there, distinctly out of place. Click on the image for a lager version.
At the top of an American website about gadgets is an advert for a UK middle-of-the-road furniture store, advertising the exact sofa I had been considering for some time.
This was no coincidence.
Nor had they been using Alien technology to read my mind. I had visited the furniture site using the same laptop (and presumably same browser), a cookie and advertising system was at play here.
In fact my mind was made up when this evening I saw this.
This was on Time Magazine’s website (again a US publication), on a Photo Gallery about Afghan Women (see this for background, wonderful world).
It’s that cheeky little sofa again, this time popping up next to a repressive regime. You Guys!
Finally, notice on the red border of the ad, bottom right there is a little bulge, clicking on it…
Does this freak me out. Probably should do, but at the moment it borders on fun, like most people my tastes and wants are diverse enough to create stupid juxtapositions (Serious News and Girls Aloud, Global Warming and fast cars). It becomes an issue when it goes beyond, ‘person x has looked at product y from company z so show advert to it’,and becomes one entity building a database of everything you view and do online.
What a scary vision. Think I’ll stick with what I know and just use Google and Facebook.
