beTech :: Evolve Already

The beTech sidebar has received a few small additions in the past week to add to your Web technology information glut—cuz we thought you’d enjoy that! Actually, it’s nothing too major… just a little side blog and a couple of experimental feeds. In the not-too-distant future we’d also like to add an improved events calendar and a del.icio.us feed from our readers. But for today, we’ll settle on the following:

Seen Elsewhere

Sometimes (okay, most times) other blogs just hit the nail on the head with new technology. Rather than write a full beTech post on a topic they’ve already covered so well, we’re setting up a little side blog action to let the other guys do the talking.

X Feeds

X (eXperimental) Feeds will feature whatever strangely useful RSS feeds seem appropriate at the moment. Of course, they’ll have something to do with Web technology and UVa.

C’ville Tech Blogs is a case in point. CTB is a Yahoo! Pipes aggregation of local technology feeds. The following list of aggregated feeds fit the requirement of serving the tech community without a lot of extraneous “my cat just walked across the keyboard” chatter:

• beCast
• beTech
• Ruby Code Jam
• Steve Whitaker’s TechNotes
• Xaprb

Please comment here to let us know if you have or know of a UVa or local tech feed to add to the list.

The last X Feed—UVa Staff Jobs for Web—is a little scrape of the UVa HR site for staff jobs that have “web” in their description. It was a quick hack, so the results aren’t as pretty as they could be (not even sorted by date). When getting the okay from the HR Webmaster to scrape the site, he mentioned that the it was going to undergo a major revision in July so we decided to let the feed go as is until we find out what the new source looks like.

As with the tech feeds, if you have additional ideas for X Feeds, please let us know here. Furthermore, if you have ideas for other sidebar treats, we’re all ears (or would that be eyes?).

Jeffrey Zeldman imparts some useful words of wisdom (and cites our very own TJ) in his latest entry: We hold most of these truths. Marvelling over the Declaration of Independence drafts at the New York Public Library, Jeffrey shares his thoughts:

The version in Thomas Jefferson’s own hand is fascinating not only because it’s in Thomas Jefferson’s own hand, but also because it contains passages that would have ended slavery at the birth of the American nation. But those passages had to be deleted before the Declaration could be signed by representatives of states where slavery was practiced.

Put another way, the client bought a document intended to liberate all humanity, but demanded changes that kept part of humanity in chains. It would take another 100 years and hundreds of thousands of deaths before slavery ended, and the tragic legacy of African enslavement plagues the U.S. to this day.…

So the next time a client requests changes that make your work less beautiful, less usable, or less smart, remember that greater people than you have lost bigger battles over far more important matters.

Google recently analyzed the use of HTML code throughout the Web using (as only they can) a sample of over a billion documents. The report is certainly worth a read and very entertaining at times:

There really is no reason for using language these days. It’s been deprecated since forever, and quite obviously a lot of people can’t spell it. And given that more than half of pages specify the type attribute anyway… this is probably mostly a matter of “just in case” cargo-cult authoring.

Looking past the thought-provoking research materials, the SVG graphs are also a handy test for your SVG-compatible browsers (e.g., Firefox 1.5+).

If you can sneak away from the warm glow of your monitor this afternoon, check out the User Interface Roundtable presentation of “Juxta: A Tool for Digital Text Comparison”. It takes place in Clemons room 407 from 2:00pm-3:30pm (Friday, October 21). Here’s the breakdown from their site:

Join us for a discussion with Duane Gran and Nick Laiacona, the developers of Juxta, a cross-platform tool for collating and analyzing a set of similar digital texts. The user interface is focused on assisting the scholar in identifying key passages that deviate from the norm, be they in the midst of dense textual variance or in sparse isolation. Maintaining clarity between these two perspectives, compounded by N number of texts, presents a complex user interface challenge.