Mario Valle Web

Ideas and open points for Web development

Link checker (and more)

Linkchecker checks links and can output also DOT file for graph drawing.

SVG usage

How SVG could be of use for visualization on the web. Check the Rzepa work: “Representation and use of Chemistry in the Global Electronic Age”.

Tutorial creation

Wink. It is useful also to capture animations. Take a look at this usage example.

Flash usage for visualization

An alternative to Animated GIF or movies? OpenLaszlo: a Flash editor and Mtasc: a free Flash compiler.

Nice JavaScript utilities

There are some very simple script that can enhance the page appearance: for example overLIB or Nifty Corners Cube.

Web 2.0

Take a look at Trends in Web 2.0 by Dawn M. Foster. Essentially it states that you will not truly understand Web 2.0 unless you participate in it. The things to do are: start a blog, share bookmarks, photos and movies, network with peers, locate them on a map, create webapps (mushups). Tim O’Reilly says that a key lesson of the web 2.0 era is that “users add value”. Another definition of Web 2.0 is the one on IEEE Spectrum When Good Clicks Go Bad: chmod 777 web. Web 2.0 is characterized by socially produced knowledge (write permisson, not only the usual read permission of the current web).

Start blogging

If do not already have a blog create one! Blogger is an easy place to start. Pick a topic that you are passionate about (technology, photography, wine, beer, cats, dogs, sports, your kids, or anything else) and commit to posting something every other day.

Share, share, share

Join any social networking site

I suggest MySpace for those under 30 or LinkedIn for the over 30 crowd. Add 5 MySpace friends or LinkedIn connections. Investigate FOAF.

Use geolocalization

Use Frappr maps (that does not work for me under Firefox) or try GeoURL that I have added to my home page. Well, seems pretty unuseful…

Collaboration

Well, the Wiki is already a good tool, but how to use it for a real project? And the relation between Wiki and Blogs? Look at: Making the Case for a Wiki and The Personal Wiki pages.

Web pages annotations

Wikalong is a wiki-margin for the internet. The idea is nice, but the implementation is unstable (the associated wiki is full of spam) and documentation is still missing.

The Semantic Extractor, an useful program

The Semantic Extractor provided by the W3C, as the name suggests, extracts semantic information from any web page. Simply type in a URL and the program will show you the structure of the web page, based on the HTML code.