Towse: views from the hill

THE ZOOMQUILT | a collaborative art project

Yowzaa!

Update: New URL for Zoomquilt

Vischeck has an absolutely amazing tool!

I’ve griped at Web developers forever about designing for the colorblind amongst us. “Please no red lettering on a black background,” I’d say. “Ja, ja, ja. I know you think it’s pretty, but a good percent of your users won’t be able to see your text, let alone read it.” They’d act like I was demented.

According to legalarts.com, “About eight percent of Caucasian males, five percent of Asiatic males, and three percent of males of other races are affected by dyschromatopsia. Only about a half-percent of females of any given race are affected.” That’s a good number of users who are affected by Web designers that don’t (or won’t) understand the situation.

Vischeck’s Web tool takes a given URL and returns a page that shows how the page would appear to someone with one of the three major types of color blindness – perfect for showing why-should-I-care designers where their oh-so-flashy sites will stumble. Great!

The site also has examples of how the colorblind see various images differently from the non-colorblind. Other information too.

Found AllConsuming.net through a referral to my blog earlier today, triggered because I’d mentioned Bill Sammon’s new book, MISUNDERESTIMATED: The President Battles Terrorism, John Kerry and the Bush Haters on Tuesday.

AllConsuming.net “is a website that watches weblogs for books that they’re talking about, and displays the most popular ones on an hourly basis.” In addition, you can pop a title into AllConsuming.net and find the blogs that have referenced it. That bit of code is pretty interesting. Enter /pride and prejudice/ and the site hares off to see what titles match /pride and prejudice/ at Amazon. Taking those titles, AllConsuming checks the blogs it covers for references.

Amazon came up with ten references, including Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Annotated Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, David M. Shapard, Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife: Pride and Prejudice Continues by Linda Berdoll, &c. The plain Jane Pride and Prejudice has forty-four Weblog mentions.

Click on the title and AllConsuming returns publishing information, Amazon sales rank, Amazon average rating (4.56 stars), &c. plus snippets from the blogs that mentioned the book, listed in reverse calendar order (newest first).

“I’m reading this book.”

said george on April 27, 2004.

“Delectable!”

said thatgirl on April 1, 2004.

“One of my favourite books of all time. The wit, gentility, finely drawn characters, and the change which the protagonists undergo makes this book a thoroughly enjoyable read.”

said civility on March 29, 2004.

If you decide you want to read more about what a given poster thinks of the book, click on the poster’s name and AllConsuming sends back a synopsis of the site, books mentioned on the site and more information.

Hm. http://allconsuming.net/weblog.cgi?url=http://www.towse.com/blogger/blog.htm

My Google Friends section lists three sites whose owners I know and four sites that I have no idea why they’re listed as Google Friends.

The allConsuming folks describe how they come up with the information: “This is a weblog detail page. It has information gleaned from Alexa.com, Google.com, and Amazon.com. Combining all of this information together, I can display a screenshot of the weblog, related sites according to Google, and products that have appeared on this website in the past.”

The automagician needs some work.

FWIW, the current hourly update reads, “Although we found 814 books last hour, none of them were mentioned on that particular weblog for the first time.”

For today, the top five mentioned titles are

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (17 mentions)

A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle (13 mentions)

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown (10 mentions)

Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward (15 mentions)

My Life by Bill Clinton (6 mentions)

Good to see L’Engle is beating out the newbies with her oldbie book. Turns out it’s because there was a Wrinkle in Time movie on TV, which triggered people to read the book.

URL Updates – ‘twixt then and now, the following URLs referenced in the Feb 2002 Blog article for Computer Bits have changed, disappeared, taken a hike. It’s too late for the print edition and the magazine doesn’t update the Web version either, so here’s a list of things that have changed:

• The Mercury News, wouldn’t you know, revamped their whole site after I submitted my article. The new link for Dan Gillmor’s blog is http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/ejournal/
  
• I sent a note John Paczkowski at the Merc to find a link to the 9-11 blog that was also referenced in the article. John sez they’re moving the archival stuff over to the new Web location and it should be available in a few days.
  
• Dave Winer’s http://www.weblogs.com has been re-vamped for speed and currently hangs Netscape 4.7+ If you’d like to check out the link, use IE.
  
• Ev’s blog at http://www.evhead.com/ doesn’t show all content with Netscape. It did at the beginning of January, honest! If you’d like to check the site out, use IE.

Four links out of thirty-two and it’s less than two months since I sent the article in. Ouch!