The Zero Room

If you are planning a non-trivial website, this twenty-five minute presentation by Paul Albert, Digital Services Librarian at Weill Cornell Medical Library which compares Drupal, a free Web Content Management System and Application Framework, to FatWire, a proprietary Web CMS, should be required viewing.

We make a point of providing our customers with the tools to easily update their own websites, and encourage them to do so on a regular basis.  Web developers' magazine "A List Apart" has an article titled "10 Tips on Writing the Living Web", which is a goldmine of useful advice for anyone who publishes online.

According to web designer Amber Simmons, keeping your readers' attention is a matter of earning their trust. Her tips for becoming a "faithful writer" are:

Do you know your web site has become dated and unmanageable, but are scared of a major overhaul? Perhaps you are right to be; even changes unquestionably for the better can alienate and anger some of your users.

In "the Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch" usability consultant Jared M. Spool explains how even major web sites with millions of users can make radical changes over time that hardly anybody notices.

The secret is out: your anti-virus software is in all likelihood virtually useless.

Web analysts Onestat report that globally the Mozilla Firefox web browser has increased it's market share to 13%, in Australia nearly 25%, and in Germany a whopping 39% of web users.

The OpenDocument juggernaut rolls on, with the announcement that the OpenDocument format is now an ISO/IEC standard.  The decision about which format to trust for storing your documents is now even easier.

The Committe for Economic Development, an eminent American conservative think tank / lobby group / nexus of sinister conspiracy to rule the world, has released a new report entitled Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness.