Social Hiking - a great web app!
I use quite a few web applications and increasingly I am tying them into my non-web activities away from the office. In that vein, over the last year or so, I’ve been using Social Hiking which is a web application developed by Phil Sorrell (@daylightgambler). I’ve not blogged about this before (except indirectly in ViewRanger GPS for Cycling) but I think it’s a great app. Here’s my description and experiences with it so far.
Website inspiration: Colour and coffee
I collect website screen shots in a Flickr set called Website Inspiration. I use the screen shots to remind myself of some fantastic website designs that I see on my travels round the web. Each design has aspects that I love, for example the colour scheme, the typography, or even one specific element that I think works really well. I have never really featured the websites or screen shots on this blog in any detail so this is the first of what I hope will be a series of regular posts that highlights some outstanding website designs. Up this week are Rainbeau Mars and Art in My Coffee
Make your own podcasts with Huffduffer
I often discover audio files on the web that I just don’t have time to listen to at the time. What I need is an easy mechanism of saving them so that I can listen later. I think I have found the website that does just that.
Spock searches for people on the Internet
Spock is a relative newcomer on the search engine scene. It provides people-based searching combined with elements of social networking and other modern website practices like tagging and voting. By signing up to Spock, you can 'claim' your search results which can allow you to shape what people see when they search for your name.
New BBC homepage
The BBC website is one of the most popular in the UK, possibly the most popular, so it is always a bit of an event when they launch a new homepage. In fact, the new version is in beta testing mode, which is probably a wise move considering that the website is ranked 41st in most visited websites worldwide.
I quite like the new version and it includes the bright colours and large font sizes that people come to expect these days. Dare I say web 2.0 here?! The new homepage also includes drag and drop content 'panel' customisability, which is similar to that used by iGoogle in recent years, and slide down functionality for editing the 'panel' groups.
The new homepage is centred on the screen which is a small but long overdue improvement in my view. I'd prefer a different font to Verdana though but that's my predjudice. Another new feature is that the user can change the colour scheme by clicking on the links under the featured image at middle right but is this just a bit of a gimmick?
Finally, there is a very nice live clock at top right. This reminds me of one of the old BBC TV identities, some years ago now.
I look forward to using the new homepage over the next few weeks.
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