Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

I'm still working on the profile pages of the site. The idea is to only store the elements I need for the working of about2findout.com, and to link to other places on the web for all the rest.

So for example fields you can enter in your profile are country and birth date because later on I might program restrictions based on country or age. To give more information about yourself, you can then add a link to your blog or web site. In a next step I might add links to popular sites such as LinkedIn, MySpaces and the likes.

The same applies for communication. So far, you can add your IDs for MSN Messenger, Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, AOL IM and ICQ. For privacy reasons you can also select who can see this information: no one, everyone or just your contacts. Today I have been searching how to start chat sessions to these clients via a simple URL link on the page.

There is a site called onlinestatus.org that hosts free online status indicators for these messaging clients (except GTalk). But unless your messaging program can't be bothered with privacy, these links will always show 'unknown' because you need to open up your online status to the general public. So I decided not to go that far and just add HTML links to start up the clients. These links will only work if the particular messaging client is installed on your computer. I found the links for skype, aol, yahoo in the onlinestatus.org generated code. The one for MSN came from a Microsoft forum post. The one for GTalk I found on the customizetalk.com forum. And the one for ICQ came from their own panel launchers.

So to save other people the trouble of looking them up, here are the URL links to start up chat sessions (change USERID with the person you want to talk to).

case 1: //AOL
"aim:goim?screenname=USERID"
case 2: //Skype
"skype:USERID?chat"
case 3: //Google Talk
"gtalk:chat?jid=USERID"
case 4: //Yahoo Messenger
"ymsgr:sendIM?USERID";
case 5: //ICQ
"http://www.icq.com/whitepages/cmd.php?uin=USERID&action=message"
case 6: //MSN
"msnim:chat?contact=USERID"

Labels: AOL, asp.net, GTalk, ICQ, MSN, skype, Yahoo

I'm a fan of tag clouds, and you can bet your mother-in-law or something precious that my site will include one.
In the mean time, check out the tag cloud made from US presidential speeches. Five seconds worth of looking at it saves you hours of listening to get the drift :-). It is based on a free tag cloud generator for time-based clouds from Chirag Mehta.

Labels: tags

Today I started working on the profile page of the about2findout.com site-to-be. You would think it is simple to find a control that displays all known countries ready to plug into an asp.net application. But I only found a few. For example on egghead cafe. That is nice, but requires the list to be hard coded, which is not very maintenance-friendly. After all, the former Yugoslavia still splits off new countries every year :-). Luckily, Mads Christensen's blog has an XML file with all countries available. I've changed it a bit so the country name is an attribute like the code and ISO country number because that way asp.net is able to directly use it as an XML data source and I don't have to write any additional code.

In case you need it too, this the modified country-names.xml file, ready to serve as an XML data source and be bound to any capable asp.net control such as listbox or checkboxlist.

I also wanted to pre-populate the box with the country the IP connection originates from. I found a nice article by AdamNajmanowicz on Codeproject. It has a module to detect the country based on the IP address. It makes use of the geoiptool.com site to get country, region and provider information based on the IP address. Of course, this system is not 100% accurate and can be bypassed, but is makes a nice start to detect a user's country.

Labels: asp.net, country list

Another very nice but not extremely useful thing (like most on web2.0):

Information Architects have an interactive map on their site listing the most popular sites of the Internet.

The map represents a typical subway map but the stops are sites like Google, LinkedIn, etc.
The poster is available for print as well.

(Thanks Ralph)

Labels: map

Today is one of those days I slowly advance in programming my site. For other non-programmers, making or adjusting a web space should become much easier with the next generation of mashup tools. A mashup is basically a site that pulls together bits and pieces from allover the web.

Microsoft's alpha experiment is called PopFly, and they have a cool pink duck as a logo :-). It is both a toolset and a community for sharing Visual Studio code. From the popfly site:

Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications. Popfly consists of two parts: Popfly Creator is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups. Popfly Space is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

You can also read this eWeek interview with the makers.

Labels: mashup, popfly

Take a look at the french site Emob. It has dozens of small video's on end-user applications like Office, Photoshop, Flash, Vista, etc. Most of the mini-lessons require a small payment, some are for free.

Free video's available at formationvideo.emob.fr.
I'm not sure if this project will be profitable because it is hard to make money selling learning to end-users, but the concept, layout and content are great.

Labels: emob