Fremus.co.za

I attended the Quirk Breakfast from Module 1 to Module 6, but sadly missed out on Module 4. Rob Stokes presented the majority of the modules, except module 5 or 6, can’t quite remember. A lot of the focus in each of the modules was aimed at everything relating to social media and Web 2.0 and how to optimise your web site or how to incorporate Web 2.0 into your current web development strategy. The lectures also had a build up towards Online Reputation Management (ORM) for which they have developed a tool called BrandsEye. They have also now released a book, an e-marketing book written by Rob Stokes titled Quirk textbook: eMarketing – the essential guide to online marketing. Its a 300 page book aimed at marketing practitioners as well as 3rd and 4th year students.

Social media is the new craze and one of the most popular platforms is Facebook. Facebook allows its users to develop applications which other users can add and use. So today I thought about a list of applications that I might use on Facebook.

Applications for Facebook can generally be grouped in two areas, business and entertainment. My focus is towards business. I can think of two ways of using Facebook so far:

1. Advertise your product(s): Use Facebook to advertise your products and allow people to browse through your products.
2. Advertise your service(s): Here I was thinking that maybe I allow developers and graphic designers to list themselves and find out about freelance work.
3. An application for Facebook questions: An application that allows you to post questions directly from your website to Facebook questions.

As a part of the whole Web 2.0 movement forums have proved invaluable, because they allow lots of users to collectively create and share content. Forums differ from blogs and wiki’s, and this is one of the main differences between all three solutions, is the way the information is displayed and handled. Forums use a post-and-reply method. This means that a registered user creates a topic on a forum and writes some content around that topic and then other registered users can comment on that topic. Only registered users can comment on topics, as opposed to blogs and wiki’s which can allow open access to any user.

I read an article recently that listed 8 Popular Open Source Forums, and from the list so far I tested PHPBB on one site and found it to be easy to install. I did find that the Afrikaans language pack was not updated or even available, which is a little disappointing. I then also tried a plugin for WordPress but found the display a little cluttered, and it just felt a little odd to have a forum inside a blog. Next in line is Vanilla, which amazingly is only 386kb when compared to the 2.16Mb of PHPBB. Vanilla took me 5 minutes to install and it is really a very lightweight forum script. You can go take a look here. I cannot run and test YetAnotherForum at this stage because it uses ASP.NET 2.0, but it really looks a bit like Invision’s forum.

Wiki’s and Blogs are two popular means by which people can create, share and collaborate on the world wide web. Creative collaboration is a term that can be used synonymously with Web 2.0, because at the heart of Web 2.0 is the creating and sharing of content between large numbers of users. That being said I have tried understanding in my own way what the difference is between a blog and a wiki, and I really want to use my own experience of the two to try and separate them as two different pieces of technology with potentially different uses and applications.

Blogs

A blog, in my view, is a website that uses a content management system that allows a user to create and publish narrative content that is intended for a large audience. The narrative ‘pieces’ are published in a journal-style way, with each published narrative ‘piece’ being listed on the website in a chronological fashion. A website that functions as a blog generally allows visitors to leave comments on each narrative piece. This website is an example of a blog.

Wiki’s

A wiki, in my opinion, is a website that uses a content management system that allows multiple users to create and collaborate content. I personally use a Wiki to document ideas and concepts for websites and share the content with users in my development team. I then let them add their ideas to the existing content and in so-doing build an effective document to work from. A wiki also allows users to search for topics and if they cannot find an item or topic it allows them to create the content. This is slightly different from the way a blog works.

So what are captcha’s? What’s the purpose of a captcha’s? Captcha’s are those little images that contain a combination of phrases, letters and/or digits. They are used on comment and contact forms on the web to prevent spambots from submitting spam comments. They work because they require human input and someone with eyes that can read the characters on the image. A spambot will not be able to see the image.

I do most of my web development with ASP.NET (C#) because its the environment I find myself in at work and admittedly its an easier environment to develop in than say a Linux or BSD environment. Ease of use in this instance might have a price in terms of hardcore performance but it has a pay-off when it comes to development speed. The server controls that come shipped standard Visual Studio 2005 make it quite easy to have a basic website with basic data controls up and running in a few minutes. The server controls take care of all the processing for you, and all you have to do to use them is drag them onto a form, set a few attributes and voila. Even Visual Web Developer (free download) comes packed with all the tools to get a small data-driven website up and running in no time.

Web 2.0 is a marketer’s catch phrase, I am sure of this. Marketing people might be inclined to use any catch phrase to promote a service or product, if it can draw the customer’s attention. Realistically though they have to realise that Web 2.0 is just a catch phrase, nothing more, in my honest opinion. The technologies that drive Web 2.0 are not so new that they have been re-invented. Social networking forms a part of the whole Web 2.0 theme of which Facebook and MySpace are popular examples. Both of these Social Networking platforms offer an API (Application User Interface) which allow developers to tap into the resources provided by each. The only reason people would want to tap into such a resource is because of the database of users that use that particular network, no other reason. If I developed a Social Networking website and I developed an API for that website and my website had 30 users as opposed to the millions of users that Facebook has, then its obvious to guess where someone might want to invest their time.

JavaScript has been found out! Its not as simplistic and uncomplicated as some, including me, believed. Its a full featured object-oriented scripting language that runs in your browser, and it spurned the development of Web 2.0 with the emergence of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML). The emergence of AJAX resulted in the development of better user interfaces for the web, better in the sense that they are more responsive. No longer are there clicks (post backs) or flickers when you click on a link or a button but instead you now have smoother responses. Off course if you turn JavaScript off in your browser, then all the functionality will disappear, but then again I guess not too many people do that.