Newcastle Music Week Expo 2008
Well here I sit at the NMW Expo Day 2008, we’ve only just managed to sort out internet access so I’ve literally had nothing to show the first round of kids walking through the expo. Talk about painful. Watching kid after kid walk past, throw a glance at the blank monitor on our booth and keep on walking past. The joys and problems of having an online media.
New website design
For the last month and a bit I’ve been selling my services as a web consultant, basically I’ve been helping a couple of local companies better their web presence and help them on their way toward being a whole lot more web savvy. As part of this consulting role I’m also developing new websites for each of them, 3 of which will be going live in the next couple of days pending final review.
With all this website development going on I’ve come to realise that my website, this blog, really doesn’t sell itself as a good, simple, clean, website. It’s quite heavy code wise, and definitely fairly heavy image wise, and it just doesn’t look and ‘feel’ like I want it to. One of the problems I have, both in life and web design, is loading too much into one thing. This is about to change with my new design, and hopefully I can follow it through in my every day life.
May I present you with the ‘almost’ final design of my new website. It’s simple, it’s really clean, there’s very little heavy lifting to do code wise, and it loads pretty darn fast. The home page has maybe 20kb of images on it, individual article pages will be larger but I felt it was important to have the home page really lean.
- I need an icon for dopplr
- I need to put in the footer copyright information
- I need to trim my current article categories down (long painful process)
After those three items are complete, and I return someone’s advertising dollars, it’ll be live. I’m looking forward to hearing what you think.
A cleaner, slower internet for all
It’s Friday, time for a Mat Rant.
For some time now the Australian Government has been talking about filtering the internet at ISP level here in Australia with a supposed ‘black list’ of websites with what is termed ‘illegal content’, I’ve even discussed it on this website before here and here.
Well there has been some amendments made to the original proposal and now the Australian Government has decided that there is no ‘opt out’ of the filter, all ISPs will be forced to comply with this legislation.
The filter will be a two-tiered system, the top tier will be always on whilst the second-tier will be opt-out. At this stage there is no full confirmation on what the top-tier filter will actually stop, or what websites will be on the blacklist, however one thing is for sure that it will restrict what we are allowed to see online and it is going to slow down our already crap-tacular internet speeds in Australia, not to mention the $44.2 million dollars that will come out of tax payers pockets to fund this.
I’m all for protecting children from pornography, violent videos, and all of the other crap that can be found on the internet however I really don’t think this is the best way to approach this, oh and by the way this filtering system wont be applied to email, peer to peer networks, or even bit-torrents, coz you know kids don’t use those technologies at all.
If this system is to work and not negatively effect how many of us work on the internet, bloggers, freelance website designers, etc. then it needs to be an opt-in service. How hard would it be to ask people when they sign up for a plan “Would you like your internet access filtered to stop certain types of ‘offensive’ materials being available on your computer?”. It’s really not that hard, shoot even Foxtel allows me to put a ‘parent barring code’ on certain channels.
C’mon Senator Conroy, wake up to yourself. This legislation will hurt Australians, it will hurt businesses, it will make us look like a pack of idiots who need protection from the ‘big bad internets’. Ohs nos!
Andrew Beeston says it best here.
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