Archive for the 'Web Technologies' Category



EventDrapery.com – Our first e-Commerce Web Project

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 by Richard Nichols

Back during the Easter Season this year we were approached about creating a rental product/service catalog and e-commerce web site for a new unique service company, EventDrapery.com, guided by Marina Miller here in Atlanta. This project required the creation of a searchable database of products, an electronic forms system, a shopping cart, the usual "about us" and "FAQs" modules and many "behind the scenes" pages, documents and web tricks. A sales-oriented website can involve hundreds and even thousands of considerations. This article is a detailed case study designed to let you peer inside one of our more complex projects.

If you haven’t already tried it or want to see it again, click once or twice on the play button in the drapery video above to see the drapery set itself up from scratch. Those clip-joint drapes are actually 12 feet tall. The Macromedia Flash video you see is made up of four kinds of photographic efforts: The flame retardant drapes were shot on location with an 8 mega-pixel Minolta DimageA2 camera. I used four Dynalite 1000x professional photographic strobe units with white umbrellas to evenly light the large area of at least 144 square feet.

Read the rest of this entry »

The End

“Captcha” proves you can out-smart any computer!

Sunday, February 26th, 2006 by Richard Nichols

Captcha graphic

Everything in this world has a name. We’ve always found it fun to learn the names of obscure processes and things that creep into existence while we are busy doing other things.

Have you signed up for anything on the Internet recently and been asked to identify a series of strange alpha-numeric characters? If so, you’ve been identified as a human being instead of a computer, thanks to a technology called “captcha.” Captcha? (a trademark of Carnegie Mellon University) is a sequence of distorted letters and numbers that can be recognized by humans, but not computers. Sometimes the backgrounds behind the letters are visually disturbed with colors and patterns, and sometimes the letters are distorted or connected in very strange ways. Here are some examples:

Captcha1

Whether you are applying for a Yahoo or MSN Hotmail account, a new domain name or an on-line registration for a rebate or a financial service, you will find examples of captcha guarding the door. Captcha is often the first step in authenticating you before you can become a member of a particular group or club.

Why is this important? If you have ever received SPAM, you are probably the victim of a rogue computer (and a rogue human) who has harvested your e-mail address to include you among its millions of members. Where it is instituted, captcha can stop “address harvesting” by its challenge/response test. It blocks a machine from signing up for accounts and then exploiting that service for a variety of attacks, from world-wide spamming to performing denial-of-service attacks, to distributing spyware and viruses.

Captcha prevents a computer from causing bogus traffic or harassing Google, Yahoo or MSN into placing a URL at the top of their search hierarchies.

The word “captcha” is an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.” According to the Wikipedia,

“The term was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, and Nicholas J. Hopper of Carnegie Mellon University, and John Langford of IBM. A common type of captcha requires that the user type the letters of a distorted and/or obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. The test is administered by a computer, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is administered by a human . . .”

According to the authors of captcha, “it is an automated test that humans can pass but current computer programs can’t pass.” The Captcha Project? for telling humans and computers apart comes from Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. The bad news is that bots are always improving so the tests continue to become more challenging for test designers. The good news is that every time a bot overcomes a captcha hurdle, text recognition software improves. This war between bots and legitimate information systems might be a win-win situation.

Even if an intruding bot (rogue computer) discovers the underlying computer code controlling the captcha program on the server, it cannot view the random letters and numbers the server generates in order to distinguish them. However, a human can, and inputting the correct digits will validate you. To state this again, only you and the server computer know the correct letters. An outside computer cannot distinguish them.

Therefore, if you try to use an automated computer to reserve 300 tickets for the next Stones or Mariah Carey concert or the next Atlanta Braves game, you probably won’t succeed. It occurs to me that captcha might even help prevent cascading Stock Market crashes by refusing automated sales once they reach a certain frequency.

Here’s one last example– no, don’t type anything, just look at it and remember the name of the process and the people who invented it so you can impress your human friends:

Captcha example 4

The End

Push Button Publishing – Why Blogs are Here to Stay

Saturday, February 18th, 2006 by Richard Nichols

Blogs and Bloggers graphic

Blogs are all about sharing information across the Internet in the swiftest and most personal manner. They can project formal or informal communications. There is a lot of “yammering” out there in radioland about blogs and about what a blog is for. Some bloggers display annoying and abusive behavior. Part of the controversy surrounding bloggers is the fact that many of them push the publish button before they have ascertained the accuracy of their facts. Blogs provide a strong sense of personal power and freedom.

What is a blog? According to the Wikipedia,

“A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”, such as Washington, D.C.’s political goings-on. Some blogs discuss personal experiences.

Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software on regular web hosting services. In the early 21st Century, blogging has quickly emerged as a popular and important means of communication, affecting public opinion and mass media around the world.”

Unfortunately, early-adopting bloggers have muddied the waters before most people have had an opportunity to understand the concept. Everyone has opinions but some people are determined to voice them loudly-and-often, based on inadequate information or extremely biased viewpoints. This makes blogging a perfect vehicle for spin doctors. There are more important points to consider so let’s focus on them.

Blogs bring us all closer to the author of the information, making it a social device far more powerful than email. Blogging is such an ingenius paradigm shift in technology that many times as you surf across the net you may be totally unaware that you are viewing one. For example, USAToday.com is a blog.

The highly intelligent women and men who have created blog technologies have done it mostly free-of-charge and behind the scenes, proving by their actions that blogs are all about sharing. A blog is an ever-changing performance– a living journey through space and time using cutting edge and often exotic web technologies.

Photo blogs are also a big part of this phenomenon. Photo websites for sharing your albums, allowing you and your friends to order prints are everywhere. But wait– the latest raves involve websites like Flickr and Photofriday.com where people do more than share their photos, they critique each others work and form new influential social communities that reach across the world. These sites and services are free. Teachers are beginning to use blogs for homework assignments. Churches are using them to post their calendars and copies of last week’s sermon. Streaming videos of meetings that were missed are now available via the company blog for instant review.

Static websites for companies and organizations change infrequently and are often the product of a web designer, a writer, and someone paying the bill to get their organization’s message out. Blogs can work like fixed websites in the same way, but the promise is that once the site is developed, reasonable people, not specialists, can update the information at any moment. New ideas, new photos, new projects can all be initiated with minimal training.

In the old web world, once a person views your site, they go away. Unless you keep your information fresh and exciting, your audience doesn’t come back. Blogs rely on social engineering– they are more in-your-face. They have alerting mechanisms built into the server-side software to keep an evergrowing audience primed for more.

You might say that normal web sites are recordings of things past, locked in a shell. Web logs (blogs) are current performances that continuously move forward, delivering up-to-the-minute content.

Blogs use pre-formatted web templates (containers) that already have the fonts, font sizes, colors, backgrounds, headline styles, and other elements determined before a person places the content into them. After the basic framework is set up to handle information, any person who desires to publish to the Internet is free to place anything he or she wants onto the web easily. No more worrying about how the page looks or whether it works. It just works.

On our artondisk.com website, we can create a few paragraphs, insert a photo or two, push a “publish” button– and the webpage is done. Finished. The server not only displays the finished product, it sends out emails to notify our audience, and feeds the World Wide Web a “syndication feed” to alert various search engines and subscribers unknown to us that a new post has been made.

We don’t have to mess with the look of the website when we post new content because our web server takes over and does the formatting for us. The headlines, sidebar, archives, indexing system, page size, colors and styles are all predetermined. We designed them up front with a bit of help from a template called Jakarta by a designer named Jose Mulia of Portland, Oregan, available through WordPress.

Cascading style sheets have been around for a number of years to help content providers and webmasters preformat web pages. So why is a blog template any different from a preformatted web page? Because it incorporates all of the major web development technologies into one dynamic melting pot. Behind the scenes a blog template adds many separate controls that deal with headers, footers, links, archiving, comments made by viewers, navigation systems, sidebars, search engines and forms. Each “post” gets its own identity (URI) called a Permalink which helps a viewer or author to find that specific page of information in the future.

The difficult part of blogging is the continual search for interesting things to write about and images to illustrate the topics. We have active restless minds over here in Art on Disk land, so that isn’t our challenge. Anyone initiating a blog must understand that it is a commitment and requires a revised look at the world. Once you get started, it creeps into your dreams, the way you organize your life and work– your “plan of the day,” but it doesn’t have to be time-consuming.

Blogging technology makes it possible to publish new information or articles with or without a timeline. It isn’t necessary to show the viewer when an article is posted. We do it because we find a timeline motivates us and keeps us organized.

The free programs (Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress, and many others) that make blogging work use only a web browser interface, so anyone can travel across the globe and post things to the Internet without having to learn Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia DreamWeaver or Adobe GoLive. Macs, PCs, cell phones, smart phones and PDAs can all publish new material to your blogsite. On computers, the web browser is becoming the most important application.

Perhaps the next best feature of blogging software is that it automatically (automagically) categorizes and stores information in a logical database-driven archiving system so that 10 years into the future a person can come back and find something easily. This “personal publishing technology” makes it easy to create and distribute new information hourly, daily or weekly if desired.

Microsoft has begun using blogging extensively in their training efforts for employees and partners as well as for customer service. This week Norma and I attended a series of Microsoft Seminars here in Atlanta. The word “blog” was mentioned as a hot topic as many as 20 times in each seminar, along with the web addresses of Microsoft blogs we need to keep up with.

In my opinion, people who debate whether blogging is a good thing miss the point. It is a powerful synthesis and application of web technologies, not a group of gossipy people. It is not a replacement for chat rooms, instant messaging systems or static web sites. It is as revolutionary as the creation of a new form of space ship– it is a new information system. What people are doing with it at first is chattering about politics, news and technology (and blogging about blogging) :-). Eventually this technology will become so mainstream that it will be a primary format for the distribution and updating of information.

Companies are gradually updating their traditional business presence on the web by moving their “press releases,” calendars and current event topics over to their new blogsites. Even more interesting is the collaboration capabilities that blogs provide and the fact that a company can have 20 blogs or 50 if they want, each one a tool for a particular objective. Blogs are becoming a major addition to company intranets and extranets.

Federal Express changed our ideas about package delivery. Blogging is changing the way companies do business, and is the least expensive form of marketing right now. Further, a potential employee who has a reasonable blog can enhance (or diminish) his or her chances of getting a job by being visible and out front where persona is easy to distinguish and evaluate.

So, how do you learn how to set up your own blog? We learned a great deal from a very fine instructor, Tim Warner, through his Blogging course at VTC.com. We highly recommend that you visit VTC.com and subscribe. For as little as $30 for a one month on-line course, you can be blogging your way into the future. We don’t work for VTC.com but we have never found a better source for software training anywhere.

Today, search engines are very interested in blogsites and give high priority to indexing them. Do you want to rise to the top of the Google search engine (or Yahoo or MSN) without hiring someone to put you there, and without paying Google for “placement?” Start a blog and keep it up. Mention your best buzz words and phrases and feature people and events for your organization. It won’t take long. Search Google for “artondisk” or for “Art On Disk” and see what happens . . . we just stated posting a little over a month ago and we are at the top. Let us know if this article gives you any new insights or ideas . . . better yet, visit our blogsite at artondisk.com and subscribe!

The End

Do you know how to mash-up?

Friday, February 3rd, 2006 by Richard Nichols

According to the Webopedia, “mash-up” involves using web applications from two or more sources on the Internet to create a compound information display, with one item overlaying another. Their “mash-up” article and one in the Wikipedia give Google Maps as an example. Using Google maps, one might overlay a satellite image of an area with traffic data from a different program running on a server in a different web location hundreds or thousands of miles away.

The Webopedia article goes on to state:

“This capability to mix and match data and applications from multiple sources into one dynamic entity is considered by many to be the promise of the Web service standard (also referred to as on-demand computing).”

Reprinted by permission

This has interesting and dynamic implications. On an elementary note, it reminds me of the information overlays of air traffic controllers who watch radar screens for identified (and sometimes unidentified) aircraft to pass over a display.

An appropriate example of mash-up is a service provided by Flickr that overlays a Yahoo map with information about the image-making users of the Flickr service. You can find out how many people in your area are using Flickr, and who’s who around where you live. Mash-up, in essence, is becoming a major tool in the global community.

Evidently the term “mash-up” comes from hip-hop music mixes, tooled by the modern day “disc jocky” who performs in clubs and other venues with his or her audio equipment, turntables, amps etc. There seems to be two forms of the word, with some using the hyphenated term and others just using “mashup.” As this term becomes more worn, the hyphen will get lost, just as “e-mail” has become email, and e-commerce, ecommerce.

We are using a form of mash-up on this website to overlay the images from one set of servers onto the web template background from another place entirely. Both sites use database technology to deliver their data to your screen. Woe be unto us if one set of servers go down, because our site would be without any images at all.

A true mash-up makes use of APIs (Application Program Interfaces) but I don’t know enough about those to have a clue as to which APIs are used in this website or in your computer operating system and web browser. Since APIs are supposedly abstract, –well hey, we are all about abstract over here. We can imagine that we are on the leading edge, since that makes us feel better and more important without increasing the cost of anything. Let’s hope your mash-ups are of the information-overlay variety, not the automobile-overlay variety.

The End