Just recently I’ve been playing around with Facebook, primarily from a work point of view investigating mash-ups as I look at ways of using social networks to disseminate Government info.
I signed up to Facebook many moons ago but never used it so now it’s like a new toy, albeit it too many widgets that I’m never gonna use. However, today I’ve found this rather useful plugin for Wordpress which integrates my blog posts with my Facebook account.
It’ll be interesting to see what traffic is generated from this seeing as I don’t have many friends on Facebook (or friends in general for that matter, sob). Again this will feed into my R&D as I endeavour to push Government into the big bad world of Web 2.0, even though it’s years behind!
This evening I was on my way to the in-laws and mistimed my run as it was that time of the day when one of the local farmers takes his cows to the milking parlour.
As I sat on the country road rather unusually a bus was in front of me and I noticed two things. Firstly this was the second time of recent I’ve seen a bus with a large advert on the back which says “Where Are We Going?”. I thought if the bus driver doesn’t know I pity the passengers! Reading on revealed this was some kind of spirtual message as it also reads, “If God did exist what would you ask?” with a link to www.alpha.org.
However, what was spookier still was what was above the advert, in the back of the bus so I immediately got out my mobile phone and too a photo. 
Look at the photo and see for yourself, I honestly couldn’t help but think is this a sign? Is the big man upstairs trying to tell me something? Of course I worked it out that what I was seeing was a skylight and a fluorescent light but it seemed like one coincidence too many that I was staring at a cross.
So this evening I’m off to read more about alpha.org and as for what I would ask God, that’s a no brainer, I always wonder if He does exist, why can’t He appear every now and then to prove his existence? Surely the world would be a purer and less evil place if He did?
On Saturday I wrote about my first experiences with the Wii Browser and since I’ve tested a few pages to fix my css problem.
I found the quirk straight away which was down to positioning. I’d set the css properties of the logo in the banner to position: relative and left: 0 but Opera for the Wii ignored this but rendered it correctly when I used absolute positioning.
I’ve since done more surfing and found a couple of useful resources worth sharing.
One thing that struck me while playing about with css is what screen resolution should a Wii friendly site be?
On one of my test pages I put in a div which I set to about 775px before it wanted to wrap (or zoom out). This then got me wondering do all webpages on the Wii render at the same screen res? I’m using a 4:3 20 inch tv, what about a 42 inch plasma? Do pages look the same? Interestingly wiinintendo says the viewable area is 608×456 but is this still the case? The article promised for “part 2 tomorrow” but I checked their December and January 2007 archives and couldn’t find a part 2.
Opera mention that if you define a handheld stylesheet, the automatic reformatting will be overridden with the styles you define in the stylesheet, presenting the user with a single column (or zoom) layout. It’s a compromise worth considering but I would rather put more effort into making a comparable version for the Wii rather than a dumbed down version.
Clearly there are a lot of questions to be asked and of course users can have their own settings which may mess things up even more. I will be watching the growth of the Wii for browsing, in the meantime us developers can only follow Opera’s advice and test in the lateset version of Opera for Windows in the hope that our sites will be at least 95% Wii compatible.
