WebDevology.com

From MVied Designs…

As you may or may not have noticed, the Internet ran into a few complications today. Apparently the problem has been linked to an AT&T routing problem somewhere in the Midwest. Some people didn’t experience any problems, while others were unable to access many large websites, most notably, Google. Several other large website such as Wal-Mart, Apple, and Microsoft were unreachable by people in certain locations

Read full story at http://mvied.com/blog/google-outage-brings-internet-crawl/.

I just ran across a post on Digg in the technology group about gadgets and devices people have built that interface in some way with Twitter. Quoting from the article:

Its (Twitter’s) charm is that its usefulness is entirely open to interpretation – while many just don’t get it (including Google’s CEO), some use it purely for self-promotion, others to connect with their peers, others to tap breaking news long before mainstream media covers it, and then there’s the subset of users that like to build or hack devices to use its API. Read on to meet six devices (of varying usefulness) that use Twitter to communicate with their human overlords.

The following devices are listed in the story:

• Tweet-a-Watt:  The Kill-a-Watt mod that broadcasts your power consumption.
• Botanicalls:  Plant water sensor that tells you when your plant needs a drink.
• Laundryroom:  A laundry room at Olin College that tells you how many washers/dryers are free.
• TwiVo:  A TiVo that tells you when it’s finished recording.
• A washing machine that Tweets you when it’s finished.
• A robot that makes and delivers popcorn, that takes orders via Twitter.

Read the full story here…

Let us know what amazing devices you’ve interfaced with Twitter or any other Web service.

The Past…

The majority of the development I did in the past was on a PC running Microsoft Windows, mainly XP Pro. As a default set of development tools, I would have the newest version of the different available browsers including Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. This was a great setup for testing in the latest and greatest browser versions but did nothing for testing in those older versions that the majority of the Web population were using. I explored many different avenues to fulfill my testing obligations and came up with a variety of solutions. None were optimal but they served their purpose. I initially had an older PC that I used only for testing purposes that had older versions of IE, Opera, Netscape and Firefox. This worked to a point but was a real pain switching amongst multiple machines just to do testing. I started using standalone versions of IE from evolt.org but this did nothing for testing in other browsers. There were a few online services that provided you with a screenshot of your page running in a variety of browsers and versions. This was good, but all it showed you was a picture – you can’t easily develop from that. There had to be a better way but I had not found it. But then…

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Welcome to WebDevology.com…

Please excuse our dust while we shake things up a bit. Sadie and I have decided to finally do more with this resource. We will be blogging about our adventures in the classroom, technology in general and our house building process. We hope this to be an informative yet entertaining resource for all things Web and education related.

Hang on tight. This may get bumpy…