Audra Ang, an Associated Press writer, reports about a Beijing clinic that treats online addicts.

All the children here have left school because they are playing games or in chat rooms everyday,” says the clinic’s director, Dr. Tao Ran. “They are suffering from depression, nervousness, fear and unwillingness to interact with others, panic and agitation. They also have sleep disorders, the shakes and numbness in their hands.

The descriptions sound a little freaky, but I have known people whose entire life was dependent on their computer.

Hmmm… 5 AM… time for lunch…

SS Zen Garden is a site illustrating the power of design using cascading style sheets (CSS). It accepts submissions from professional designers and allows visitors of the site to browse, participate, and appreciate a variety of different styles. Navigation among the styles and heavy page loads are rather slow, so why not use the following screenshot gallery of styles from CSS Zen Garden?

Judging by the official Firefox Roadmap, the release of Firefox 1.1 is near.

Quoting the site:

We are planning for a Firefox 2.0, but will divide the planned work over (at this point) three major Milestones, 1.1 (July 2005), 1.5 (unscheduled) and 2.0 (unscheduled). All major development work will be done on the Mozilla trunk, and these releases will coincide with Gecko version revs.

If you have free time in your hands, you can use Burning Edge to keep track of the Firefox changelog.

magine yourself the following scenario:

You open a page filled with links and adjacent to each individual link is a little visual page preview generated on-the-fly — a pseudo-screenshot if you like.

Ever since the inclusion of tabs in major browsers, navigation of several destinations at once (forking) has been possible. Nonetheless, under normal curcumstances, only one page could be viewed at any given point in time. Several previews, much like thumbnails of imagery, can increase productivity significantly. Allow me to illustrate this graphically.

In this text-only page, on-line preview
of destination pages would help greatly

To make such extended hypertext protocol viable, bandwidth barriers must be breached. Every link in any given page (with a possible threshold on the number of previews) will result in site hits. This inconsistent and unfamiliar behaviour has implications on server load, statistics and even CPU load which is required page rendering. Perhaps one can argue that RSS feeds have had a similar impact.

Will mentioning of the name be good for business?

here is a fun and yet scary thing about maintaining sites which hold good search engine ranks. The mentioning of names (names of places, but of individual people in particular) ‘invites’ visits by the ‘owner’ of that name or its friends, associates, and clients.

If the person in question is technology-savvy, it should not take more than a day for him/her to locate the source. So-called hat tips make the approach even easier (intentionally so) and services like Technorati assist the process as well. To those who approach the computer only on occasions it can take weeks or months to find out what others have said about them. This perhaps would finally occur when ego surfing (searching names that relate to self).

This power can be exploited or misused, but most importantly, it is something a webmaster must always be aware of.

Will you trust these for storing your mail?

uch information is migrating from our hard-drives to on-line servers: files (e.g. FTP), bookmarks (Deli.ci.us or portals), (Web-based) mail, feeds (analysis and statistics by Feedburner), photos (notably Flickr) and newsgroups (e.g. Google Groups) are merely a few more major examples.

Storage of personal data remotely has its powers:

• Data can be accessed from anywhere regardless of the computer used
• Backup is often handled by the service providers
• Liability shifts to service providers
• Inferences, e.g. spam filtering in GMail that adapts in accordance to users’ purging behaviour, social bookmarks, tagging…

Some people, myself included, have learned the hard way why the dependency upon third parties is risky. Hard-core users have their todo lists on-line, their mail on third-party servers and often files or address books stored remotely. The dangers:

• On-line servers may disappear due to bankruptcy, takeovers or corruption
• Import (and especially export) facilities are intentionally limited to suppress user mobility
• Servers fail or periodically go down; timescale for recovery is unknown
• Limited space and ‘premium’ packages that later emerge
• Pricing and policies which change, e.g. Yahoo stopped free POP3 support around 2001 (I too was a victim)

It is easier to blame somebody else but yourself as in the case of third-party dependencies. Yet, things are different when you control your own — shall we say — destiny. Ownership of your own domain is the first step towards an easier life in which the system administrator is yourself.

Scrapers: which is the original and which is the fake?

here has recently been a rise in the number of scrapers across the Internet. Such sites ‘scrape’ content off other existing, content-rich sites and put it along with ads on the Internet. They can make a ‘quick buck’ by attracting errant users who use search engines. In the process, genuine sites lose visitors and potentially get penalised for duplicate content.

Apart from illegal scrapers and spam, there are marginal cases of plagiarism. Imported content must always be:

• Contained within quotes
• Quoted in part so that it contains enough text to serve as a ‘teaser’ for the original information source
• Include at least one prominent link to the source