As an exercise in one of my level one courses I get my students to write a blog on some research topic of their choosing. I then get them to assess each others’ blog and award each other marks for content. This blog on Spam in the Internet was the winning entry this year. The others were: The history of the Internet hamad.blog Global warming Tackling Spam in the Internet...
As a first part in a series of experiments on [light-weight markup languages](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language) (e.g. for blogs, wilkis, presentations etc) I have installed the [PyBlosxom](http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/) blogging tool. It tool a few minutes more than the 10 minutes claimed in the [user guide](http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/1.3.1/manual/x78.html). But it’s working now. For future reference the URL (or should that be [URI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier)) is [http://tinyurl.com/2gyqvx](http://tinyurl.com/2gyqvx). An advantage of PyBlosxom (and [Perl Blosxom ](http://www.blosxom.com/) that inspired it) is that the blog entries are just text files which can be edited in any text editor and kept under version control....
In which [Dave Raggett](http://www.w3.org/people/raggett) presents the state-of-the-art in Web Forms: that is HTML Forms versus the richer XML standard XForms. Most folks these days have to resort to clever, complex, JavaScript to achieve sophisticated UI effects in the current crop of HTML standards (with all the issues around cross-browser compatibilty that that implies). Dave is proposing a *transitional approach* based on HTML plus portable JavaScript that can provide XForms-like behaviour (declarative validation, rich data types, forms logic) in the current crop of browsers....
This week I’ve been [dipping into and watching](http://crispyj2.blogspot.com/2007/04/educational-videos-from-google.html) a lot of Google TechTalks with the [engEdu tag](http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?q=engedu) on Google video. I guess like visiting the library shelves and *browsing* (something I really ought to make time for!) as opposed to just hitting the catalogue for a specific title, this tends to throw up interesting things that you wouldn’t otherwise come across. One such was a TechTalk by [Mark Birbeck](http://internet-apps.blogspot.com) of [formsPlayer....
It’s my wife Renate’s birthday today. Happy birthday darling!