The instructors using our tool have been very vocal, and we're absolutely thrilled about that. However, we haven't heard too much from our fellow hackers or our instructor's students. If you've got a minute or two to spare, please let us know what you think.
This looks interesting, but I'm thrilled to hear that you are actually talking to customers first. Listen to them.
Nits:
1) I don't like that the 3 sellings points on the splash screen are aligned with 3 unrelated feature images. I was expecting each image to reflect each selling point and got a little confused.
2) The green hills footer bugs the crap out of me on the inner screens. Seeing text peak around a curved footer when I'm scrolling just doesn't look right.
Also a quick point on #1 - the images caught my eye more than the text and the images/text seem to link to different places.
If you want to get all 6 of these points across, I'd suggest letting the text live alone where it is then placing the images in a 3 column layout down below and enlarging them.
Just out of curiosity, what resolution are you using? I just happen to be using my old laptop today and I could see how the hills could be more distracting than we had anticipated.
The purpose of the semantic web is parsing of documents in general, not JUST search engine parsing of documents.
A disclosure tag would enable services such as aggregators (which the author mentions specifically), to deal with disclosures consistently. Given the recently raised legal implications surrounding this issue, it sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
I understand your and the original author's intention for the tag, but I think the author is operating under several flawed assumptions.
Portability: The author mentions the original disclaimer text being lost with a site's content being aggregated. How would adding a new tag change this? As happens now, some aggregators will choose to take this information, some will not, and the disclosure text may or may not be lost anyway. The use of tags do not confer control over how content is presented.
Separation: I can agree with this on the merit of semantics, and it speaks to the data-centric part of my brain. But while the logical part of my brain says "yes" to semantically describing the content, it still seems like a "pet" tag to have. The pool of available tags should not be made even larger, in my opinion. May as well just have rant, parody, cartoon-reference, and lolcat tags while we're at it (lolcats are even, I would argue, more ubiquitous than disclosures).
Style: If I understand the author's intention correctly here, he is stating that marking up a disclosure would make the writer more apt to create styling for it? If the author is implying that designers skip styling a disclosure because it's not marked up correctly, or that a disclosure is more difficult to mark up than other portions of a site, then I disagree with this assertion.
Given the legal ramifications of providing or not providing a disclosure, you're better off focusing on the disclosure content than how it's marked up.
That might be a bit of a stretch. I don't recall the administration of any K-12 school I attended ever explaining their reasons for doing anything (to the parents, maybe, but even that was rare). Though, even if the schools did explain the change, surely they'd be a bit more delicate than shouting "blame the fatties!" over the intercom system.
I agree that they wouldn't be so crass about the whole thing, but kids are smart. It's not hard to figure out why a school might ban candy bars and sodas, then to assign blame to those they think are the cause of it. That sounds rather child-like to me, does it not?
Thanks. Great catch. Admittedly, I'm still disappointed though. If they were taking it seriously, I'd expect something bright and shiny on that front page of theirs.
or rephrased : idea no.1 - redesign ed.gov and associated programs.
:)
I'm not trolling; this is an actual idea. I'll construct a better, longer version of this and post it soon on the site. A better portal could make ed.gov a fantastic place for all to visit.
Python-twitter will work too, but it covers significantly fewer API calls than Tweepy and doesn't have native oauth support (though oauth-python-twitter solves the latter nicely enough).
This isn't exactly the same type of thing the article talks about, but it drives me crazy when I see sites with subtly cut off drop shadows. The sharp edge catch my eye and it drives me crazy.
