The European e-Privacy directive, cookies and you
The European e-Privacy directive is due to be implemented in the UK in May and will result in a change in the law relating to cookies (small files stored on your computer’s hard drive). Kieren Pitts outlines the changes and discusses how this may influence your web site:- Upcoming changes to cookie laws
Published on 15 Mar 11 under Briefings | No Comments »
Here’s something you might actually want to use
Word clouds are fantastic and often quite beautiful ways of presenting information. They can also be used to analyse the key themes in a piece of text. To generate word clouds from text you can use www.wordle.net – it’s free and fun. If you want to save your word cloud to use in a presentation [...]
Published on 21 Oct 10 under Briefings | 3 Comments »
The art of now – instant search results
As technology gets faster and more efficient users expect information to be available almost instantaneously. The move to increasing the speed of information retrieval was emphasised recently when Google launched Google Instant. What is Google Instant? Google Instant is an enhancement to Google’s search interface. As you begin to type, Google analyses the letters you [...]
Published on 30 Sep 10 under Briefings | 1 Comment »
The power of semantics (part 2)
After my earlier blog post introducing some of the ideas behind the Semantic Web, I recently came across this little excellent video showing how the next version of the Drupal content management system comes pre-built with support for adding semantics to web pages. This next version of Drupal (Version 7) should be hopefully coming out [...]
Published on 13 Sep 10 under News and updates | No Comments »
Puzzles, e-cards and Rover – engaging the user
ILRT has developed a web site, Hidden Lives Revealed, for the Children’s Society, with information about the Society’s work and its children’s homes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The site was originally funded by the National Lottery and is intended to appeal to a range of ages and to be used as [...]
Published on 3 Aug 10 under Briefings | No Comments »
Life in the cloud
Despite working in the IT industry for more than fifteen years, when it comes to my personal use of IT, I find that I’m rather reluctant to embrace new technology. I’m one of the few developers on the team who continue to use a Microsoft Windows operating system, not only that, but it’s one that [...]
Published on 16 Jul 10 under Briefings | No Comments »
Worldwide Universities Network – a new website
We’re delighted to have recently launched a new website for the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) http://www.wun.ac.uk/ Here at ILRT using a Drupal-based Content Management System, we designed and developed a number of templates that allow the editors to keep to a consistent look and feel throughout the pages. The templates also reduce the time needed [...]
Published on 8 Jun 10 under News and updates | No Comments »
The power of semantics
Chris Bailey explains how searching for Iron Man uses sophisticated semantics. Here in ILRT, we don’t just produce websites for people. Over the last year I’ve been working with our Web Futures team on a number of their projects. Web futures is a research group within ILRT investigating new ways of managing, organising and interacting [...]
Published on 14 May 10 under Briefings | 2 Comments »
Unicode and the web
Why bother? If you create content for the web, you may have to transfer accented characters (or text in non-Roman scripts) onto a web page. But even if the text looks all right when viewed within your organisation, it may be illegible to the wider world. To avoid this, you need to know a little [...]
Published on 4 May 10 under Briefings | No Comments »
The internet free lunch
The idea of free as in zero price, along with free as in openness and freedom, has long been integral to the nature of the internet and hence to its economics and business models. Essentially the internet provides a means for virtually zero cost reproduction and distribution of digital products, e.g. books, music, films, software, [...]
Published on 9 Apr 10 under Briefings | No Comments »