Lab 1

Part I – Beginning Web Development

1. Blog set up at this address (http://markscanlonwebdev.blogspot.ie/)

2. Twitter handle for course created: @markscanlon265

3. The Internet Society was created "to promote the open development, evolution and use of the            Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world".
  
    Membership to W3C is available to all organisations and individuals

W3C Technology searched for on twitter

Web Architecture
Article posted by @xoriant states that due to increased mobile use and access to information and technologies, web architecture that seemed up to date at the start of the decade is already being pushed to the brink.

Semantic Web
An article posted by @semanticweb discusses the trade-off in personal data being published online to help with faster and more relevant search results and data for others, and the risk of phishing attacks and even a traveler's patterns to figure out when they won't be at home.

Web of Devices
In a tweet by @richardengel he posts a video of 'honeypot' tests to test the likelihood of being hacked while traveling in Russia, where 3 of his devices are hacked within 24 hours.

Useful Twitter accounts to follow for DT265

- @sitepointdotcom is an online resource for web designers and developers, with web news, tips etc. related to web development.
- @netmag A magazine for web designers and developers
- @phpizer Resources about PHP, MySQL, Apache, Design and Ergonomics

Programming Languages (Wikipedia Data)

C++ and Python have the most regularly updated articles of the last 2 years, with Java close behind. COBOL and Haskell have much fewer updates.

Assuming a wikipedia article doesn't have a stub at the top indicating that the article is missing information or references, a good indication of the quality of an article is the number of references at the bottom of the page in comparison to the length of the article. The articles for these programming languages are all well cited. Another method of researching the quality of the article is to read the discussion in the "talk" tab.

A way to view vandalism on wikipedia is to go to revision history and look at the rating on each revision. Revisions with hugely negative rating will usually be due to vandalism with an explanation of what the vandal modified beside it. The Java, C++ and COBOL seem to be the most vandalized, with Python having very little vandalism and Haskell almost none.

The most common titles in these articles are 'History', 'Criticism' and 'Features'. There are also 'References', 'External Links' and 'Further Reading' which appear in most wikipedia articles.

The articles for Haskell and Python appear to have changed the most, mainly due to the original pages containing very little content. The articles for Java, C++ and COBOL have also changed a great deal, but had a decent amount of content to begin with.

-------------------------------------------------

Part III - Analysing the UI

WebMD
The home page here is a little too cluttered for an ageing user, with not much distinction between different content on the page. The font used is also quite small with no easy option of magnifying. However I think the menus at the top and the symptom checker are quite simple for an ageing user to use.

Book Depository
I think this is a good website for ageing users, simple layout with everything just a click away and very clear distinction between different sections such as 'Our Top Picks' etc.

Wired
While this is a good website with regard to font sizes and simplicity, I think the menu bar could be more obvious and the search bar could also be easily overlooked. Inside the menus it could take a couple more clicks to find an article that you're looking for. There is lots of scrolling on the home page.

--------------------

http://www.premierleague.com/ is a website that would have a target demographic of young males, but the navigation is clear and simple, with lots of information a single click away, including links to every team's websites and links for match tickets.

----------------------

From the questionnaire:

For WebMD, I gave positive feedback for most of the questions asked, apart from minimizing the users memory load.

Again for BookDepository, I generally gave positive feedback in the categories given.

Similarly for Wired, it has gotten me to think that all 3 websites are actually quite well designed and should be pretty clear to use for any user.

----------------------

WebMD scored 0% for mobile compatibility so I am assuming that it is riddled with errors when viewed on mobile. BookDepository scored the same. The same for Wired.

google.com scores 69% but even this has a single 'severe' error

----------------------

All 3 websites seem to have lots of problems according to wave.webaim.org, with webMD having 290 contrast errors which seems like a lot, and could be a problem for ageing users. BookDepository seems to fare best with just 4 errors and no HTML problems