The new Cognicology.com design has been up for about a month now, and whilst the design is a definite improvement over the last design, it still isn’t our ideal layout. I actually had a meeting with Al today about the design of the site and we’ve both come to the conclusion that we want something that is a little more ‘full and exciting’ and a lot less minimalist. At around the same time as we’ve been thinking and discussing this, I’ve been following the blog of Smashing Magazine which has some great in-depth articles revolving around online design. I first found Smashing Magazine when I stumbled upon their great collection of monthly desktop wallpaper calendars during one of my procrastinatory searches for an inspirational (and anti-procrastinatory) desktop image. I mention these guys because by chance they have published a great article on the wireframing stage of web design projects.

I’ve knocked up a quick wireframe outline for a possible new Cognicology.com web layout. We will pass it on to the peeps we know in the business and get comments/ideas from them on what they think of the arrangement of elements.

The other cool thing related to Smashing Magazine is that I’ve pre-ordered a copy of their upcoming book, The Smashing Book. To quote them directly:

The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability and optimization and explores how to create successful user interfaces and apply marketing principles to increase conversion rates. It also shows how to get the most out of typography, color and branding so that you end up with intuitive and effective Web designs. And lastly, you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine.

The book is due out late September, and they are giving a pre-order discount of 20% off the price of the book. Check it out here.

In terms of technical, we’ve moved all (well, nearly all) of our hosted services from GoDaddy hosting to hosting through Knownhost. GoDaddy hosting was cheap enough but it had a tendancy to suffer really slow loading times during peak US hours – not really acceptable for a blog delivering video content (see strategic below)! We now have a virtual private server with Knownhost and the service has so far performed flawlessly.

On the strategic setting, Alborz and I have decided that we are going to move away from the traditional text-heavy blog or online magazine format and move towards delivering Cognicology primarily as a video blog, or vlog (not the biggest fan of the term vlog – sounds like something Richard Branson would call his blog). We both currently have to do a load of writing through our other commitments, so switching to video was a great way to get some more of that tasty spice known as variety.

We’ve now got a completely redesigned website for cognicology now that is really strongly centred around video delivery – it has a whopping big space at the top for our videos and the video content is prioritised in the category browsers, etc.. In terms of actual recording style when it comes to the videos we are going for a fairly organic style with little to no scripting – we want to deliver our opinions, ideas and tips on the cognicology subject manner with authenticity and ernest which I think is best captured with unscripted dialogue.

Anyway, check out Cognicology!

http://www.cognicology.com/

The pilot site using Google Maps to display WiFi maps for Australian cities has been an amazing success – I’ve had people jumping on board and extending WiAU’s pitiful collection of a single Brisbane hotspot map to having maps for most capital cities in Australia. With the great amount of community support for WiAU from both individuals donating time to create maps and hotspots as well as other organisation such as Free Sydney Wireless giving the site a great wrap, I thought it was only fair that I give back my time and attention and improve the system.

Here is a list of things that I’ve implemented over the last month or so:

A completely custom engine

The new engine is run (mostly) on WiAU’s server (with the exception of the tiling engine, which is run on the OSM servers). In fact, WiAU is now implemented entirely without the use of Google Maps.

The pilot system was, in essence, a site for listing a bunch of Google Maps that had locations marked for hotspots. There were a bunch of conventions defined, such as particular coloured markers for the type of hotspot on offer. This method was cumbersome however and required people to have a Google account to edit and add maps.

I hope that the new engine is a little easier to get up and running and is hopefully a little more intuitive.

Open maps, open access, OpenSource

After using OpenSteetMap for a little while, I realised that the maps for WiAU are essentially the map equivalent of a wiki page, having a Wiki-esque access style. Absolutely anyone can view maps and any registered user can add, edit, delete or otherwise change maps and markers – there are no access level restrictions, no moderators and no user caste-systems.

Given the above stype, the maps on WiFi in Australia are completely open – and so I thought that the underlying technology should also be. All maps on WiFi in Australia are based on two fantastic open source mapping technologies:

• The OpenLayers mapping interface,
• using OpenStreetMap as its geographical layer.

Rich formatting using standardised markup

Descriptions for markers and maps are entered using WikiCreole, a standardised wiki markup language. By using a simple-to-learn markup it is easy to include rich formatting, links, tables and even images in your marker descriptions.

Using WikiCreole is great, as users don’t need to know or even have any knowledge of HTML to create nicely formatted hotspot descriptions! They just need to know the very simple creole-markup to create richly formatted descriptions. Also, when entering the description users can pop open a cheatsheet for the markup which is really handy.

Beta and the old maps

Now for the other side. The new system is currently in beta – WiAU has grown into a complicated beast and as such it is inevitable that there might still be a few little bugs hanging around. Also, the new maps are currently unpopulated with the markers that users have added to the old maps – this is due to technical and licensing issues with accessing the old data. Also, hotspots that are added give credit to the contributor – I don’t want to take any credit for the work and contributions of others!

If you want to access the old maps, they are still able to be reached by visiting http://<mapname>.wifi-in-australia.com/ (replacing <mapname> with the city or region of the map).

Oh, and for comparison, the new URL structure for maps is http://www.wifi-in-australia.com/map/<mapname>.

Finally, thanks again to everybody who has taken part in the project so far – I look forward to your continued support, contributions and (hopefully less of this last one) bug reports! Also, any feedback on the interface and engine are always welcomed and appreciated!