Member for
12 years 6 monthsI am the lead developer for Composr CMS. Composr is a feature-rich website engine, optimized for ambitious folks who fall somewhere between newbie and coder.
I am the lead developer for Composr CMS. Composr is a feature-rich website engine, optimized for ambitious folks who fall somewhere between newbie and coder.
Back in February I wrote an article saying how I believed Google AMP has been imposed on the web by Google as a ‘standard’ for developing fast webpages, and my dismay about that. Google apparently developed this as an internal project without any open collaboration, and avoiding the W3C standardization processes. Google made implementation of Google AMP a requirement to show at the top of the search results for common news searches.
To many of us open web folk, Google’s AMP violated the widely held principle of search engines not putting bias into search results, and/or the principle of web standards (take your pick – it would not be bias if it was a standardized approach that the wider web community had agreed upon).
Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, just announced that they are looking to block in-page popups (also known as overlays). These are the kind of things that commonly interrupt you to ask you to sign up to newsletters or to 'Like on Facebook'. In-page popups are very different to the traditional (and much more intrusive) popups which all popular browsers now all block, something that isn't at all controversial.
Social media is the perfect platform for turning important discussions into shallow memes. A place where we all live in echo chambers, the cliquiest of all cliques.
In November 2017 Sean Parker, co-founder of Facebook, admitted:
...we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while. It's a social-validation feedback loop...exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology
Like others in the IT community, I have become increasingly concerned with Google's behavior with their AMP technology.
For those who aren't really aware what AMP is, it's Google's proprietary solution for speeding up mobile pages. Webmasters implement AMP, which is a kind of Google-sanctified and Google-code-driven version of your webpage. It works very well and solves an important problem. Often when you search Google on a mobile device it will show AMP articles at the top of the results, so you get access to fast content first, which is reasonable in and of itself.
The ocPortal development team is pleased to announce that ocPortal 7.1 has now entered beta.
ocPortal 7.1 brings full support for HTML5 and for the schema.org meta-data initiative that Google/Yahoo/Bing jointly announced on Thursday 2nd June. This article explains how we have received schema.org, and how we have implemented it into ocPortal.
We feel that schema.org is a very important project, and is perfectly aligned with the goals and nature of ocPortal, so we have scrambled to release a solid implementation (achieved within 3 days).
Not only should schema.org support enhance the Search Engine Optimization of ocPortal websites, it really opens up new interoperability possibilities. For example, look at how Microsoft have been using 'tiles' in Windows Phone, and the recent Windows 8 demo. This is a great example of how semantic markup can be used to create rich interfaces from website data. Because ocPortal now provides this data automatically, in the standardized schema.org microdata format, ocPortal webmasters need not do anything to enable these kinds of interoperabilities.
Specifically, we have implemented the following into ocPortal from HTML5:
And the following from schema.org: