code on a whole minute

I’ve been busy lately working on web annotation. I have produced a patch to add annotation to Moodle, and a stand-alone version suitable for integration into other web applications. Most recently, I’ve added a screencast of the system in action. I’ve also uploaded a simple Mandarin quiz web application which I use to teach myself Mandarin Chinese vocabulary. Feel free to try it.

I recently installed the PageRank extension for Firefox, which shows a gas-gauge style Google page rank indicator for the current web page. I was slightly amazed at Google’s original icons. They are desperately in need of colour and difficult to read. Similar ranks are nearly impossible to differentiate without hovering over the gauge with the mouse. So I came up with my own icons, which you are welcome to download. Here’s an example: . . .

I apologize for the primitive site – I’ve been focusing on infrastructure. I write my blog articles in OpenOffice.org, then export them and use an XSLT stylesheet to convert them HTML. The process is automated using Apache Ant and a collection of XSLT stylesheets I have written. I’ve also implemented a few Ant tasks for processing XML documents. I just added a page to the site with a description of how this works and a zip file with the source code.