Website

Coming back from holidays, I fired my RSS reader and, among many interesting posts, I found this one from Smashing Magazine about static website generators being the Next Big Thing on the web (and a follow-up deep-diving into four of them). The first paper describes how the web started as something static, became all dynamic and is progressively coming back to something more static, at least for some specific tasks. The interesting thing is that the author also describes pros and cons of each stage and why the web jumped to the next level. ...

(Post in French regarding the strange manners of a French-speaking Belgian consumer association: Test-Achats) Test-Achats est une association de défense des consommateurs belges ainsi que le nom de leur magazine mensuel. Je veux lire un de leurs articles sur leur site web. C’est impossible, il faut s’abonner. Payer pour lire un article me paraît normal (une personne a travaillé pour écrire cet article). Mais il aurait été intéressant de pouvoir acheter l’article à l’unité plutôt que de devoir s’abonner pour pouvoir avoir un code d’accès aux archives et seulement lire 1 article (vente liée ?). Passons. ...

A small post to welcome the new website for the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL). The OCAL was created more than 6 years ago and now has more than 24.000 vector illustrations in the Public Domain (in the SVG format that can be read by most graphic software). For me, a major improvement is the direct visualisation of thumbnails. In the previous version of the website, it was indeed painfull to open each result of a search in order to see if the illustration was what one was looking for. I’m using the Library since a few years and I am always amazed at the quality of most illustrations in the science and biology sections (the two sections I use the most). ...

One of the two labs where I’m working, the Center for Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, has updated its website. You can see it here and browse its growing content. And this time, I did nothing (a company built the website for us).