Gaffney3.com

CSS naked day has arrive and as a reminder, Gaffney3.com has stripped itself naked of its CSS for the common goal of promoting web standards. Gaffney.com graciously using a CSS created by the prolific Lokesh Dhakar, but even without, the site structure and layout is still functional and appropriate for a myriad of devices, browsers and platforms because of its usage of XHTML.

As a note, I will be taking some time today to delving into the Zemanta plugin to determine if I can aid them in making their plugin produce validate XHTML, because they are currently breaking my validation.  They did release an update and I’m anxious to read its ChangeLog.

Image via Wikipedia

On April 9, 2008, Gaffney3.com will strip itself naked of its CSS for the common goal of promoting web standards for the day. Without the CSS, which on Gaffney3.com was created by the talented Lokesh Dhakar, visitors will see the site free from formatting.

For those of you unfamiliar, I’m a huge fan of XHTML having felt the pain of reformulating HTML for some of the sites I’ve worked on over the years for cross-browser, -platform and -device functionality. Also, with the nuance differences between the varied user-agents and parsers “correcting” HTML, a more restrictive or rigid subset is necessary to more correctly render the design which is in the best interest of both the web designer and user.

Having said this, Gaffney3.com currently does not validate since the introduction of the Zemanta plug-in which has been tremendously useful, however will need to clean up their markup if I am to continue using it.

Google has officially launched their Google App Engine for full-stack, automatically scalable, hosted web application platform as of 9pm PST last night. The architecture offered consists of Python application servers, BigTable database access, and GFS distributed data file servers.

Obviously, this service is intended to go toe-to-toe with the Amazon suite of web services; more specifically S3 for data storage, EC2 for virtual servers, and their SimpleDB for database access.

Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington were at the event last night. Scoble posted several videos from the event. Arrington, as always, expatiates on the functionality, usage and monitoring of the service. Google also posted their official video from their announcement as well as a demonstration video.

From Google:

Run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure.
Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.

• No assembly required.
  Google App Engine provides a fully-integrated application environment.
• It’s easy to scale.
  Google App Engine makes it easy to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.
• It’s free to get started.
  Every Google App Engine application can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.

The real question for me is whether this will truly be for business and enterprise level applications or for the small, supplemental apps developed on a tight deadline.

This morning, News Corp announce that it will be restructuring its Fox Interactive Media unit which includes the departure of its Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett and the launch of its online advertising network. This is seen as an attempt to flatten out its interactive sales organization by combining their advertising technology, operations and sales into a single unit which, in turn, will oversee sales of for both Fox’s and third-party sites.

In a memo issued to FIM on Thursday, President Peter Levinsohn said:

“By integrating the sales teams in this way, each operating unit will be empowered to assume responsibility for its revenue, growth and profitability. Further, each operating group will be afforded greater flexibility to implement processes and programs that meet the unique needs of their respective markets.

“Since the sales teams will now be integrated with their respective brands, we will no longer have a separate FIM Revenue Group.”