Mr Bats, the Kangaroo Cat

Retro Singapore Sports Council site finally abandoned for “icanbook.com.sg”

The Singapore Sports Council has had a retro looking site for bookings that persisted until late last year. Benjamin Koe highlighted the page at http://www.ibook.ssc.gov.sg to a few of us last December noting the site’s footer says “Preferable Browsers are Netscape 4.0 and above or Internet Explorer 3.02 and above”.

It was fun viewing the soon to be abandoned look that reminded me of some of my hoax webpages from the 90’s as well as my SETI@Home stats page that petered out in 2004 (no more idling computers by then).

I remember stories Ladybug used to relate about booking badminton courts for her regular weekly game with friends. She’d choose courts around Clementi for the group, which were in high demand – she’d wait until midnight and click refresh repeatedly until the slots opened up for the week ahead in order to grab her desired slot. In five minutes the slots were completely gone!

She seemed to enjoy the challenge and on some occasions, I’d hear her talking excitedly when she was beaten to a lot. Frenetic activity would follow to secure the next best venues within that 3-minute window. Singapore getting crowded is felt in so many ways.

New portal for bookings

SSC, along with a few others are now using a new portal, I Can Book:

“ICanBook was launched on 4th January 2010 @ www.icanbook.com.sg. It is an online booking portal that allows the public to book facilities (both sports and non-sports), register for courses and to make payment for the transactions.

The portal is managed by I-Magination Solution Pte Ltd. The Singapore Sports Council (SSC) is one of the first four government agencies that has subscribed to the portal. The other three government agencies are the People’s Association, National Parks Board and National Heritage Board.”

So much work, so little time

Mr Bats the cat keels over in front of my second monitor – and I wishing I could join him!

Uh-oh, Haloscan’s dying – switching the Habitatnews comments engine

On 21 Nov 2005, I finally tweaked some code enough to provide a Haloscan comment engine for the Samizdat blogging engine I was using. This brought comment capability to all three Samizdat blogs I was maintaining at the time – my old blog, Habitatnews and the old Raffles Museum News. 

So it was kinda sad to get this notice today that Haloscan's folding. Four and a quarter years of great service. While there weren't many comments, the few that were posted were important and I was notified immediately. And, of course, it took great effort to insert the comments in the first place! 

Two of my blogs have since migrated to WordPress. Habitatnews however, is still extant, so I've opted to migrate to the Echo comment engine. It'll cost US$12/year after a two month trial. Since comment traffic is very low, I'll explore the free options out there. Right now there is some python script but it addles my brain! I could, of course, simply redirect the comment link to a pop up box that will redirect comments to my email account. 

If I remember how. We'll see.

Xylo and Tiger “holding hands”

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In the midst of a Web.20 class

I am with the MW5201 students and we are racing through Web2.0 tools in Lab 7.

Mr Bats the cat snuggles up

Tiger the ticked-tabby cat, snoozes on the sofa

Xylo the cat watches a Katydid

Yeah, he was fascinated; maintained his eye lock on the insect.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Readability – making a webpage more readable

Ivan Chew highlighted to me Readability, a great tool to make webpages easier to read, especially with extensive text. It strips away the trimmings to leave you with just the text, sized and styled to your taste and spread out over an ideal width, like so:

Many news sites have a button to click to obtain the print-friendly version of an article – Readabilty makes this simpler.

To enjoy this, you have to:

1. Go to the arc90 webpage: lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability
2. Select:
   • Style (e.g in my case “newspaper),
   • Size (I chose “Large”) and
   • Margin (my choice was “Wide”).
3. Drag the “READABILITY” bookmarklet to your browser’s toolbar (just below the URL window).
4. Next time you want to make it easier to read an article, just click the bookmarklet!

You can insert multiple bookmarklets set to different parameters of style, size and width.

Prior to Reability, I cut and past lengthy text into Tofu, a simple and lovely desktop tool for Mac OS X. Tofu arranges text into multiple columns and adjusts the style and background to your settings, as well as the width of columns. The size of text is also adjustable on the fly and it can present text full screen.

WhIle Tofu is superior to Readability, the latter is merely a click (or keystroke) away within your browser window. Thus Readability is more convenient for the short to medium length articles that I might encounter on the next while I’ll continue using Tofu for longer articles. Lovely!.