Our old site featured a lot of animated eye candy that was more a demonstration of our scripting prowess than a truly useful navigational affordance. The redesign, Code Name: Placid, features a more traditional three column layout that should be easier to integrate with dynamic PHP-based subsystems like this blog, which will eventually merge much more tightly with our website proper. Our markup is also much lighter this time around as we were able to replace a lot of structural hooks and CSS2 code with more direct CSS3 declarations. The actual layout itself is based on the Faux Absolute Positioning technique. We also make minimal use of javascript to play a brief audio greeting the first time someone arrives on our site regardless of which page they land on. Finally, we are using Google’s Web Fonts to enhance the overall legibility of our copy.

Once deadlines are past, we will resume daily postings!

The big question for End Users is what kind of a reader / tablet to embrace. Platforms like the Sony Reader actively encourage users to bring their own content whereas Apple’s offerings are clearly aimed at dissuading the user from doing so by trying to tie all sales to their online market, effectively placing an Apple Transaction Tax on every purchase.

Whether we will see such practices successfully challenged in the courts on antitrust grounds remains to be seen as does the outcome of potential litigation to prevent the practice of jailbreaking Apple devices to permit End Users to load their own 3rd party apps.

Jailbreaking will become an even bigger issue in 2010 if large numbers of Nook users take advantage of its Android foundation to subvert the Nook’s free wireless internet connectivity which is intended to provide a dedicated conduit to the Barnes & Nobel e-book market for general web browsing.

While a dedicated reader is very appealing, particularly for those of us normally accustomed to printing out countless academic papers and such equally critical is note-taking and reference management functionality which is unlikely to be well supported in a purely recreational device.

The Newton Messagepad still sets a very high bar for user interface functionality that has yet to be surpassed.

In any case, End Users should demand the freedom to install or buy digital content and apps from multiple sources. Given the ability to safely “sandbox” applications and restrict their resource usage if needed (as clearly demonstrated by Google’s brilliant Chrome browser), the claims of vendors like Apple that they need to control what you can run on your device to insure that it behaves sanely in a networked environment are of exceedingly dubious merit.

If End Users refuse to tolerate such practices and vote with their wallets for open ended platforms, 2010 could mark a real turning point for the better.

The next couple of weeks will be taken up with a writing project while we wait for any trailing 2009 donations to reach us so we can fully assess our financial position from the year past. Then as soon as the IRS release the 2009 990-EZ Form & Instructions we will be processing that paperwork and transferring the information in it to our next Annual Report. We are also actively looking to expand our Board of Directors, so if you’d like to be considered, do get in touch.

As time permits between all of these administrative tasks we will roll out our next major website update as soon as possible so we can begin to expand the site again. We need volunteer to help in this work too!

Research-wise, we are primarily focused on parsing quasi natural language for End User Programming and we are also looking at some Public Policy Issues related to Virtual Worlds.

We have a few other plans in the works, but don’t want to prematurely make any announcements at this time.

Overall, 2010 is shaping up to be a great year!

We hope and trust that they will recognize the critical importance of information technology literacy at a much deeper level than mere button pushing to make things work.

Students need to understand what computing can and can’t do; they need to be able to recognize, anticipate, and minimize risks; to be able to make informed business and public policy decision about the implications of emerging technologies; and they need to be able to roll up their sleeves and delve into End User Programming lest they loose those opportunities to offshore outsourcing.

The IEUC stands ready to work hand in hand with all sectors to help bring about these vital changes.

As we noted last month, Rob Akscyn has now rotated out to our Advisory Board and Kirk St. Amant and Jeff Smith have joined our Board of Directors, restoring our Board to full strength for the challenging year ahead.

2008 was a bad year for the US economy and the nonprofit sector was particularly hard hit. With donors at both the institutional and individual level re-directing their giving to Social Safety Net causes, our donations were sharply off. Since, it is now clear that online fundraising for an organization with our profile generates far more regulatory compliance overhead than actual revenue, we stand ready to totally re-think our fundraising strategy going forward.

We will have more financial details on the year past as final bills and donations roll in over the weeks ahead.

While the financial outlook for 2009 is murky, our prospects have never been brighter on the Operations Side. Our new Directors are already exploring the feasibility of several potential Special Projects and last year’s complete online infrastructure overhaul has us well positioned to dramatically expand the range of content offered on our website. We are also preparing to share most of our back end code, which will let other sites leverage the thousands of hours of R&D that went into our website relaunch.

These are exciting times and scary times. The nonprofit sector remains in crisis and their is a very real risk that a number of charities will fail this year. However, the IEUC will not be one of them. With no paid staff, truly minimal overhead, and a mission that involves channeling IDEAS rather than DOLLARS we are here to stay.

So if your New Year’s Resolution is to volunteer some of your time or  to share some of your financial good fortune with a worthy cause, we invite you to join us in Forging The Future.

The future is what we make it, so by supporting our work, you can choose economic recovery, increased freedom & security, and a new era of personal empowerment ushered in through the wonders of information technology!

Since the system consolidates all of your accounts into one, it is critical that you trust your OpenID provider even more than you would a single site, since someone with database access to the OpenID server could usurp your identity everywhere by resetting your password to a new one and then logging into any of your accounts elsewhere.

The logical way to minimize that risk is to host your own identity provider server, which is supposed to be quite painless and easy to do.

Be warned, it is not.

For the last few weeks we have been trying various OpenID servers and have yet to find one that can pass all of the OpenID Enabled: OpenID Tests.

If you do want to experiment with this technology, we recommend indirectly specifying your OpenID End Point. This means that you should point any services requiring you to use OpenID to a web page that uses link tags in its headers to redirect them to your current OpenID provider of choice. Then you can, in theory, change OpenID providers without changing your OpenID Identity with respect to third party sites. However, different implementations may place restrictions on your account name choice which could foil your attempt to seamlessly swap servers.

If you can find a solution that reliably performs well in the real world, do let us know so we can share your good news. Until then, beware the hype and avoid diving in prematurely since this sort of experimentation can be a real time sink.

So in the meantime, if you must use OpenID, go with a large trusted “name” provider and if there isn’t one that you truly trust, consider establishing multiple OpenID’s for different accounts, even though doing this would of course defeat the point of the entire exercise.