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Earthquakes! Landslides!
By Steve McCabe, Delphis.dm
Such was the headline in the newspaper, several days later. But once again, we turned straight to the Net in huge numbers at a time of a major event. The quake and landslides of the 21st Nov left many of us seeking information immediately, online. But how did we fare?
CDERA.org had the first technical details on the quake magnitude, location etc. The most fascinating material though was the photos from Portsmouth by Ashton Riviere. Hes since upgraded his site to contain even more info about the event. See http://www.pss.tripod.com
But we do desperately need the local disaster office to have the web presence talked about for several years. As bad as the quake was, it left the communications infrastructure untouched. Demand for details on the event must though have stressed traditional avenues of information the Web could have provided alternative but authoritative information at a critical time. News-Dominica.com for example saw visits to the site triple on the day of and after the quake, but it took some time for official information to be made available.
WAP
Though its in no way new, its only recently Ive been able to evaluate the data services side of our cellular providers who have in fact been providing the service in various forms for some time. Now though were all getting serious about it.
WAP is the Wireless Application Protocol accessing the Internet on wireless devices like cell phones or PDAs. You can surf the web, access e-mail, even Instant Message. Whats going to drive it forward is also the wider and cheaper availability of Third Generation phones.
It was only when DOMLEC took power one Saturday that I realized the true power of WAP I connected to the web on the phone, used the WAP version of Google to find a site serving up live English football scores. WAP has indeed come of age!
But from a web developers point of view, it provides challenges. Mainly because all design skills become secondary to providing concise information WAP devices have small displays and access the Internet with microbrowsers - browsers with small file sizes that have to accommodate the low-bandwidth and low memory constraints of handheld devices on a wireless network.
Nevertheless, creating a WAP-enabled site is fun, since its almost pure information. If you can WAP, use your phone to go to avirtualdominica.com and follow the WAP link.
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