Quarkbase is a website offering a mashup of information pertaining to websites. Information is gathered showing you information about a website's traffic, company, social popularity, technical specs, and more. The information is gathered from a number of sources including Zoominfo, CrunchBase, Bloglines, Dmoz and Dealipedia. There is a bookmarklet available to allow you to easily get information about websites while you browse by auto loading the website you are viewing into the quarkbase website and opening the available information in a new tab (tested in Firefox).

Progress Bar
	Although this feature isn't much more than eye-candy, there is a nice progress bar that indicates how much information has been compiled and how much is left.
Summary
	The summary section displays a screenshot of the website entered as well as a general summary of information regarding pertinent information from the categories detailed below.
Introduction
	The introduction section gives a picture of the website logo and general information about the website. You can read a description of the website, see tags about the website, get links to the official about and contact pages, and see basic domain registration information. You can also see a list of websites that contain similar information and content.
Social Popularity
	The social popularity section provides information from social websites including Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Technorati, and StumbleUpon. There are counts for how many times the website entered shows up on each of these social websites. You can see some specifics like how many diggs it has received on digg, how many comments it has received on StumbleUpon, etc. The final subsection includes information about any feeds available.
Traffic
	The traffic section details what is available from Alexa. There isn't a mashup of information provided here, but it still includes useful and important information from Alexa.
People
	The people sections lists the people associated, both directly and inderectly, with the website entered.
Spotlight
	The spotlight section shows blog entries and other websites that reference the website entered. Some sources include twitter, Google news, Technorati, and many others depending on who is linking to the website.
Company
	The company section provides information regarding who the company is, where it is located, the number of employees, when it was founded, any merger/acquisition information, and job openings available.
Technical
	The technical section lists information about who hosts the website, where the hosting is located, and what type of platform the website is using (ex: wordpress blog)

As many of you know Adobe launched it's CS4 product on September 23^rd. To help with the release of the product Adobe held a CS4 launch broadcast that is available from the AdobeTV website. If you missed the broadcast, you can still check out the hour long video to get some of the information surrounding the new release.

This release includes updates to well known products like Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and Acrobat, but there are also updates to some products incuded that you may not know about like Soundbooth and OnLocation. You can get CS4 in six different versions:

• Design Premium - $1,799
• Design Standard - $1,399
• Web Premium - $1,699
• Web Premium - $999
• Production Premium - $1,699
• Master Collection - $2,499

Each version includes different combinations of applications. If you would like more information about CS4 or the products included within each version, check out the CS4 website.

Picking the colors for your next website or logo design is not always an easy task. There are so many great looking websites out there that use some very nice colors. How do you find the color to start with as the base or add to compliment it? Thankfully for those of us that aren't as creative as we wish we were there are websites available to help us see what a color scheme would look like. Here are some of the websites available.

Adobe Kuler

This is one of the coolest color applications I've used. It allows you to register an account in order to save color schemes you create or like to easily return to them at a later time. There are recent and best lists for color schemes that have been created by others. You can create your own or pick one that someone else has made. Being able to browse the others helps in finding the right scheme for you. The app lets you control and change each of the five colors or choose one to start with and create a scheme based on rule sets (analogous, monochromatic, triad, complimentary, compound, and shades). Another cool thing about Kuler is its ability to pick a color from an uploaded picture.

Color Wizard

The Color Wizard is very similar to Adobe Kuler. It has the ability to pick many different colors and provides RGB color sliders for fine tuning. Once you pick a color, a general scheme is generated and allows you to filter based on the rule sets (monochromatic, analogous, triadic, tetradic, complimentary, and split-complimentary). You are given a scheme made up of four colors. You don't have the ability to save schemes for later, but this is still a great tool for color schemes.

Colour Scheme Chooser

This is the slowest loading application that I found but it is worth the wait. The app was originally created by SitePro Central. You have the ability to choose a color to start with based on HEX and RGB as well as providing a color picker. A scheme of seven colors is created for you based on rule sets (monochromatic, analogic, analogic+, complimentary, and split-complimentary, triadic, and double contrast).

Color Schemer

This application is available both online and as a downloadable desktop installation. It isn't as fancy looking as Adobe's but it gets the job done. You are able to pick a color to start with either by HEX or RGB code or clicking on a color and a palette will be generated based on that color. Once you have picked your base color and the palette has been created you can lighten or darken the entire palette. If you see another color in the palette that you like better you can simply click on the color and a new palette will be generated based on the new color as the base. A palette of 16 colors is created.

ColorToy 2.0

This is yet another Flash application that allows you to start with a base color and have a scheme created from that color. There aren't many bells and whistles offered but it will generate nine colors that work well together. You can use HEX or RGB to select your base color or use a random function that will pick a color for you.

What other resources do you use to pick your color scheme? Let us know in the comments.

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The release of this curriculum is important to many groups of people, webmasters being one group. As webmasters, we know that standards are very important. The more standards we can and do adhere to, the better chance our website has of being displayed correctly within the many different browsers available. Even if you adhere to the standards, there will always be problems and issues that arise, but following the standards is still important. As Opera explains:

The beauty of the Web is that it creates a uniform, international development platform. Using Web Standards means your sites will be quicker to code and maintain, more compact, and accessible to web users regardless of their browsing platform and (dis)ability. (Opera)

The Web Standards Curriculum is part of Opera Education. Ultimately these education programs are meant to spread the usage of their browser; I believe they have chosen a great way to do it. Not only are the spreading the word about the browser, but they are helping the community as well. As the Opera browser usage increases, so will knowledge and understanding of web technologies and standards. I was very pleased to read about the release of the Web Standards Curriculum; I hope that there will be more to come.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been working to set the specifications for the new HTML 5. They have produced a document that outlines all the changes, deletions, and additions. This draft is very long and a little tiring to read, so I've tried to create a short summary of important parts. This summary is by no means all inclusive or a replacement for the information in the draft on the W3C's website.

• New Elements - These new elements are intended to provide better structure.
  • section, article, aside, header, footer, nav, dialog, figure, audio, video, embed, mark, meter, time, canvas, command, datagrid, details, datalist, datatemplate, rule, nest, event-source, output, progress, ruby, rt, rb
• New Attributes - The elements listed below have had attributes added to them. There are too many attributes to list in this summary, so I am only listing the elements that have had attributes added.
  • a, area, base, value, meta, input, output, select, textarea, button, fieldset, form, textarea, menu, style, script, html, ol, link, iframe
• Changed Elements - These elements have been changed to reflect the way they were being used.
  • a, address, b, i, hr, label, menu, small, strong, q
• Deleted Elements - These elements have been removed either because they should be used in CSS, they had a lack of usability, or they were confusing.
  • basefont, big, center, font, s, strike, tt, u, frame, frameset, noframes, acronym, applet, isindex, dir
• Deleted Attributes - These attributes have been removed because these, like some of the deleted elements above, they should be used in CSS.
  • accesskey, rev, charset, shape, coords, longdesc, target, nohref, profile, version, name, scheme, archive, classid, codebase, codetype, declare, standby, valuetype, type, language, summary, axis, abbr, scope, headers
  • align, alink, link, text, vlink, background, bgcolor, border, cellpadding, cellspacing, char, charoff, clear, compact, frame, frameborder, height, hspace, vspace, marginheight, marginwidth, noshade, nowrap, rules, scrolling, size, type, valign, width
• New APIs -HTML5 introduces some new APIs for easier web application creation.
  • 2D Drawing, audio, video, persistant storage, offline, editing, drag & drop, network, notification, history, cross document messaging, server sent events
• HTMLDocument Extensions - These provide easier interfacing with the DOM.
  • getElementsByClassName(), innerHTML, activeElement, hasFocus, getSelection(), designMode, execCommand()
• HTMLElement Extensions - These provide easier interfacing with the DOM.
  • getElementsByClassName(), innerHTML, classList

Although I tried to create a detailed summary, there is a lot more not covered here. I would encourage you to read over the new specifications and get a better idea of what HTML 5 is all about. For instance, the deleted attributes are removed from specific elements, so be sure to look over the full documentation before getting too worried about any changes made in HTML 5.

Although this release was a working draft published on January 22, 2008, it is expected to be in development for at least another year if not more.

What do you think about the new HTML 5? Do you have anything to add to the summary? Leave 'em in the comments for all of us to learn from.

Be sure to check it out here and add it to your profile!

I registered for Facebook at the request of developing a Facebook Application for conVerge Church. As I figured, Facebook is now a new tool for me to learn and will consume many hours of browsing documentation, testing code, and developing new apps. At the moment the application is very basic, but with any help from God, I will be able to learn the Facebook API and turn the app into a fun and useful tool. I am very happy to continue helping conVerge Church with their online presence and will continue to develop, whether it be their website or Facebook Apps!

Be sure to check out both the website and the Facebook Application.

Comments and requests are always welcome and appreciated in helping me develop new and helpful pieces to the website!