William Computer Blog

I received my tv guide magazine for foxtel cable tv this morning. The news was announced last week (I posted the link on my linkblog) and this morning I received an announcement from foxtel about the features of digital cable television. There are some exciting new features that interest me so I decided to blog about it.

With foxtel digital, they will have more extra channels for me to watch. Currently, there are around 45 channels on the cable television and they wil provide with around 130 channels in the future.

You can now watch sport from all angles, so when I watch sport I can now choose to watch from different 4 angles. You can now view team player’s profile with a click of a button and you can now listen to different commenatry.

When you watch news channel, you can now choose when and how you want to see your news. You can now choose if you only want to watch the business news, the headlines news, the entertainment news, the sport news, so you don’t need to watch the whole show now. It feels like going to the website of internet news site and choose which news category you like instead of watching the whole news.

Now this is the greatest, most brilliant feature that really got me interested is I can now watch the latest blockbuster movie shown in widescreen with enhanced sound. There is no need for me now to go the the video store to rent DVD or Video. Of course, I have to see the price first, if the price is reasonable compare to the video store.

The best thing about foxtel digital is there is no need for me to buy a digital television. They will provide a new digital set-top unit if I upgrade my account to digital. Foxtel will continue to offer the analogue service, and I think I’ll wait a few weeks or months to upgrade. I need to check the price first (the setup fee, the monthly fee) and if the price is good of course I will upgrade!

Anyway, foxtel’s website got all the information you want about digital foxtel. 100+ channels to watch isn’t that great? It also provide a digital quality picture and CD quality sound!

Please be aware that this is not a foxtel advertisement and I do not work for foxtel, I’m just an excited customer of foxtel who is interested in their latest offering! Any questions about foxtel digital, please visit foxtel website.

I created a new linkblog on this site. The linkblog is collections of links to interesting sites, articles, news, that I stumbled upon while browsing the WWW. The reason why I created the linkblog is because I don’t want to post a new entry only to link a single article on my main blog.

The five recent links on the linkblog is also displayed on the main blog, if you click on the see more links link, it will bring you to the main linkblog where you can see a description of the links.

I am now going to explain how I created the linkblog. The first thing I did is to create a new weblog on my existing installation of movable type. I changed the Local Site Path of the linkblog weblog to a directory called linkblog on my weblog’s DocumentRoot so the address of the linkblog would be http://wpram.com/linkblog/.

There are three movable type templates I use on the linkblog, that is the main index, the monthly archive and the text-only template. The Main Index template is the index.php of the linkblog. It provides description of the links, links to my main blog, links to the monthly archives, and links to the linkblog RSS newsfeed files. The monthly archive allows you to view the list of links by months.

The final template is the one used by my main blog to display the recent link lists on the front page. It is called the text-only template located at textonly.php. I am using PHP include() function to display it on my main blog. If your host doesn’t have php, you can use Apache Server Side Includes.

Whenever I want to update the linkblog, all I have to do is post a new entry on the linkblog instead of the mainblog. The format is Entry Body for the link and title and Extended entry for the description of the links.

Detik is a popular Indonesian news site, and I just heard from Lala that someone created a copy of detik news by fetching the news material of detik every 5 minutes. The reason why he created the project was because he thought it would be cool if people could read detik news without having to look at those ugly ads on detik’s site.

What he did was wrong, he was breaking the copyright and I do not think it is a creative idea. However, I do think the design of detik is ugly. If you visit the website, you will see that the page is crowded with banner advertisement.

Placing banner ads are fine, I know that’s where detik get their money, but placing banner advertisement on the top, left, right and bottom side of the page is annoying. Not only those banner ads are annoying but visitors are required to spend more time and bandwidth to load the banner ads.

Detik is not the only Indonesian site with so many banner ads on the site. Kompas, one of Indonesia’s most popular newspaper, also placed a lot of annoying banner ads everywhere on the page.

Look at CNN, Sydney Morning Herald, Time, and many other international news sites. They do have banner ads, but not everywhere!

Accessing detik is horribly slow. I know this is probably a bandwidth issue, but I think they could improve the speed of their site by following the webstandards. If you take a look at their markup, you can see a lot of presentational markup that could be replaced with the use of CSS.

Not only detik will save bandwidth by following the webstandards but visitors of detik will also benefit because they will be able to load detik.com faster than before.

There should be a webstandards campaign with the goal of introducing the benefit of designing with webstandards in Indonesia. If detik provide a cleaner, faster and less banner ads, hopefully there won’t be anyone in the world who will think about stealing their content again.