One problem developers have had with building websites was a limited access to fonts which work on cross-platform browsers. Some fonts may work on my MAC laptop which don't work on my Windows desktop.

Introducing Google Fonts API. You can use additional fonts through the Google font's API to allow you use a different font that would not be readily available. This isn't a new thing, it's moreso been around for a bit and I have used it a few times. For instance, on the Best PEI Restaurants page where we are using a font called "Droid Sans".

To use the API, all you need to do is link the font in a seperate stylesheet, add it into your current stylesheet and you can use any font's you want. This allows people to expand the amount of usable fonts.

Be sure to checkout the Google Fonts Directory.

If your anything like me, I'm not much of a fan of hearing how a website doubled in traffic over a few days. After all, 2 pizzas is twice the amount as 1 pizza. 2000 is double the amount of 1000. And 1,000,000 is twice the amount of 500,000.

Now that we've finished the math lesson, lets get back to the point. Tourism PEI issued a press release stating the traffic to their website doubled and they had to increase capacity to their site.

I didn't like this press release and asked the communications officer for Tourism PEI what the actual numbers were. Julie ended up sending me to the director who had access to the stats.

He did some comparables in Google Analytics, comparing July 12-18, 2009 to July 11-17,2010. For those unaware, Regis & Kelly filmed 4 shows here on July 12th and 13th. PEI ended up being the 2nd most Google'd item for a while on the 12th and was within the top 5 trending topics on Twitter. In the morning of both days, they shot live and in the afternoon they shot for the other days.

According to CTV, the show was a hit for them. They had 968,000 viewers for this morning talk show with additional coverage on other shows such as Canada AM, e-talk, extra, live at 5 and the list goes on.

Item	2009	2010	Change
Visits	54,779	130,098	+137%
Pageviews	418,906	765,940	+82%
Pages/Visit	7.65	5.89	-23%
Time on Site	6mins, 54 secs	5mins, 23 secs	-22%

The most popular page, besides the index page, happens to be the Places to Stay page, with the second being the search results for the search page. The third top visited page was the Things to Do page.

One of the more interesting comparisions between the two years is the browser wars. I've done a quick comparision of the top browsers.

Browser	2009	2010	Gain/Loss
Internet Explorer	75.58%	68.48%	-7.1%
Firefox	16.88%	16.47%	-0.41%
Safari	5.55%	9.80%	+4.35%
Google Chrome	1.48%	3.96%	+2.48%

So what else could the province have done to make this campaign go better? One thing, is they really should have had a specific landing page setup for the Regis & Kelly show.

Remember how our Tourism ads used to say, call 1x800 and ask for Carolyn? The reason tourism did this was to track how many people asked for Carolyn, then they would have an idea if the marketing campaign which stated, "ask for Carolyn" was successful. The province should have setup a special landing page just for the Regis & Kelly event which would track how things went. An example of this would be using a domain like visitpei.com just in the Regis & Kelly ads. This way, the province would know exactly how well things went. It would also help the province make it more targeted to the audience, since they would know anyone going to visitpei.com would have been from the Regis & Kelly show.

The problem with tourism, is that its not easy to say we were up or down because of this or that. If tourism is up next year, can we say that the Regis & Kelly publicity was a huge success? No, you can't. Why? Because there are so many factors involved, one being obviously the economy.

Obviously this year and last won't be record breaking years due to the economy being in the slumps however with the economy recovering more this year, that alone will have a impact on tourism.

If your around Victoria Row some night around 930PM, be sure to checkout the Sound & Light show at Province House. The show starts around 930PM and last 30-60 minutes. I was down there earlier this week and snapped a few photos.

After chatting with some residents and non-residents, they informed me the only other Sound & Light show they know of is in Ottawa. None the less, here's some photos or better yet, go down and check it out!

With the addition of two more farmers markets in Charlottetown, here is the date & times.

*Charlottetown Farmers Market	100 Belvedere Avenue	Wednesday 9AM-2PM
Queen Street Co-Op	420 Queen Street	Fridays 3PM-8PM
Charlottetown Farmers Market	100 Belvedere Avenue	Saturdays 9AM-2PM
DCI Farmers Market	90 Queen Street	Sundays 11AM-4PM

* Only open in Summertime.

Tonight I went back with my camera in hand to take some photos. Chris Wilkinson of Spinphoto advised me what type of lens to get today for my Canon Rebel XTI. So tonight, I used it.

Again, another amazing show with a lot more people on the streets tonight then last night! The first is my favorite.

Tonight I had the opportunity to watch the Cirque du Soleil (Circus of the Sun) performance at the waterfront. From the moment (930PM) they started walking down Great George Street I was simply amazed. If you don't intend on attending any of the shows, I highly suggest you at least view the parade down Great George. The parade alone (which is free, starts at 930PM by Province House) will more then likely encourage you to checkout the show. The parade's about 15 minutes that ends at the entrance tot he gates to the show grounds. The parade ended up gathering a couple hundred people and will no doubt help generate a lot of interest in the shows.

By the time the show got inside the gates, I was really impressed. The costumes and props were well done. The show (an hour) takes you into a magical world which will leave your jaws on the ground. Everything about the performance was well thought out and obviously well planned.

Inside the fences, it opened things up for more acrobatics to be performed and I was equally impressed with the performance inside the fence as I was while watching the parade.

I think the Tourism Charlottetown crew is onto something huge here, especially if we could keep this a PEI only event for a few years. This is an opportunity for PEI to go beyond the normal rock concerts we are used too and I think there is a lot more potential here with this new performance then the old one. Once you see the show, you'll be amazed.

Downtown Charlottetown Inc. is planning on opening a new farmers market in the downtown core. Starting on July 4th, the Downtown Farmers Market will offer Islanders and visitors another location where Islanders can purchase local food and supplies. With the average consumer spending $32.06 at a farmers market, it is definitely a great way to help promote our local economy.

The Downtown Charlottetown Inc. press release states that it is "because of people wanting to support local producers and the growing desire to know where our food is coming from."

The plan is that the downtown Farmers Market will be once a week on Sunday's. It will go from The Clover Farm on Queen to Grafton. The press release states that the sidewalks will still be open as well as the roads won't be blocked off.

I do hope that there is enough room on the sidewalk for this new market as some of the sidewalks between those two places are pretty small.

The press release quotes Downtown Charlottetown Inc Executive Director as saying, "A downtown farmer's market will increase pedestrian traffic in the downtown, improve sales for nearby retailers and expand Sunday shopping options".

The new market will operate on Sunday's from 11am until 4pm and they have a goal of having at least 20 vendors take part in the market for 12 Sundays between July 4th and September 19th.

This new location raises some interesting questions on the new convention center as the plans for it had a large farmers market in the middle of where DFO is currently. I wounder if that project has been delayed? Charlottetown Mayor Clifford Lee has stated he'd love to see a new farmers market downtown as well.

That being said, the new farmers market is a welcome addition as the one on Belvedere Avenue doesn't seem to be expanding. A conversation with a vendor this week, lead me to understand that only 2-3 new vendors have been added to the Belvedere Farmers Market in the past 4-5 years.

Vendors interested in this opportunity can contacted Jason Lee @ 626-7720.

Last week I had the opportunity to get my hands on the Nexus One and play with it for a bit.

Here's a size comparison. On top left is the Blackberry Curve 8330, then in the middle/on bottom is the Apple iPad and on top right is the Google Nexus One.

After playing with the Nexus One for a few minutes there was a few items I did not like such as typing on it. My fingers must be too big or its really hard to type on the Nexus One (I had the same experience with the Storm2). The other feature I did not like was that when I rotated the Nexus One, the screen did not adjust as well. After spending a few minutes looking it up, the system settings showed it was suppose to rotate so we might have been doing something wrong. However it wasn't a simple process like it is with the iPad.

My last semester at the University of Prince Edward Island I was taking a Mathematical Economics course. We were taught all kinds of crazy and awesome mathematical equations.

As with most my math courses, I struggled. Between writing all the notes down and understanding it all, I was blown away.

Then at night I would come home and read this really horribly written text book which didn't help.

I needed a new way to learn, a new way to understand. One part I struggled with was the Definite Integral. I went to extra math help and got some help with some other equations but I wasn't always available when the math help was open. I needed another way. I hired a tutor which in the end seemed like we reviewed things very similarly to how we went over them in class. This didn't work.

Determined to pass, I went to google and typed in one of my mathematical equations and sure enough a video from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) came up. The youtube video was of a class being taught the particular equation. I was curious to find out what else is out there. So sure enough I went to youtube and typed in a couple equations and voila. Awesome explanations of how to solve the mathematical equations I struggled with.

The youtube user patrickJMT offered easy to understand videos which I watched and learnt how to do the said equations.

Heres an example:

My exam scores increased big time. Things were no longer difficult and thanks to youtube and patrickJMT it helped me understand math.

So, if you are struggling with math problems, checkout Youtube. They got a lot of great step by step directions on how to solve different problems. Don't get discouraged if you don't understand the first or second video, there are some really good videos out there that do wonders.

So if your stuck on a math problem, checkout Youtube!

With the new craze on mobile devices, we've launched a new mobile website which features directional information through the assistance of barcodes. In the future, we will see a closer connection between your mobile devices GPS and the website your navigating on. As such, I've created a new mobile site for Globe World Flavours.

The website is going to be promoted in conjunction with a QR Code (2 dimensional barcode) to make better use of ads setup throughout town. On posters or advertisements, a barcode will be displayed such as:

People will then scan the barcode with their mobile device such as a Blackberry or iPhone and be able to find directions to Globe from where ever they are. Since the barcodes will be setup at specific locations, it will actual directions from where they are to 132 Richmond St.

So for instance, lets say your a cruise ship visitor who just got off a cruise ship at the wharf. Heres a basic example of what you would see after you scan the above barcode:

You can view this in action on the Globe mobile website or checkout the sample.

I believe that in a few years we will begin to see barcodes on everything. Lots of items will be scan-able via a mobile device. This will allow more up to date information to be processed. In the future when you drive up to a car dealership, you will be able to scan a barcode on the car to find out specific information on that exact car as well as other basic information about the vehicle.

There are already shipping companies and car lots interested in using the technology. The Halifax Metro had barcodes inside their paper which allows the reader to bringup more information on the story. There is even a QR barcode on my soap bottle!

At the current time not all Blackberry's will run the Google Maps API therefore a static image of a location map will be displayed. I'm sure in the future Blackberry will have a fix for this.