Disability News

Disabled World Survives First 10 Months

Nearly 10 months have passed since we saw the launch of Disabled-World.Com a website that has grown into a complete online community for the disabled and people with disabilities.

Nearly 10 months have passed since we saw the launch of Disabled-World.Com a website that has grown into a complete online community for the disabled and people with disabilities.

I had a chance to speak with Ian Langtree, the founder and owner of Disabled World, to find out how the website had progressed since its conception nearly a year ago.

The last few months at Disabled-World.Com have been extremely busy, we have gradually been implementing new coding and design enhancements throughout the site. We found that as the website became more and more popular the limitations of some of the scripts we were using became apparent. Fortunately we were able to update the problem areas with no disruption of the sites uptime, it was all transparent to the user but has greatly enhanced the speed and useability of the site in general.

Disabled World prides itself on bringing together people with disabilities, for example the Disabled dating side of the online community now boasts over 20000 members with various disabilities from all over the world. Many of the Disabled World community members have actually met in person and several have even gone on to get married after finding a partner through our site. Our members are quite diverse and are from all walks of life. We have members who are pilots, actors and radio announcers to those that have full time live in caregivers assisting them. Disabled World has also contributed financially for the making of two documentaries featuring the daily hurdles of disabled life.

An exciting new feature at Disabled World is the just completed coding of an XML / RSS data feed. RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites. Major news sites like Wired and community sites like Slashdot use RSS feeds. In simple terms this basically means that the latest headlines and articles from Disabled World can now be read in a program called an aggregator, which collects subscribed news from various websites and provides it to you on your desktop, much like an e-mail program such as Outlook. The Disabled World RSS can also be added to your MyYahoo! personal page, this allows you to read the latest articles as they are added to our website.

As to the future of Disabled World?
"We have learned a great deal over the past ten months as to what features our members want from the website and there are loads of new features constantly being implemented and planned for addition to Disabled World in the months ahead."

The Disabled World website can be found at http://www.disabled-world.com and the new RSS data feed can be accessed at http://www.disabled-world.com/artman/rss.xml

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