If you’re in Toronto and interested in art, I’d recommend checking out the Square Foot Exhibition at AWOL Gallery. The show runs until August 27th.

AWOL Gallery presents Square Foot IV, a dynamic annual art exhibit, which showcases the work of hundreds of artists from the professional to novice. With each artist creating work in a 12×12 inch format, the show is hung in a grid forming an installation of overwhelming proportions.

It really is a huge show, with work by hundreds of artists hung in a dense grid. Works come in all styles and media, and all of them with a reasonable $200 price tag. There was lots there that I liked, maybe next year I’ll go again and take a couple of hundred bucks with me.

This isn’t a web post, but I think it fits under the heading ‘Of Interest to Geeks’. I discovered recently that Discount rents Toyota hybrid cars, so the next time a trip out of town came up I used the opportunity to try one.

I was really impressed. The Prius drove well, had plenty of space and even has an LCD screen in the dash so you can track your fuel economy in real time (at least until your significant other switches the screen off as ‘you should be concentrating on the road, not the computer’).

Best of all was the fuel efficiency. Driving somewhere at around the speed limit (give or take 10km/h) in town, highway and rural roads gave a very respectable consumption figure of 4.2 l/100km, or 56 mpg (US). Now that’s impressive, with seemingly never going below $1/l again and my current scary bedtime reading being The Weather Makers I’ll definitely rent a Prius again.

If you’re in Toronto and into tech then BarCamp is an event worth checking out. It happens the weekend of August 26-27 in Microsoft’s offices at Adelaide & Yonge. As described on the wiki:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

This event is part of the TorCamp phenomenon, started last November. It’s grown from about 50 at TorCamp 1 to over 140 at the last TorCamp DemoCamp.

The topics and people at these things run the gamut of tech, with a tendency to skew towards web and online stuff. I’ve been to the previous two BarCamps in Toronto and got a lot out of them. Though, you should be warned that you very much get out what you put into these events, there’s definitely no spoon-feeding. The official rule says:

All BarCamp attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one.

If that all sounds a little much, then attending a DemoCamp might sound interesting. Democamps are free, monthly events that sprang out of the BarCamp Toronto (aka TorCamp) community. The format is that 5-6 people demo some working tech, ranging from hacked disposable camera harware to enterprise security systems, with a lot of web 2.0ish stuff sprinkled throughout. Democamps are also a great place to get to know the community, without the requirement that everyone be as actively involved.

I ranted this morning about the awful mistakes that loft development companies seem to be making on the web. So I thought I’d point to what looks like a good example of a Toronto loft information website.

To be honest, I didn’t actually discover HomeInALoft.com, I developed it myself. Though develop might imply more polish that it yet has. It’s just a blog I threw together with the idea of posting some of the stuff I’m finding anyway, in the course of my own loft research. So, it’s part notebook, part experiment in beating the competition and part play at becoming an adsense billionaire.

Recently I’ve been looking at the websites of a loft developments around Toronto. Without exception the sites suck in far too many ways. I’m going to pick on www.westsidelofts.ca, but it is by no means alone in its sins.

I’m not going to just complain, I’m going to provide some constructive criticism.

Here are points number 1, 2, and 3 on my list of how to not break your website don’t use Flash . Now I’m going to backpedal a little, and say that there are times when Flash can be a useful tool. However, creating a simple image and text based website is not one of those times, that’s what HTML is for.

OK, so that’s my ugly anti-Flash zealotry laid out. But why, what’s my problem? Well here one important problem:

Google hates Flash as much as I do - you simply can’t afford to have your site ignored by Google, but by using Flash that’s exactly what you’re going to get. Long story short, the text in a Flash based site is not readable by computers, so Google has no way of telling what your site is about, which means you don’t exist.

Here’s an example if you search for “west side lofts” on Google you should see www.westsidelofts.ca at number one, so far so good, and that’s because the URL contains exactly those search terms, so Google assumes the site must be relevant. But now try searching for lofts toronto, lofts toronto queen street or even west side lofts toronto and you won’t see the site come anywhere in the first several hundred results. That’s because they used flash to create the site so Google can’t read it to determine that it should be a top result for all those searches.

Now it would be possible to build a Flash site that didn’t have these problems to such an extent. But why bother, it makes much more sense to build the site in HTML, which could be equal or easily beat a Flash site in usability, attractiveness, findability and probably costs less to boot.