This website lets you know wait times at GTA COVID-19 testing centres

A Toronto man found the largest pain point for people looking to get a COVID-19 test: the wait. And hoping to ease the Greater Toronto Area residents' pain, Ben Harris built a website called covidwaits.com, which crowdsources information about COVID-19 testing centres. 

The Toronto startup consultant found himself waiting for hours to get tested, and there wasn't an online resource that let him know where it was best to go without wasting so much time.

"My takeaway was, I wish someone would have told me that the Etobicoke drive-thru was five hours before I left my house," Harris told CTV News Toronto. "And the second thing was I wish there was a way that I could check the wait times before I went so that I could make the most informed decision about where to go."

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Modern website design requires an integrated SEO strategy for success

Companies and brands realize the need to have an accessible and engaging online presence that’s unique as well as informative.  There’s a trend for companies and brands to invest in standalone websites which are suitable for accessing on web browsers of PCs as well as on various mobile devices.

Responsive web design has become the best solution for creating websites that can inform and entertain users no matter what device they are using. Companies and brands are relying less on platforms like Facebook to reach an audience and investing in web and mobile properties that they can fully control and optimize as needed.

The advantage of building website design from the ground up is that it is easy to integrate an SEO strategy up front. 

According to Parxavenue Ltd., a Canadian SEO Company, “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the method of increasing the numbers of visitors to your website through search engines. The higher the position in the search engine result pages (SERPs) your website ranks, the more visible it is to visitors and the numbers that visit your site will naturally increase. This is called organic search, and this is what SEO is focused on. Ignoring SEO will significantly hinder your ranking in the SERPs, and drastically limit your online visibility.”

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There’s a new site that’ll make it easier for you to search for Netflix content

This might be what your weekend needs. Reddit user CrazedEli or Ville Salminen in real life built and shared on the r/television subreddit his newest site called Flixable. It’s basically a search engine for Netflix that shows you what’s popular, original, or leaving the streaming service. It’ll let you browse by genre or IMDb rating as well as filter searches based on release date. Salminen said he built the site as a hobby to teach him more about programming but he also realized it addressed a need people still had: how to look for content beyond what Netflix’s algorithm suggests—which admittedly looks like most of their original content but not much of the other content they offer. For now, it catalogs what’s available on Netflix in the US, but he says he’ll be expanding this to include other countries as well.

According to Salminen, “With Flixable, I had one aim. To build a site that would make it easier for Netflix subscribers to choose what to watch on a movie night.” He previously created a similar browsing site for Netflix called AllFlicks but he sold that to Reelgood in November 2017. This new site is basically building on his dream of rebuilding AllFlicks from scratch. He is in talks with Hulu representatives to make a similar site for the service.

Source: Mashable

Interactive timeline explains why time passes by quickly as you age

We’re already past the half year mark for 2015 and if you’re older, you tend to feel this more than if you were in your teens. Why is that? An interactive timeline made by Maximilian Kiener is there to explain the phenomenon to you. According to the timeline, the brain’s perception of time shifts as you get older, making it seem like time is moving faster than it really is.  So, the longer you live, the smaller a year becomes in relation to your entire life as a whole. The example given on Lifehacker is, when you’re five, a year is considered 20 percent of your life. When you’re 50, a year is only two percent of your life. Kiener’s timeline is based on the theory from philosopher Paul Janet. You can check it out here yourself, if you want this concept explained to you in an easier manner.

Source: Lifehacker