An excellent TED Talk by Eli Pariser: Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles’. One of the really surprising things he claims, is that even if you’re not logged into Google, the search results are still being filtered for you. He ran a quick experiment, to show how different people got wildly different results for the same word, at the same time on the same day.
I use Web-Stat to track my website traffic and to warn me if my site is down. Whenever my websitesite goes down, I wonder to myself…how often do websites go down? My hosting company is DreamHost and whenever there’s an issue people rant and rave about downtime. But I wanted to share my actual downtime statistics with folks, who may be wondering: how much downtime is “normal” for a small business website?
I’m on holiday as I write this. I picked the month of December to be on a holiday for several reasons. One of my reasons is that I can use Google Trends to see when searches for what I’m selling (small business website design) drops.
I don’t actually know why, but when I write. I put one space after each period. I can’t remember why I learned to do this, and sometimes when I write, I feel a little pang of guilt with this feeling like maybe I should be putting two spaces. I learned to type on a manual typewriter in high school. But I’m lazy, so I put one. Recently, I read this article in Slate, entitled ” Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it.” and I am now guilt free. If you type, it’s great reading. Excellent for cocktail “did you know that…” conversations.
Here’s a link to my favorite Favicon Generator, it creates the icon for you and gives you the instructions and code you need to implement it. It works!
I came across this article reviewing Google + entitled “I’d Rather Be a Minus Than Be on Google +“. I am admittedly social media phobic – I closed my Facebook account after three weeks and only look at Twitter during emergencies. So I was curious about someone’s opinion of this new Google+ which is supposedly going to be the new Facebook killer. It’s a good article, enjoy.
“The comparison clearly suggests that more people on the higher side of IQ scale have moved away from Internet Explorer in the last 5 years,” AptiQuant concludes.
Say you’ve purchased your domain from a company, like GoDaddy. And now you want to transfer it to a different company, like DreamHost. Here are steps you need to take. I’m going to keep them general enough so that you should be able to transfer them from and to any domain registrar.
If you’re using a Mac, and using DreamWeaver to design websites, sometimes you need a tool to compare two files. I use TextWrangler for this, and wanted to list the instructions here in case someone else finds it useful (and because I’m tired of looking it up myself).
“Though the competition is extremely close…Firefox 4 is strongly favored by HTML5 processing, boot time, and memory usage,” Rosenblatt concluded. “Overall, I’d judge from these results that Firefox 4 is the winner this time around.”
“In terms of safety, Chrome and Firefox seem to be the browsers of choice. The two were both unchallenged at this year’s PWN2OWN hacking competition, according to ComputerWorld.”
Sometimes clients see things in a certain way in their browsers that I’m unable to see. Often the fastest way to clear up the confusion, is for them to send me a screenshot. Send a screenshot of something on the web is easy to do once you know the steps.
I often have people contact me who are in various stages of breaking up with their current web designers. Sometimes the termination is friendly, sometimes it’s not. Here’s what you should know BEFORE you attempt to fire, or otherwise end your working relationship with your web designer.
A client sent me a link to this article on Slate.com that gave a fairly scathing review of one of the common open source content management applications called Drupal. While I’ve never used Drupal, after reading this article, I don’t think I ever will.
For the past month or so, I’ve been able to use live chat to communicate with the folks at DreamHost.com, my web hosting company. While their support ticket system has been excellent, they’ve now improved their support system by adding a live chat feature for some of their customers. I’ve used it several times, and didn’t want to write about it until they officially announced it – and today, they did!
An iframe, is an HTML element that gives you a window through which you can view another website. But sometimes, you want to show just a particular piece of that other website. I thought this was impossible to do, until today, when I found an article that told me how to do it.
I have an iPhone and I love it. But recently I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease which means I need to avoid any foods that have gluten (wheat, rye, barley). It’s tricky and very time consuming to navigate a grocery store now, with all of the hidden sources of gluten in processed foods. Did you know that “brown rice syrup” can contain wheat? But a company called MidLifeCrisisApps.com has come out with an iPhone app that makes my life much easier: Is That Gluten Free?
On all the websites I develop, I strongly recommend that clients add an online contact “form” to make it easier for prospective customers to contact them. My own experience seemed to indicate that folks are more likely to fill out a contact form that’s embedded in a website page, rather than clicking on an email address link that opens their mail application. I decided to actually gather some real data, and post the results to my blog – so here it is.
Every once in a while, I run into an issue and get ready to bang my head on my desk. But today, just before I did that, I Googled a problem I was having and was so very delighted with the solution I found, I wanted to give them a link with thanks. Read the rest of this entry »
I had a prospective client ask me the following question: “Should I trademark my domain name?”. I had no idea. But I knew who to ask: my local Seattle trademark attorney, Jefferson Coulter.
