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:: (Wednesday, May 12.2004) - "Oh, me! ... Oh, my!": One thing you gotta have if you're gonna be a web designer is patience. Especially when it comes to clients.
Currently, we have a couple of our clients who are bravely engaged in updating bits and pieces of their own websites.
We did the basic grunt work, the heavy lifting, and original content editing/production. Which, of course, costs money. So, some clients, to save money, are doing some of their own minor updates and things. This is not such a big deal except we're the ones who've spent fifty to sixty hours, or more, a week for the past seven years learning about markup, CSS, typography, web based graphic and media design/production, and plumbing the vagaries of search engines. Besides that, the issue, of course, is when we link to our client sites and then add own link and mark to the footer of client pages. We figure this into the value equation when we price out design/development and hosting services and the client gets a little better deal for all that. But, then, when unbeknownst to ourselves, we find the client has been merrily jazzing up pages with things that really don't work. Like text alternating in pink and black. In the same paragraph. Naturally, we become somewhat nonplussed. Things that impair readiblity are not good functional design. And the common mistake amateurs make is they think that if something looks good to them, it will look good to everybody. Nevermind all the extra bytes of code all those extra spans with inline CSS for pink text are adding to a page that previously would download in about 8 seconds over a dial-up connection but now may take half a minute or more.
Where it becomes an issue with us is when we're linking to that client's site and we have our marque in the footer or somewhere. Some of our clients, and prospective clients do happen to be fairly sophisticated about design, typography, and user issues. We, naturally, don't want them to look at some of this stuff and think we did it. So it's a problem. We can, of course, remove links to client sites and edit out our credits in page footers. And we do. Problem is, some of these clients don't have much linking to them. If they're profiling well in Google and other search engines, and a couple of them are, it's because of our links plus the standards compliant html they had to begin with. Of course, if the html gets garbaged up too much, as we go along, such sites may start to lose position as well as overall viewer impact. It's a bit of a quandry because we do want our clients to do well. We consider it a mark against us if they do not.
So... in the future... we will always be happy to work with clients who want us to design and manage their site for them. But the new rule is going to have to be that unless they want to foot the bill to roll out a total, standards compliant, content management system, if we design and manage the site, we design and manage the site. Totally. And, unfortunately, yes, that does cost money. If they want to do it themselves, fine. We'll be happy to host it for them and recommend some tools to use. But we're not going to produce layouts, CSS, typography, graphics, and carefully edited text content and then sit back and watch it get hacked up by somebody updating the site on their lunch break.
:: (Tueday, Jan 10.2004) - I'm #1 on Google: Earlier today it was pointed out that if you do a search for James Parsons on Google, I was popping up in the pole position. What I particularly liked is the snippet of text quoted with the link when I looked at it earlier tonight. To wit:
" ... objectives. Our objective is to help them do it..."
:: (Monday, Jan 29.2004) - I'm a rotten blogger: Noting that's it's been one month to the day since I last contributed anything to this, I guess I'll just have to say, "I'm a rotten blogger."
Well, we're busy. Putting a lot of time into updates on different client projects. Plus, the [link opens in new window] restaurant. Which is doing OK. No complaints. We're still waiting on the [link opens in new window] wallpaper mural.
One big blinkin' linkin' debate: The link to the wallpaper mural brings up a question. The image of the wallpaper is on the site of the manufacturer. Which happens to be [link opens in new window] Komar. They're in Germany. Their site is in frames. Which basically means that to link to the picture of the wallpaper, we have to link to the page it's on; which normally appears in a pop-up on a page that's in frames. Otherwise, all we can do is send folks to the Komar site and let them flounder around until they find it. Assuming they're interested enough to go look, they're not necessarily going to know what they're looking for. Because without linking directly to the file with the image, all we could do is describe it, (photo mural of New York's Times Square at night with flood of Yellow Cabs). Now maybe Komar would rather have visitors do that, but it foils our effort to illustrate what we're talking about. All these problems, of course, are eliminated when we get rid of frames.
The other big linking debate: The other issue is links that open in separate windows. Generally speaking, this is coming to be viewed as a [link opens in new window] bad practice. Historically, we've tended to do this when we're sending our viewers to some other site. That way, when they close the window, our page is still there behind it. This, though, breaks the breadcrumb trail and makes the browser "back" button more or less useless. There's been [link opens in new window] discussion going around about this practice. And some of it has been heated.
Jakob Nielsen [link opens in new window] says the following:
Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer's carpet. Don't pollute my screen with any more windows, thanks (particularly since current operating systems have miserable window management). If I want a new window, I will open it myself!Then there's Mark of [link opens in new window] dive into mark fame. Mark says this:
In all dominant browsers, using the<a target="_blank"> tag to force a link to open in a new window breaks the Back button. The new window does not retain the browser history of the previous window, so the "Back" button is disabled. This is incredibly confusing, even for me, and I've been using the web for 10 years. In 2002, it's amazing that people still do this. Don't do this. Don't force links to open in new windows.
While we think a major objection to this technique is mediated when we make our readers aware that a link opens in new window, we understand the problems this can create for some visitors and for this reason, we're thinking about abandoning the practice.
:: (Monday, Dec 29.2003) - Ventures. And then, more ventures... Mama Marcia's™ threw open it's door (there's just one) a week ago tonight. The first night, we had about a dozen customers. The next night we were swamped. Christmas Even and Christmas Day, we were closed and opened again on Friday. We had a nice steady trade all weekend. Normal hours are 4:30 to 10:00 on Thursday and Sunday, 4:30 to 11:00 on Friday and Saturday. Although, this week, we're planning to be open New Year's Eve from 4:30 to 1:00 for a no-alcohol place to grab a bite before or after the party. It's just a nice little family place with red-checked tablecloths, but folks are liking it.
A note on the no-alcohol decision: When we first decided to open a pizza restaurant, we debated getting a liquor license so we could serve wine and beer. We both like wine and beer. With pizza, I especially like beer. But one of the primary things we wanted to achieve was a family-type place where people will feel comfortable bringing their kids and where the high school age chums of our 16-year could go, too. While there are lots of places like this, that also serve wine and beer to the adults, we felt our place was really a bit small to do that well. Hence, we decided we would not serve alcohol. While I'm an inveterate cigar smoker, we're also a no-smoking establishment. Again, the restaurant which seats 48 is just a bit small to maintain cleanly defined smoking and non-smoking areas. While I think it's unfortunate that so many non-smokers seem to be so intolerant of those who do, that's the temperament of the public these days. However, since we're only open 4 nights a week, we have 3 other nights we can be available for special events and parties. One thing, we're thinking about is a regular smoker's night in the form of a cigar and, maybe, wine tasting session every few weeks. We might hook up with local purveyors of wine and cigars and offer an adults only (no one under 21 allowed, with or without parent or guardian) pizza buffet with cigar samples and wine tasting to go along with it for a set charge. This may be a small-town, rural area, but lots of folks around here appreciate a good glass of wine. After all, we have Dick's Beverage Depot just around the corner and up the street. And there's a few cigar smokers who appreciate a nice Honduran or Dominican puro, too. After we see how things shake down, here, the next few weeks, we'll think about it.
:: (Wednesday, Nov 26.2003) - Too busy to blog, I note that it's been a while since I added anything to this. Part of it has to do with the fact that my better half is prepping to launch a new pizzeria (and hamburger joint) in this burg. Even when your building was formally a restaurant, there's still a lot of stuff to do in projects like this. It'll be small, cozy, and the food & service will be great. Eat in, or take out at Mama Marcia's. It's going to be, "better than homemade!"
:: (Sunday, Sep 21.2003) - Pitching tables out the window is getting to be a regular thing around here. Daily, we're finding that small businesses and independent professionals can be the best and most appreciative folks to whom we can promote the concepts of web standards in site design, revision, and management.
Day to day, we manage and host a number of small business micro-sites. We're fortunate in that most of our clients are people we've come to know and genuinely like. Frankly, it's nice working for people as opposed to corporate entities. Yesterday, we quickly hashed over the simple little site we manage for our good friend Jim Howlett and his nifty little company down in Abilene, TX, Jim's Jungle Play & Design. For the past 20 years, Jim has specialized in designing, building, and installing modular play areas for kids ranging from toddler size on up to 12 or so. His customers typically include restaurants (Dairy Queen), schools, community centers, FECs (Family Entertainment Centers), daycare providers, and more. Recently, a special area of focus has been modular playground systems for kids with developmental and physical challenges.
Like a lot of small businesses and independent self-employed professionals, Jim doesn't have a million dollar budget for advertising and website development. So, naturally, he wants to make sure the site is going to be managed as effectively as possible within the budget. With this in mind we suggested that revising the site to use CSS for layout, rather than tables, will improve his accessiblity to various different devices and help his search engine profile. For some time now, search strings like "soft modular play equipment" or "modular play equipment" have usually returned Jim's Jungle Play & Design at the top of the heap on Google. For that matter, just searching for "modular play" will generally return him on the first page, 5 or 6 down from the top, out of some 634,000 potential results. While he doesn't have a huge amount of content on here, the content that is on the site is relevant. Otherwise, we're inclined to attribute the search engine results to just plain, clean, valid markup. No tricks. Just good ol' valid html.
One of the things about the Web that we've always liked is the way it holds the promise for leveling the playing field. Small companies and individual talented professionals who can supply the product or do the job can edge past larger and more staid competitors. At the risk of sounding like a Nike commercial, while corporate entities can spend hours and days immersed in office politics, struggling through meetings, debating website design, revision, or even just simple content updates, the small business or individual can just go and do it.
Small business clients and independent professionals can move quickly in applying and benefiting from the "The Business Value of Web Standards". A concept that at one time seemed to be in the sole purview of webloggers and advocacy groups like The Web Standards Project is quickly embraced when the advantages can be illustrated in a lucid fashion. The W3C has done us all a hugely good thing in designing markup and CSS the way it has. Otherwise, by this time, we all might need $30,000 worth of proprietary software just to build and maintain even a small, simple website. And, though try as they might, we think it means the Fortune 500 will never be able to take sole control or ownership of this medium.
:: (Tuesday, Sep 09.2003) - A helpful cat can be good to have.
Earlier on, I know I said I wasn't going to mosh around in personal stuff. Talking about your cute pets tends to fall in that category and can be excruciatingly boring to people who are not necessarily into domesticated animals.
So, if I've got an excuse for this, it's because I've always been interested in how and what animals think. Just how intelligent some of them are, and in what ways.
Probably the commonest domestic animals are dogs and cats. Humans and dogs and cats have been keeping each other company for a few thousand years. Mostly, my wife and I have always been "dog" people. But a couple of years ago, after good ol' May, our Norwegian Elk Hound/German Shepard had to be put to sleep, we got a cat. A black female domestic short-hair. We got her when she was about ten weeks old. We named her Cleo. She was small when we got her and she's not a big cat now. Sort of a pocket cat, I guess you'd say.
Now we have two cats. A little over a year ago, Cleo had kittens. Three of them. All males. All black. We gave away two and kept the third. We got him neutered and he's gotten huge. His daddy was a black cat, too, but with a longer coat. So he's got a longer coat. Lays around for hours, flat on his back, with his legs spread out, and snoozes. We named him Buddy and he's just that; a buddy. We call him The Bud-lug.
So. Anyway. There I am at the kitchen table, yesterday. Putting together an external SCSI drive for backup. Whenever you're doing anything with tools, these cats have to come running. It fascinates them. Espcially Cleo. Buddy finds tool work interesting, but if it's close to nap time, he'll wander off sooner. Unless you're doing something that makes sparks or smoke in the air. He has an odd fascination for pyrotechnics. I thought cats were not supposed to like that stuff. Tell it to Buddy. While he likes sparks and smoke, he just doesn't quite like explosions. Yet.
The case for the drive I was putting together, of course, has several very small screws. You also want to avoid using magnetized screwdrivers around hard drives. So these dinky screws are easy to drop. I'm working away on this thing and Cleo is sitting on one of the other kitchen chairs watching everything I'm doing. With rapt interest. Of course, I drop one of these pesky little screws. Of course it goes somewhere on the kitchen floor. Which, of course, has that kind of nubbly vinyl floor covering that makes finding things like small screws doubly difficult.
Well. Not to fear. Cleo's here! That screw hit the floor and bounced. But Cleo is watching. She immediately jumps down from her chair and goes to it. She sniffs at it. Points at it with her nose. Looks back at me. And points at it, again, with her nose. Again looks at me with this quizical look as if to say, "Well...?" Needless to say, it makes finding the screw a lot easier.
Now one might probably suppose her immediate interest was, "Is this something good to eat?" But we've done this before, Cleo and I. Working together on these little things. Any more, when I've got to do something like this, I always like to make sure Cleo's around. And she is mostly obliging. We've put bookcases and stereo cabinets together. Odd pieces of furniture. Worked on cameras and computers. Whenever you drop some little piece of something, you can count on Cleo to jump down and point it out for you. Even if it winds up under something else. She'll try to fish it out. I think she knows the difference between little screws and nuts and plastic parts and things that are good to eat. She's just a helpful cat who's possibly wishing that she, too, had opposable thumbs and could work with tools.
:: (Wednesday, Aug 27.2003) - Although we're having an August blast of summer weather (daytime temps in the 90's - and that's farenheit degrees), Fall is sneaking up and that's followed by Winter. As always, we will seriously consider bonafide job offers in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
:: (Thursday, Aug 21.2003) - What is the Blogstakes Contest? It's just a simple thing cooked up by Brian Alvey, producer-director of Meet The Makers.
Brian says, "Blogstakes is a new kind of sweepstakes with two winners for every prize: a randomly-chosen person who entered and the site that referred the winning entry. So if the prize is a truck, then the winning entry gets a truck and the blog that sent them gets a truck too." Although the prize for the Blogstakes contest, in this case, is not a truck. It's a free year's subscription to Browsercam which is a handy way to check how your website is looking in other browser versions on other operating systems.
:: (Monday, Aug 18.2003) - We really do not like Network Solutions.
In their struggle to retain market share which we think justice only demands that they loose, NetSol seems to exist entirely by virtue of obfuscation. Updating/editing records should be a simple straightforward process, but this never seems to be the case at Network Solutions. We wouldn't be messing with them at all except we still have a couple of client domains registered there that we haven't yet, for whatever reason, gotten switched to Bulkregister.com, which we've been using for the last couple of years now.
Our experience with Bulkregister.com, despite their somewhat scary sounding name, has been a lot more positive. We've got about 99% of our client domains registered with them at this point. All new domain registrations are processed with them. Right now, we're in the process of transferring the last, sole client domain we have left on Network Solutions to Bulkregister.com. When that's done, we will not look back.
Unlike Network Solutions, the Bulkregister.com system is simple and quick to work with. They don't seem to be inclined to spam their registrants, associates, or partners to death, either. They know what business they are in. They are simply an ICANN accredited registrar. They're not pushing cheap template web site solutions or hosting. We appreciate that. A lot.
Smokin': We just found out we've been picked to be the new editor the results.about.com cigar page. We know a lot about cigars.
The results.about.com project is a web directory. Similar, in concept and development, to the dmoz.org open directory project, it's being built by live human editors picked for their familiarity with a particular subject.
Having been a cigar afficionado for about 30 years, we've sampled pretty much everything from Marsh-Wheeling stogies (made right down there near Robo-land, at Wheeling, WV) to the finest handmade Cubans from Havana and the Vuelte Abajo. It's an industry driven and strongly influenced by individual personalities rather than corporate personae and we're familiar with who a lot of them are. we also know there's a good cigar for any budget. You can spend a lot of money, but you don't have to. There's even good inexpensive machine made cigars produced right here in the USA (Connecticut & Pennsylvania). Good handmade long filler smokes don't have to cost a fortune, either. Sometimes, the chief thing about buying a brand is it will have more consistency. But, we know good sources and we know the vocabulary. We have our own tidy little collection of links to articles, history, and related cigar culture and are familiar with the growing areas and the general characteristics of leaf from the different regions. Just like wine, cigars have vintages with variations from growing season to growing season. To have gotten somebody much better for this, they would have had to get Marv Shanken (editor/publisher of Cigar Aficionado and Wine Spectator) but we think he might be kind of busy as it is.
"And, yes, we've heard all the admonishments about smoking..."
:: (Sunday, Aug 17.2003) - One of the things we noticed during the northeast power blackout is that the volume of spam hitting mailboxes on our system seemed to drop significantly. We do various things to block it from even landing on the mailserver, but a lot still gets through. During the power blackout we seemed to see about a 30% to 40% reduction in spam overall. While network and communications systems were probably one of the first things they worked to bring back online, many of the customers connected to those networks didn't really see service restored until later. It's tempting, therefore, to conclude that there are a heck of a lot of spammers up there.
We subsequently learn that many others didn't really see a big spam drop. So, maybe, it's just a lot of our spammers who are up there in that part of the country?
:: (Saturday, Aug 16.2003) - Up to now, we've been resisting the weblog craze.
As for me, I'm a generalist. I know about lots of different things, but am not really an expert on anything. These days, I don't have an interesting tumultous life. Not a lot of drama, here. Comedic episodes are more common, but most would not translate well out of context. Daily life mostly consists of updating and maintaining client projects while searching for new ones.
Some of the personal blogs I've stumbled across strike me as a bit too personal. I suspect at some point in the future, some of these folks will realize they are mortified at having published their personal lives in all their narcissistic hubris for 600 plus million potential readers to peruse. I also think readers who are attracted to really personal blogs are a little voyeuristic. Don't expect me to get too personal. I'm not a SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy).
Once in a while, something occurs to me. I basically figured out how to do what's come to be known as Fahrner Image Replacement (FIR) before reading about it. But I think it's a technique with a clear semantical value and logically should occur to a lot of people as they learn about CSS. If I have an idea like that again, I'll write about it here.
If you are looking at this page on an older browser, like Netscape 4.x, you will see a plain jane, default background, and otherwise completely unstyled page. There's not a lot of stylish stuff going on here, but it's all controled by CSS. There's less than 1% of you still using these old CSS-less browsers at this point. To accomodate this would require extra code and a few hacks and workarounds that don't really do anything for the 99% plus of you who are using CSS capable browsers. If you want to upgrade your old browser (and that's up to you), there's links at batworks.com/buc.shtml to some of the popular options.
Browsers: Now that Microsoft has decided they're not going to continue development of Internet Explorer as a stand-alone app and AOL has killed Netscape, we wonder what the future will bring for projects like Mozilla, Opera, and Apple with their new Safari web browser. Conventional wisdom does not apply, here, and we're not sure it bodes well for these other browser projects whether they're "open source" or not. Concievably this might result in a more rapid Mozilla, Opera, and Safari ascendancy, but nothing ever works the way you think it should. Knowing something about consumers, we should suspect they'll take the line of least resistance.
Blackout: The blackout (aug 14.2003) knocked our system down for about an hour and a half on Thursday afternoon. We're in Iowa, but our server colo is in Brooklyn. We understand some people didn't get power restored until today.
Most people caught in the outage seemed to brave it well enough. From news reports we watched, it seemed to turn into an excuse to party for many. We're sure that for a lot of folks it was a hardship, but our assessment of New Yorkers, for example, has changed a lot since 9/11. To be honest, we used to view east coast people as whiny, mercurial types given to temper tantrums over inconsequentials. A lot of people in the midwest used to view east coast people like that. I think we've been unfair in this. We saw the grit and determination of New Yorkers on 9/11 and in the days after and we think they largely typified what is best about America and Americans. We're not surprised they seemed to handle this most recent episode with aplomb.
The interesting thing, though, is when we realize how tenuous is our grasp on the technology that moves life in the 21st century. A power line goes down and... poof! No lights except candles, oil lamps, or things that run off batteries. No networks. No computers. No refrigeration. No air conditioning. No water from the tap for those living in high rise buildings. No working flush toilets. A lot of things just quit working. Even if you have a car, and a lot of New Yorkers do not, you couldn't necessarily escape in that if the outage extended more than a day or two. You would only have the fuel you had in your tank when the power went out, because the gas pumps at the corner QuickTrip are not going to work.