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June 22nd, 2006
Posted by Matt at 5:07 pm
Helping disorganized people stay that way.
This is the craziest/coolest thing I’ve seen in a while.
After watching this demo I couldn’t help but remember the scene from Minority Report where Tom Cruise is using fiber-optic gloves to move files around on his screen.
Not having used this software, I can’t decide whether I would love it or hate it. I can’t help but think I would always feel like my virtual desktop was just as messy as my real world desktop. On the other hand, it might make me feel a little more connected to the real world - what with working on a computer all day long. I could fling files around with passion and gusto! Or is this the kind of thing that would propel me deeper into a virtual reality, blurring the lines between what is organic and what is an operating system?
Category: General Thoughts
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June 7th, 2006
25
Posted by Matt at 5:05 pm
I had to get two really big files to a couple people today. Our FTP has been misbehaving lately, as has our FedEx man. One semi-reliable source witnessed him standing in front of our building yesterday looking for 2929 Carlisle. My witness says he pointed out the GIANT STEEL 2929 on our building, at which point the courier mumbled, "It's after six anyway - I'll just come back tomorrow." Well, I'm on a deadline today and can't risk intermittent servers or incompetent delivery persons.
Enter DropSend. I noticed this link sometime ago as it appears after each of Mr. Oxton's posts. Until today I never had a reason to give it a spin. Here's the lowdown:
1 user
250mb of online storage
Send 5 emails (up to 250mb each) per month
Free.
For right now, this is all I need, but there's plenty plenty more storage if you want to pay for it. Because I generally FTP my larger files, I don't foresee ever needing more than the free account. But if you're interested, check out the specs at www.dropsend.com/pricingsignup.php.
I thought about taking a whole bunch of screen shots and providing a little tour. Lucky for you (and me, I guess), they've already posted a tour of the application. I suggest you take it for a spin yourself.
Category: General Thoughts, For Fun, Web Technical, Technologies
Permalink | 3 Comments
May 18th, 2006
Posted by Neil at 4:48 pm
55b
Premise:
As shoppers are becoming more sophisticated in e-browsing and e-shopping, product search engines, verses general search engines, are quickly becoming a large source for product and online store recommendations. This blog entry covers a strategic method of benefiting from other companies’ product search engine marketing efforts, adding yet another element to the online product marketing mix: Search Engine Merchandising & Pay-per-click Piggy Backing.
E-Commerce Dream Dashing
An excited client comes to your web company with a gleaming dot com product-selling dream and dollar signs in his or her eyes, wanting an online store selling products which, in their mind, will cut back on the common hassles of a brick-and-mortar store.
How do you explain to your new client that their website could have poor placement in Google for their primary keywords for up to a year or more? How does one make these eager entrepreneurs understand that Google, and Yahoo! to a lesser degree, has a “time out” period, or “sandbox,” before it allows new sites in the search listings?
Read the rest of this entry »
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Category: Web Strategy, Internet Marketing
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Posted by Matt at 3:38 pm
 I actually forgot what lead me to Color Schemer this morning, but the discovery of sweet, inexpensive little apps is always a nice way to start the day. While I haven't dowloaded the full version yet, I have been using the FREE ColorPix app (pictured) for several hours. It functions a lot like ColorZilla, but with some bonuses:
- It deciphers color from anywhere on your screen. So unlike CZ, you're not restricted to your web browser.
- It's magnifying tool allows you to select a color and then click on the information display to copy the RGB, HEX, HSB and/or CMYK values to your clipboard. (Note: ctrl+click on the HEX value to copy it without the # symbol.)
- You can set the preferences to launch the app when windows starts up … ooooh stinker - I just realized it's only available for Windows. Sorry MACophiles - you'll have to drop a Grant (Ulysses S., that is) and purchase the whole shabang. At the moment, I'm getting out of debt and can't afford such frivolities.
What makes this little puppy so appealing to me isn't so much it's functionality as it's community of users. Color Schemer is drawing a bit of a crowd - and a talented one at that. The forums section of their website is repleat with tips, advice and shop-talk. I'm a little gitty over the color scheme gallery. It showcases loads of fantastic schemes for untalented hacks like myself to download and apply.
Category: General Thoughts
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83
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May 9th, 2006
Posted by Chris Ruppel at 1:37 pm
1403
Note: this is intended for legitimate uses of an HTML table, NOT when using it to provide visual layout. When using a table for layout, stick with <table>, <tr>, and <td>, as using the elements below in an unintended manner will hurt more than help.
I was reading an article on making tables accessible, and I wanted to point out some other benefits besides helping screen readers. As you may be aware, in many cases better accessibility means better search engine optimization. Let me point out a few cases where this is true.
Summarizing Content
Using the caption tag and summary attribute gives the search engine something to report, and also a place to put a keyword-rich description of the table that is directly linked to the data, rather than being a nearby unrelated paragraph of text. This simple addition gives meaning to the data in a format understandable by the software that processes your site (Googlebot for example), rather than just the human visitors browsing the search engine results. As for looks, the caption tag can be easily styled as you see fit, just like any other tag, even invisible if you’d like. I’ll leave ethics up to you.
Content Correlation
Roger Johansson mentions using the ’scope’ attibute on your <th> tags. Using <th>’s will help you to begin with, since it differentiates the heading information versus regular content. With the scope attribute defined, it goes even further and informs the search engines what the heading is correlated to. So if you have headings defined in both axes, the search engine can correctly interpret the relationship of the data. Check the example below, with one of each scope highlighted.
The three headings in the first row have a scope of ‘col’ which indicates the data they are referring to is in columns below each of them. Likewise, I set the scope of each person’s name to be ‘row’, which tells the search engine that the data in that row is all related to that name. See how easy it is to spot Bob’s age? This is a pretty simple task for a human even without the help of the scope, but the coloring represents the aid you are supplying to the search engine.
Note that scope can be applied to a <td> just as effectively as a <th>, and when a cell is both data and a heading like the names below, the <td> is the appropriate choice for tagging the headings for each row.
Alternative Search Terms
<th> tags can take an ‘abbr’ attribute. While this is convenient for the screen reader to avoid saying the same three word heading over and over again, it also can come in handy if people end up searching for a less formal but still descriptive term for that column of data. See the ‘Date of Birth’ column in the example source.
Example Table
Employee Birthdays
| Name |
Date of Birth |
Age |
| Chris |
Jun 14, 1983 |
22 |
| Bob |
Nov 11, 1979 |
26 |
| Tom |
Apr 09, 1976 |
30 |
The source (styling excluded):
<table summary="A sample table demonstrating the benefits of the scope attribute within table elements">
<caption>Employee Birthdays</caption>
<tr>
<th scope="col">Name</th>
<th scope="col" abbr="Birthday">Date of Birth</th>
<th scope="col">Age</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td scope="row">Chris</td>
<td>Jun 14, 1983</td>
<td>22</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td scope="row">Bob</td>
<td>Nov 11, 1979</td>
<td>26</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td scope="row">Tom</td>
<td>Apr 09, 1976</td>
<td>30</td>
</tr>
</table>
fab
Category: Web Development, Web Technical
Permalink | 3 Comments
May 1st, 2006
Posted by Chris Ruppel at 7:21 pm
I am a web standards geek. I am a novice, but I definitely try to do it the W3C way if it’s possible. I feel it’s made me a much better developer, having improved both the quality of my work and my understanding of the technologies as a whole. I write pretty clean markup, and go out of my way to separate the various layers of a web page.
Non-standard Standards?
Having said that, it was recently brought to my attention that a common property in JavaScript, innerHTML, is not a W3C property. It is present in IE, Mozilla browsers, KHTML, and Opera, but it is not an actual standard property!! Having ramped up my usage of it recently due to Ajax (which also falls under the umbrella of a ubiquitous non-standard, for now at least), I was pretty let down to learn this. Just about every browser supports it and treats it the exact same way, to the point that it has more univeral support than the actual W3C Recommendation involving ‘createElement’ and ‘createTextNode’. It is clearly a de facto standard, moreso than IE being equated with ‘the internet’ in the minds of many people.
I understand the problems with it , but I feel you have to draw the line at some point. Is it good web design to use innerHTML? Many say no, and some offer an alternative that tries to bridge the innerHTML ease of use with cumbersome W3C methods. As I learn about the varied alternatives I have to ask myself, what is the value of doing something using the ‘technically correct’ method when other alternatives work just as well or better (as in this case)?
Getting the Job Done
When discussing this, a friend of mine said, “good web design is an exponential curve. you never reach perfect.” I find this to be true, and not just to ease my conscience. I realize that this sentiment can be applied on many lower levels (why should I not use spacer gifs?), and my response is nothing is stopping you except your own judgement, just like my choice to continue the use of innerHTML. I’m not trying to nullify other assertions I’ve made in the past, but it is a tough call when you come to such an impasse.
Category: Web Development, Web Technical
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April 26th, 2006
Posted by Chris Ruppel at 8:30 am
The team of developers making the Opera Web Browser can (at least for now) rest easy on the fact that their product supports modern web standards to a superior degree. Opera 9 RC has had it nailed down for some time, but this is their first public Opera release passing the Acid2. As of this writing it is 9.0 beta.
This bold claim is verifiable by anyone using said browser. All you have to do is take the Acid2 Test. If you go to this page using any browser except KHTML-based Safari 2 or Opera 9, you will most likely see a distorted mess of colors. These browsers, as much as you love or hate them, do not support what the WaSP has determined to be the most needed and useful functionality of HTML 4 and CSS 2.
If you are interested in seeing your choice browser pass the Acid2 test, I suggest notifying the development team of the browser you use
Category: General Thoughts
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April 19th, 2006
Posted by Chris Ruppel at 3:29 pm
6ca
Recently people have started noticing something odd. They have to click on a flash file, java applet, or any other interactive component before using it. You may see the message “Press SPACEBAR or ENTER to activate and use this control” What causes this? Thanks to a patent troll by Eolas Technologies, Microsoft has chosen to make a change to their Internet Exporer interface for all content that requires an <applet>, <object>, or <embed> tag.
A Ridiculous Patent
I’m not going to go into the specifics, but Eolas filed the patent this century [edit: I take that back, issued 1998] and basically claims to have invented the process of using interactive content on the internet. The W3C has even gotten involved, claiming that documents published over a decade ago qualify as prior art against this ridiculous patent.
Eolas wants 521 million dollars from Microsoft to license the priviledge of allowing IE 6 to work the way it has worked since 2001. Oh, and they don’t care about licensing to the browsers with smaller market share (Mozilla, Opera, et al). How funny.
Veropace is already prepared
Clients of Veropace need not worry, as we have been using the methods required to sidestep this frivolous ordeal for years, and have noticed no changes to sites we have produced.
Read more at MSDN for an explanation of the problem and different solutions.
Or if you want a quick solution, use this code generator
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Category: Web Development, Web Technical
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April 17th, 2006
Posted by Chris Ruppel at 10:57 pm
If a picture is worth a thousand words, that means I talk less, and many times that’s a good thing. I ran across a simple, rather compelling way of explaining the benefits of semantic markup combined with CSS. It is titled Standards in a Nutshell. See for yourself.
Imagine the three colors as three different programming languages. In the first example, they’re all slammed together in one document. In the other, they are neatly separated and grouped in a less random fashion. If you are unfamiliar to web design and scripting, which one looks more organized and maintainable? If you are up to speed, crack open a few sites, which one resembles your website?
It may not have to be perfect like the diagram, but it is much easier to maintain a website when you separate the different languages while bulding it initially. This goes for a simple site all the way up to a wiki or CMS.
Category: General Thoughts
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Posted by Matt at 1:25 pm
a37
Copywriting was by far the most influential and rewarding class of my college career. I sometimes wonder what my academic experience would have looked like had I taken it as a freshman instead of as a senior. Professor Shaw was a witty, sixty-something professional who had worked in the industry for decades. She was a quality assurance Nazi. If your work stunk (and it usually did), she would look you in the eye, smile and say something like, “I said to use your words sparingly,” or, “spend more than ten minutes on the next draft.” If it was a bad final draft, she’d tell you it wasn’t the final draft. She was as sparse in speech as she was on paper. I learned much from what wasn’t said.
On the first day of the semester, Shaw greeted the class with something very close to the following address:
“You’re all horrible writers. Don’t feel bad, it’s not entirely your fault. You’ve been taught to write poorly. Your English teachers may have said, ‘It’s quality, not quantity that’s important,’ but I’ve no doubt they still pushed for ‘ten pages on this’ or ‘one thousand words on that.’ If you write one sentence, you should write it well. And if you’ve written one good sentence, a second will often be superfluous - at least in the world of advertising.”
Years later, that address still rings in my ears when writing. So get on with it already, Donovan!
The Copy Workshop,” is so much more than a book on copywriting. It should be required reading for anyone who has to write or even speak to anyone ever. This is THE textbook on making a point. It’s PACKED with entertaining example ads and fun (albeit challenging) exercises. Bruce Bendinger quips his way through his instruction in four sections: Forewords, More Words, Your Words, and Onwards. From history to how-to, from typography to television, Bendinger covers the gamut. This was my course reading for Copywriting 3401. If you talk and/or write to people on occasion, I commend this book to you. If you work in Marketing - you should have read this years ago. If you’ve already read it, you should read it again. I return to it annually.
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Category: General Thoughts, Books
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