Archive for December, 2006

Dec 31 2006 at 11:37am

Live updates in progress

This is Liam’s idea – don’t shut down the site, just go ahead and do the updates. People can watch you screw up. Live!

So here we go. I’m widening the design, then heading off to look for some plugins

Wish me luck!

Dec 22 2006 at 2:33pm

I’m about to leave work for the holdiays. Yay! I’ve got the whole week off between Christmas and New years. I haven’t had this much spare time since before I met Liam. Most of last year’s long weekends and vacation time was spent travelling. Which was great, don’t get me wrong

I do have lots of website work to do, including some updates to this site. I want to look at maybe some new plugins (a spell checker if possible! and maybe something for better commenting and RSS feeds). I also want to change the design so it expands to 1000px. It’s feeling too narrow to me these days. Probably to you too Our new content site is in the works too and I’ve got a lot of writing to do for that, and a bunch of blog post ideas too. Oh, and Liam and I are getting a whole bunch of graphic design books for Christmas! From Santa, you know Looks like it will be a busy holiday

Of course, I’ll be spending the next few days with my family so I’m looking forward to that too

Have a great holiday, and see you in the new year I wish I had my camera, I could have taken a picture of all my desk decorations

Edit: hmmm… that’s kind of a scary amount of smilies

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

Dec 20 2006 at 3:21pm

People are totally clueless about SEO

I see it all the time on the forums. People popping up with rather stupid SEO questions. What is my PageRank? How do I increase my PageRank? Why won’t anyone trade links with me? Hello??? Have you not read anything about SEO in the past year???

The way I see it, there are two subsets of people here: the designer/developer types who don’t even care enough to ask questions about SEO, and the average webmaster types who for some reason have seriously inaccurate ideas about SEO.

Super-sexy advanced CSS and JS FAQ

Enough acronyms for ya? Tee hee

Don’t you just love advanced CSS? I do. Check out this FAQ I made last week for work. Definition lists. Pseudo-elements. Generated Content. Unobstrusive JavaScript. CSS that isn’t supported by IE? Conditional comments. Ooooh, are you drooling yet?

I even sort of wrote the Javascript myself. And I wrote a whole article about how I developed it, which will be published on our new content site

Posted in Design, Web Standards | 2 Comments »

Dec 08 2006 at 1:14pm

Great websites: NewsTarget.com

I came across this NewsTarget.com when my mom sent me a link to an article on fake avocado dip (seriously. Read it, it’s good). I was really impressed with the NewsTarget site for a couple of reasons. Obviously it’s got lots of great content, written in an informative and engaging way. It’s also got a great design: upbeat, colourful, clean, elegant, and above all, appropriate for the site (although unfortunately table-based).

The W3C supporters page

Take a look at the W3C supporters page. It costs $1000 to become a supporter of the W3C and get your link on this page. This page is a PR 9. That’s right, PR 9. Now check out all the sites that are listed.

I’ll give you a sec to skim through that.

Didn’t I see some of those in my spam folder the other day? “Cheap Hosting Provider”, “Wholesale Childrens Clothing”, “Dubai Furnished Apartments”, “Online Gambling Guide”??? Many of the links appear to be for legit but it’s these spammy ones that caught my attention. The W3C is effectively selling PR 9 linkbacks from a highly respected site for $1000 apeice.

Just disgusting. And sad. You’d think that google would recognize that as a spam page with all those shady links on it. Maybe it does, I don’t know.

(This was pointed out to me by this post about digg spamming which really has nothing else to do with this post)

Posted in Marketing/SEO/Monetization, Web Culture | 4 Comments »