Say What!?

This is from a Boston.com article entitled "Obama's To-Do List":

Obama advisers say he may review the department's newly approved guidelines that could let the FBI investigate Americans in national security cases without evidence of a crime, based in part on their ethnicity or religion.

Yeah, you might want to take a second look at those guidelines, right after you remove the swastika flag from behind the desk of whatever numbnuts approved said guideline.

This whole transition scenario reminds me of the time I was hired to take over for an obviously overwhelmed temp worker. The first day of my job was spent hauling fistfuls of documents, contracts and invoices out of where they had been crammed helter-skelter in various drawers. It was scary how long it took to recover from the previous employee's incompetence. Hopefully, Obama will have more assistance than I did since, you know, the stakes are a lot higher.

Say What!?

Google and Yahoo decide to go separate ways.

Google has decided to pull out of a deal to partner up with Yahoo on advertising services. First reported in April, there was a tentative agreement to share advertising space on web pages but it has been scrapped basically because people are worried that it will lead to Google becoming the new Microsoft. Unfortunately, now Yahoo is more vulnerable than ever to a takeover by Microsoft itself, so there you go. Sometimes there's such a fine line between celebrating diversity and divide and conquer.

In other news...

Google and Yahoo decide to go separate ways.

Cool Site of the Day

Found via Reddit's link about an eight-armed creature existing before the dinosaurs by about 300 million years. (Ungoliant perhaps?) A clean, colorful and visually appealing site about science news on the Australian news site, abc.net.au proves that Australians got it going on.

Cool Site of the Day

5 Good Knitting Sites and Why They Rock

Whoo! FINALLY getting a chance to post something! It's been a crazy week, what with my husband being out of town, my toddler going for the potty training full throttle (she's even started asking for something to read while she's on the throne OMG) and mucho michegaus with working on some client leads...

But enough about me, here are some sites that I've collected that deal with various aspects of knitting. Some are educational, others are just fun to read. Enjoy!

Knitting Help
Why it rocks: Free knitting videos, a nice modern interface and patterns. Also a photowall which is pretty cool.

Stitchy McYarn Pants
Why it rocks: Even the name of the site cracks me up. When you slip a stitch, go here to get away and find side-splitting examples of day-glo, acrylic knitted beer can hats and other rummage sale flash-backs. (Jennsweb trivia: I went to Mass Art with the blog's author and her sense of humor has sharpened with age like a fine gouda)

Queer Joe's Knitting Blog
Why it rocks: More than just a series of tutorials and odes to cable stitches, Joe blogs about everything from politics, to his impending retirement, to his partner Thaddeus's passion for mushroom foraging.

Fake Sheep Blog
Why it rocks: It's a beautifully designed Wordpress site run by a New Zealand vegan who only knits with non-animal fibers. In New Zealand, which has more sheep than people. 'Nuff said.

Knitty Blog
Why it rocks: This is a great online resource for the initiated, dedicated knitter who wants to keep up with what's new in the world of knitting. Also, patterns galore (some of which actually transcend the "I'm a crafty knitter type!" look) and a link to a cool cafepress store.

That's it for now. Enjoy!

5 Good Knitting Sites and Why They Rock

AAARRRGH!!! moment of the day

Brought to you by Boston's Craig's List

AAARRRGH!!! moment of the day

...and in other news

Rumblings on the BBC website about unconfirmed reports that a US airstrike has hit a village in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan near the Afghan border. Just a little FYI from the British News, because we are too busy navel-gazing over the economy to notice right now.

Note to reader, yes, the economy is a HUGE deal. I just hope we don't screw up our foreign policy credit with the world at the same time. Oh, wait, too late.

...and in other news

Free Printer Service

Found this on CNET this morning. A free online service that lets you enter a URL, select what you want to print and then print ONLY what you want to print. Saves ink AND paper!

Free Printer Service

Axis Flashback!

Maybe it's the random firing of neurons, maybe it's oncoming senility, but for some reason I felt the urge to track down some Trisomie 21 just to see if it was out there. Found a clip on Last FM which you can see here
Feel free to light up a Kretek clove cigarette and blast a fog machine to get the full effect.

Axis Flashback!

Hip Hop Doc Beat Street Break Down!

RRRRRRUP!!!!
I have a half formed memory of watching a documentary about hip hop and graffiti culture around the year 1984 in the basement rec room of one of my church youth group cadre's. We had one of those "get to the kids by reaching out to their youth culture" type leaders and I guess it made an impression on me. Hip hop was a divisive and defining subculture. In the whitey-white suburbs, it caused fist fights at parties when someone slapped a 12 inch of "Beat Street Breakdown" on the turntable. Some kids would start hesitantly bouncing their heads to the beat, someone would start breaking out whatever moves they had picked up from MTV and then some music critic type would charge over to the stereo and start ranting while they ripped the needle off the record. "This isn't real music! RUSH is real music!!! At least they play their own instruments!!!" 2112 ain't bad, but you can't bob your head to it.
Fast forward to Tuesday and Netflix delivered my copy of "Style Wars". I sat there mildly enjoying the contrast between pre-gansta b-boy dialect and tweedy white guy voice over interspersed with classic footage of former mayor of NYC Ed Koch and the odd outraged average citizen when they cut to a gallery opening for a group of graffiti bombers. Suddenly it all came back in a flood, the plaid couch, the youth minister freezing the tape in the vcr to show us some point he wanted to make. An nice Upper West Side art collector's wife described an art critic asking one of the artists what they would do if he painted over his work and to watch her try to impersonate an 18 year old bomber saying "I'd keell you mon." was a defining moment.
Makes a great double feature with "Beat Street" which is kind of an awesome film if you can get past the Filmmaking 101 acting and editing.
Visit this link to donate to the Smithsonian's Hip Hop collection.

Hip Hop Doc Beat Street Break Down!

GOTCHA!

So I keep seeing emails in my inbox purporting to be from Google adwords telling me that I have to "update" my billing information. In fact I saw one tonight that said my site's adwords had been "stoped". Curious, I went to jennsweb's home page and there was the usual text link Adsense ad plain as day. Now even more curious, I Googled "adwords scam" and Boom! This popped up.
I've said it before, and now I'll paraphrase it again. Scammers eat their young.

GOTCHA!

A Good Way to Utilize RSS

Scan job sites for your next gig.

A Good Way to Utilize RSS

Useful article about Linux

Because it's free, you're free, it's secure and it's easy.
Go check it out!

Useful article about Linux

The Answer to Adrian's Question

4 Stories about the resignation of Admiral William J. Fallon, the military commander of US Middle East operations.

Time Magazine

New York Times
Al Jazeera's version

The Intelligence Daily's analysis

The Answer to Adrian's Question

History Lesson Of The Day

A brief history of world conflicts from WWII to Gulf War II enacted with the native cuisine of the countries involved. I think I just learned more watching a bunch of animated cheeseburgers than I did in an entire semester of high school history class.

History Lesson Of The Day

Jennsweb's Excellent SEO Glossary

For anyone who's ever wondered what phrases like "pinging Technorati's rss feed for Diggs" mean.

Delicious: Del.icio.us is at heart, an online service that lets you bookmark pages on the web under a user name. Whenever you save a page's URL, Del.icio.us's user interface asks you to tag the page with keywords. These keyword tags are used to index the page in a searchable database. Entering a keyword such as "design" in a search will reveal all pages tagged with that keyword. The fun comes when you start checking out who else has saved the same page as you have and you are able to browse their collection of links.


Digg: Responsible use of Digg's services is like being your own publicist. Whenever you publish new content on your web site, you should submit the URL of the new information to Digg. There's a few steps to go through, but once your submittal has been checked for its spam factor and approved, the URL you have posted goes into rotation on Digg's site in the category you have chosen it to appear under. Also, if you run a blog and the posts are Digg-enabled, the posts appear in order of most Diggs when someone searches your posts.

Permalinks: If you run a site with Wordpress, you have the option of using Permalinks to make your posts' and pages' titles more visible to search engines. Log into your Wordpress site's dashboard and under Options, choose Permalinks. If they have not been enabled, you will simply need to choose the format option and click Update Permalink Structure. Choosing the Date and Name based option will give transform the url of a Post or Page from http://jennmearswebdesign.com/p=23 into http://jennmearswebdesign.com/2008/03/jennswebs-excellent-SEO-glossary which is much more attractive title to a search engine that happens to be looking for SEO+glossary.


Pingbacks: Pingbacks are a way of knowing when someone has linked to a post on your blog. Imagine that everyone's blog is a little submarine traveling through the vast ocean of the web. The clever submarine operator would want to know when another vessel is in the neighborhood so they make sure that they have enabled their sub with Pingbacks. They can tell when another sub has "pinged" them vice versa.

RSS:Basically, RSS was developed to let websites syndicate their content using XML. If you picture the world wide web as an actual spider web, then imagine that your site is an insect stuck in the web. If it struggles/publishes new rss-enabled content a lot, then search engine "spiders" will notice it much more than an insect just sitting there. Creating an RSS feed for your site makes it a lot more attractive to search engines and they will index you more frequently. Also, if a visitor uses RSS feeds to keep up with sites, they will be much more likely to keep coming back if you make it easier to find out when you have new content.

Search Engine Spider: These are automated scripts developed by search engine companies like Google, Lycos and Yahoo that "crawl" over the web checking for new content. Much like an actual spider, these programs don't exactly have 20/20 vision. They react to things like page titles containing searched-for keywords and frequently updated content, "movement" on the web, if you will.

Technorati: The top ranked content syndication site out there. It's like "Reader's Digest" without the bad cartoons. If you resister your site with them, they will index your content via your post's tags. The indexed tags become part of their database so that when a Technorati user searches for a term like "SEO" your post tagged with "SEO" will show up in the results along with other blogs' posts tagged SEO.

Trackback: A trackback is notification that another blog has linked back to yours. Kind of like a "shout out", it works when both sites have enabled trackbacks. This way, when you publish a post and have enabled the trackback function, blogs that have sent you a trackback "ping" will be displayed in the comments section. And as Oscar Wilde said, "The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about."

Jennsweb's Excellent SEO Glossary

Excellent Question Adrian

Excellent Question Adrian

Free Stock Photo site of the day

The Stockexpert site is one of that rarest of breeds, a free photo website that is actually free! Well, some of their best photos are only available via their credit system, but it is clearly explained and they tell you right on the 1st pop-up window how much each photo is at each resolution. Having spent the good part of a rainy Saturday afternoon slogging through about 6 stock photo websites, this site was tops for selection, pricing (majority of pay-for-use images $1) and ease of use.

Free Stock Photo site of the day

RSS: a guide to weeding the web

What is RSS and why should I care?

RSS is an acronym for several variations of the same idea. Some people take it to mean Rich Site Summary. Others like the meaning RDF Site Summary, but for the majority of users out there, it stands for Really Simple Syndication. What this all means is that sites that are RSS-enabled make it very easy for readers to check and see if a site has new content that they may want to read. If you find yourself constantly checking particular sites to see if they have anything new, then you'll realize that it saves you a lot of time to be able to track all your favorite sites in one central location rather than having to remember a bunch of URLs.

How do I start?

In order to get started in the world of RSS feeds, you will need to get what is called a news reader. The three main types are down-loadable desktop applications, browser-based programs and web-based programs that you can set up an account with.

Here are some places to look to get started.

down-loadable reader programs


browser based readers


web-based readers

Now, I'll show you a quick and easy example of how I keep track of a few sites via RSS.

I have the Firefox browser, which is the browser of choice for a LOT of designers and developers for reasons that I won't go into here because they are numerous enough to merit their own post. For our purposes today, just take a look at the patch of pink fog in the top right corner.




That little orange chicklet appears next to the URL of any site that Firefox senses is RSS feed-enabled. And since ThirstyPony is a site that is all about SEO, the site's creator has (very wisely) enabled a feed.





Since I am a big SEO geek, I want to keep checking in with TP to see if they have new stuff. So I want to click on the little orange chicklet in order to start subscribing to the site.




(As you can see from the dropdown list, there are several variations on the idea of syndicated feeds. When feeds became widely available around the turn of the century, there was a rush to create the best version and this gave rise to various "forks" in the road to RSS development.)

for extra credit read more here


Once you've chosen your RSS format, Firefox will ask where you would like to store your feed. I chose my bookmarks toolbar.
































So from now on, whenever I want to keep track of what's new on Thirsty Pony, I just go to my bookmarks toolbar in Firefox and hover over the link to bring up the newest items. (now my secret's out. I'm an HP geek too)
















Should my site be RSS enabled?

If you publish new content to your site with any frequency absolutely! To a user that's hip to RSS, it will make your site much more attractive since they will appreciate the fact that you have taken the effort to make your content RSS friendly.

If you want to give it a go, you can get started here

(psst! they also have RSS graphics!)


Is there anything else I should do after my site is RSS enabled?

I recommend using Feedburner to re-publish your feed to a wider audience and Marshall Kirkpatrick has written an excellent article about why.


Can I display other sites' feeds on my site?
It's not a bad idea, if you want to be a good resource for your loyal visitors. (It's considered polite to ask the other sites before you do it though.)

RSS: a guide to weeding the web

We interrupt this blog to bring you an important message from the BBC

While on assignment in Afghanistan with Sebastian Junger for Vanity Fair, Tim Hetherington took this photo of an exhausted US soldier in a bunker in the Korengal Valley. This photo won the World Press Photo of the Year award. There's also a great photo essay linked to the article.

We interrupt this blog to bring you an important message from the BBC

Most Ironic Link of the Week

In an article about how to use advertising on a Wordpress site, someone created a link for Adbrite's service, but left out the "d" in the url. The reader is taken to a "splash page" for a Texas metal finishing company's site that even has one of those waving American flag gifs on its homepage.
Whoopsy!

Most Ironic Link of the Week

Getting Photos into your Google Map

Since I'm currently working on 3 different sites that require working with Google's map feature, I've had a chance to find a few quirks in their map interface. After trying to use their instructions to insert images into a map marker pop up, I found a few workarounds.
This quick tutorial assumes three things: 1) That you have a Google account. 2) That you have a map already created and saved into your "My Maps" on Google. 3) That you have set up a Google Picasa account.

I also recommend using a browsing program that allows you to open up multiple tabs since you will need to click back and forth between tabs.

The Google Picasa/Map method:

Step 1: In your image editing program, create an image that is at least 144 pixels wide.


Save on your computer as a jpg image. Make a note of its measurements in pixels for Step 8.



Step 2: On the web, go to your Google account and on the home page, go to More>Photos. On your Picasa page, select New Album on the right.

Step 3: Upload your jpg image. Then go back to your album and click on the image. After the image loads into its own page, you will see a link entitled "link to this image" in the 4th box down on the right. Click on it.

Step 4: Choose the "HTML to embed in website" option by clicking in the text box. This will highlight the code. Go to the top toolbar in your browser and under Edit click Copy.

Step 5: Now open a new tab in your browser (File>New Tab), and go to your Google homepage again. Click on Maps in the upper left corner of the page. Once that page opens, go to My Maps and select the map that you have created and saved.

Step 6: Once the map you want to work on is loaded into the window on the right, Click on the Edit button. This will enable you to make changes to your map. With your map in Edit mode, click on an area or marker to edit its contents.(see image below for example)


















Step 7: Here's the fun part! Switch to edit HTML and click at the top of the window to place the cursor there. Then, go to the top toolbar again and hit Edit > Paste. This will paste the URL that you copied from your Picasa page. You actually only need part of the pasted code. You will need to find the part that says img src= and delete the code that comes before it.(see the example code below for this and the next step)










Step 8: After you have deleted the a href tag, go to the end of the pasted code and delete the closing tag. (). Then, directly after the URL of the image in the remaining code, but before the closing bracket (>), type: width=(width in pixels)px height=(height in pixels)px. (see image below)



Step 9: Click Save on the left, and then click on the marker or area again. Check to make sure everything is OK by switching to the Rich Text choice in the pop-up window.

If everything looks OK, click Done.
Note: if it doesn't look right at first, make sure the code for the image reads img src="url for image" and then the width and height.

Getting Photos into your Google Map

SEO for Wordpress

Good tips for optimizing a Wordpress powered site and for websites in general.

SEO for Wordpress

Wordpress Advertising-The easy way

It seems like it should be easy enough. Your client wants to put a few ads for local businesses into the sidebar of their site. So you upload an image for the ad into your "images" folder, open up your "sidebar.php" file, find out where you want the ad to show up, write some html and Voila! Hey, wait a minute, there's no image, just the "alt" tag showing through. What up?

After spending some time wading through the Wordpress forums, I found out that I should put a text widget into my sidebar. Okay, simple enough, wait! Now my entire sidebar disappeared!
I took the text1 widget out and tried looking for another solution.

If Wordpress has a weak link, it's the fact that its administrators tend to shunt most of the technical support into the forums arena. Its a nice gesture to let the community solve its own problems and it frees up their time to keep developing, but, as we all know, these online forums run the risk of being rife with misinformation and posters who forget to play nice. Long story short, after much Googling, I found a very simple solution that doesn't involve messy widgets or plugins. (Muchos gracias Lorelle and Wendy!)

Jennsweb recipe for easy Wordpress Ads
(author's note: these are simply advertising text, image and link. Therefore, they don't count clicks, or generate themselves dynamically via keywords. That is a plugin thing.)

Step 1: Create a small rectangular image to use for your ad. Save it at dimensions that will fit into your theme's sidebar. I created the image at the top of this article to be 100 pixels wide by 124 high. For consistency's sake, I save the optimized image in the "images" folder of the theme.

Step 2: Go to your site's Admin panel (dashboard) and choose Write>Post. Just write a quick title in the Title area so you will be able to find it later.

Step 3: Go down to the Upload area and browse to where you saved the image and upload it. Make sure it uploads at the full size.

Step 4: Save the post, but don't publish it.

Step 5: Go to Manage>Uploads to find the image you just uploaded. Click on the image to load its URL into the address bar.

Step 6: Highlight the image's URL and then copy it.

Step 7: Go to Presentation>Theme Editor, and select your sidebar file for editing. Find the place in the code where you would like the ad to appear. For example, I chose a place down at the end, just in front of the closing tag.

Step 8: Type in the HTML for your ad's copy and hyperlink. For the image, type in something like this:



Step 9: Now place your cursor in between the two quotation marks and paste the image's URL there.

Step 10: Click "update file" and then view your site to test the result. You may want to tweak the copy or placement a little, and that should be possible with the theme's stylesheet file.

Wordpress Advertising-The easy way

Cool Internet Explorer simulator

Because there's nothing more frustrating than wasting blood, sweat and tears developing a page that renders beautifully in Firefox and Safari, only to find out that Internet Explorer is treating it like a red-headed step-child.
Thanks to Lifehacker for the link!

Cool Internet Explorer simulator

Ayyiyi! Estos comentarios son tan picantes!

I love it when I go searching for a solution for a client and come across a little online skirmish like this!

Ayyiyi! Estos comentarios son tan picantes!

All you ever wanted to know about Wordpress...

...but didn't even know to ask:

What is it?
It's an online content management tool. That means that you are able to make changes to the site via a web browser.

How does it work?
You have to download Wordpress from the website and then upload it to your hosting server. Once it's on your site, you can upload photos, make web pages that you can edit once they are published, and keep an blog on your site for quick news items or articles or interesting links.

What's so great about that?
Say your company has a new product coming out. If you need to update your site to include information about that product then you might face a costly site re-design. With a tool like Wordpress, however, you would sign into the site, choose to add a page about the new product and your site's links would automatically be updated to reflect the new information.

Is it tricky?
I would only say, if you do not have a clear idea of what you want your site to look like or say or how you would like your information organized, then things can get a little sticky. Once you have that all sorted out, then make sure you kick the tires of your theme a little before you dive into creating the site.

So, do I still need to hire a designer?
That's an excellent question.
I would say that if you feel comfortable using an FTP program, and you know how to access your website's folder on your hosting company's server to copy the Wordpress download there, check out a couple of good books and go for it.
If you want a fully customized site with the right bells and whistles and you would rather it in the hands of someone who will manage all the details while you focus on your actual business, then a designer can be a cost-effective solution.
Simply add up how much time you spend in the forum, divide it by the cost of a cup coffee and multiply it by the square root of itself. If the end result is less than your age in dog years, have fun!

All you ever wanted to know about Wordpress...

How do you say "Allah Akbar" in HTML?

My client wants to have her site available in quite a few languages so I've been working on a dropdown list of links to Google's site translator. Since she realized that if the viewer doesn't want to read the site in English, then they may not recognize the English word for their language, I had to copy and paste that language's name for itself into an HTML list. Both versions of Chinese worked, Greek worked, Japanese, Korean and Russian worked, but Arabic? No dice.
Hmmm....

How do you say "Allah Akbar" in HTML?

Blogs, and the blogging bloggers that blog them

I've been acting like a squirrel on crack with Del.icio.us over the past 2 years. In the course of trying to grow a web design business from something done on the side, when I've got free time on the weekend, through the part time graphic design job with the difference made up with web clients, to taking the plunge into the full time freelance world, every time I researched a different aspect of the web, I would hit Google and bookmark every decent article I could get my hands on.

The following list is the first of (hopefully) many where I share the best of the best on various topics such as Search Engine Optimization, hosting, web technologies and this one, blogging.

1) Detailed article on how to generate income from a blog by Steve Pavlina

2) 10 Free (or cheap) Content Management Systems. A CMS is basically a blog's sophisticated older cousin. This is a quick start in getting a handle on what words like Zope, Apache and Plone mean.

3) Adsense sense and sensibility. Useful tips onhow to use Google's Adsense feature without feeling like a big fat whore.

4) Kustomizing your tangerine candy-flake streamlined blog. Cool tutorials for giving a blog a personalized look by Jennifer Apple.

5) Now Digg this. A short and sweet article on 37 Signal's site about how to get your blog noticed, the right way.

Blogs, and the blogging bloggers that blog them