larryaronson.com

Thinking of starting a Website to publish your thoughts, promote your business, provide a service, or connect with friends? “It’s easy,” uh-huh, “It’s free; No HTML necessary!” Yeah, right.

Well…, yes, that is right. Easy because services exists that create usable websites using templates and wizards friendly enough for the Internet illiterate.  And free – or at least it’s free in the sense of approaching zero initial software cost. But, in order for your website to grow, you’re going to need that technical knowledge, HTML, to keep your content publishing costs under control.

How amazing it is that we can create and globally distribute content, on zillions of Web pages, to inform and entertain ourselves without moving physical stuff anywhere! The Web page is irrevocably becoming the World’s most common form of communication. It’s the lowest cost replacement for articles, pamphlets, brochures, manuals, directories, flyers, commercials, letters, announcements—almost any kind of document you can think of. The Web does this instantly, adding interactivity, links and searching as a bonus!!

But here’s the problem: By doing so much for so many, the Web has become irreducibly complex. It’s also rapidly evolving. The learning curve never gets any less steep and climbing it is not easy. There just is so much to know about and we all know that even just knowing about what to know ain’t easy.

Content Is Kingdom

For many small website owners, creating and maintaining their own content is paramount. So Web editing tools are the keys to the content kingdom. There are two choices: using a wysiwyg editor on a local PC, downloading and uploading files; or using a Web-based editor to edit content directly on a webserver. The former approch allows you to create Web pages rich in structure and interactivity. The latter is easier by far and can be done anywhere you browse the Web. Unfortunately Web-based wysiwyg editors are rather puny and often frustrating to use when the content has any structure or is already marked up with HTML from another source like Microsoft Word. Knowing HTML helps you avoid many of problems and resolve others before they frustrate, no matter which editing method is used.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web about twenty years ago, he thought that most HTML would be written by software programs. How did that work out? You might ask. Not very well, actually. One of the Web’s great strengths – a dictate that browsers must gracefully tolerate crappy code – is also a weakness. The early browsers; Mosaic, Netscape, AOL and Internet Explorer, went to war competing for market share by introducing new elements into the HTML language. The people writing wysiwyg editors couldn’t keep up with the rapid pace of HTML development, delivering mediocre products that generated bad code, while competition among Web designers to create unique and compelling pages encouraged  advanced HTML techniques beyond the capabilities of the wysiwyg editors.

The Rise Of The Robots

It’s 2009 and although they look much like their counterparts of a dozen years ago, Web pages are coded quite differently in this century. For one thing, good cross-browser support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) make it possible to code Web pages with far less HTML markup. Also, a large proportion of Web pages are dynamically generated using HTML templates. These templates are bits of code that may be reused millions of times a day so there’s high value in using the cleanest, leanest HTML markup possible.

By far the biggest change is the rise of search technologies and the role that today’s search platforms: Google, Yahoo, Bing and others, play in our experience of the Web. A modern Website seeks to increase its find-ability and raise its search engine ranking. These requirements has spawned a new business practice called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Companies providing SEO services specialize in writing HTML that’s very easy for the search engines’ automated scripts (the robots) to understand.

This is Web 2.0, where websites continually exchange information with other websites and where what other websites “know” and “think” about your website can be as important as your site’s content. Knowing the basics of HTML, how it works to add semantic information to page elements and how that information is gathered and used by robots will give you an edge in meeting your online goals.

Tags: CSS, HTML, robots, Search, SEO, Web 2.0, websites

Humintell.com is a website project I worked on this past Spring for the Landsman Communications Group on behalf of their client, David Matsumoto, a pioneering researcher in the field of Microexpression Analysis—understanding the underlying emotions of people by looking for universal facial expressions that flick on and off in less than a second. Humintell seeks to provide online training in these skills and the website serves a the marketing vehicle for the business, a blog for discussing related issues, and a gateway to the custom training modules for subscribers.

I built the Humintell.com website in WordPress on top of Minimal, a free theme from The WordPress Theme Shop that features variable width columns and other nice enhancements. The wonderful graphic design, typography and layout is from Dean Meyers, who added some of the playful visual effects used on the site. Dean Landsman of the Landsman Communications Group integrated the various online pieces into a coherent whole, creating/editing much of the initial content.

Congratulations, Humintell! And thanks to Howard Greenstein of The Harbrooke Group for referring me to Landsman.

Tags: blog, David Matsumoto, Dean Meyers, Harbrooke Group, Humintell, Landsman, microexpression analysis, minimal, online training, wordpress

Reading Friday’s NY Times article: A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web, made me laugh. In the era of Twitter and the age of instant messaging, the Associated Press says it’s in the business of selling headlines and has a right to license their every use in any context including—especially including—search engines such as: Google, Yahoo and Bing. Unquoted in the NY Times article is any mention of what this 1,400 member, non-profit association does best: aggregating and editing news sourced by a global network of reporters and editors.

In the 1980s, when I worked at the CBS News Election and Survey Unit, there was an A.P. ticker near my desk. At the time, the A.P. had the contract to collect election results from their county reporting points, summarize those results and provide them by teletype to members and subscribers. Most of the time, however, it carried the feed of breaking news and followup stories. Postings were not signed, they just had an originating station but, after watching for a while, the personalities of different stations around the World emerged. Mistakes were common and pranks were occasionally pulled. In today’s parlance, this was a very successful social media network with many of the characteristics found in today’s Internet mix of chatting, tweeting and blogging. It just wasn’t free and it wasn’t open. It was built on expensive phone lines leased from Ma Bell and you had to be an accredited member to post stories.

The A.P. has a great heritage that goes back many decades before my encounter at CBS. I have a novel that I bought at The Strand Bookstore on my first visit there upon moving to NYC after collage:  Informed Sources (Day East Received) by Willard S. Bain. The novel is a visual work in teletype-ese, printed in an ALL-CAPS typewriter font. Written in 1967, it was given away for free in mimeograph format by The Communication Company, an underground press, before being published by Doubleday and Company in this softcover edition that I’ll have to stop reading soon if I want to finish this post.

Informed Sources tells the story of a terrorist plot coinciding with the reported death of a pop culture idol from the perspective of the station staffers at Informed Sources (IS), an A.P. like network:

INFORMED SOURCES BULLETIN
    BERKELEY, NOW (IS) -- A PLAN TO BLOW UP GOLDEN
GATE BRIDGE IN HONOR OF ROBIN THE COCK, WHOSE
ALLEGED LIFE REPORTEDLY HAS ENDED IN RUMORED
DEATH, WAS ABANDONED TODAY.
                                          VC807PPS

Except that this is 1967 and everyone is more or less stoned. Yet, here too, you can hear voices like those of today’s Internet. Take this quote from the beginning:

BOSTON, NOW (IS) -- WHAT'S HAPPENING?
     IN SCORES OF SCATTERED BASEMENT BASES ACROSS
THE LAND THE QUESTION GATHERED ITSELF AND THEN
HOVERED IN THE ANSWERING ECHO.
     CYNICS SNEERED IT WAS ALL A BIG PIPE DREAM, BUT
ONE OVEREXTENDED PIONEER OF THE NEW LEISURE SAID
"THAT'S WAY BESIDE THE POINT."

The more thing change… Right? The novel remains an unknown classic of the underground literary world at that time when the beat poets were experimenting with LSD and cultural revolution. It’s not on-line, as far as I know. There are only four used copies of the softbound edition for sale on Amazon and only one of the mimeograph copies.

WHIMSY SEIZES SYNAPSE TRAPEZES

Sorry, but I don’t wish the A.P. well in their headline selling business. Not if it means a full court press against fair-use under copyright that will saddle the Internet with last century’s digital rights concepts. There is a big difference between atoms and bits and the bits of information that seach engines gather and maintain about other online content (links) is not that content — it is the conversation about that content. The A.P. did social media right for so many years but now they don’t seem to get it at all. Paid headlines, like paid speech must eventually lose market share to free variety.

Tags: AP, Associated Press, CBS News, Google, informed sources, news, NY Times, Search, Twitter

Google announced their plan to introduce the Google Chrome OS into the market for PC operating systems. Google Chrome OS is an expansion of the capabilities Google introduced with their Chrome browser just 9 months ago. It will essentially be a Web OS that intelligently integrates on-line and local device resources to provide a slick interface for managing all the content consumption, creation and sharing we routinely do. Netbooks running the new Chrome OS should be available in about a year.

This is important news. Not because it challenges Microsoft’s dominance of the PC operating system market, as stressed in the New York Times article on the announcement, but because it’s a sign that we are heading to another sweet spot in the information technology revolution. A sweet spot is where hardware, software and cultural trends come together to make complex tasks much easier and cheaper to accomplish. The effect transforms society enabling new ways for people to interact. For example, in 1994, reliable, dial-up Internet service met the graphical Web browser, Mosaic, just as Al Gore re-invented the Internet as an open platform for business, entertainment and the free, global exchange of information and ideas.

Here are the important trends today: A new generation of high-speed WiFi based on freed up broadcast spectrum from the conversion to digital TV is on its way and will meet up with new portable devices that are fun to use and cheap to own. After Google Chrome OS goes open-source, there should be versions available for everything from X-Boxes to old TiVo machines.

Speaking of Tivo, the recent Supreme Court decision to deny the appeal in the Cablevision DVR case highlights another trend. Cablevision wanted to provide DVR services upstream on their servers. The broadcast networks held that this was making copies for redistribution and, thus, they should pay royalties. The Appeals Court ruling, which the Supremes let stand, held that, once the consumer paid a license for a piece of content, it didn’t matter where it was stored on the consumer’s behalf—on a local hard drive or somewhere in the cloud.  This decision lays the groundwork for challenging all the restrictions that the telco, broadcast and cable monopolies, place on how, where and when we do anything.

Here’s my last trend to watch: A month ago, the state of Vermont OK’d the formation of virtual corporations by a change in its tax laws. This means that corporations (LLCs) in Vermont no longer need to have a physical mailing address and can conduct online board meetings.

An important conclusion was missed in the Vermont reporting – a corporation can have bank accounts and credit cards. This is a privilege hitherto granted by our government only to corporations and individuals and denied to such entities as: MeetUp groups and SecondLife communities. The effect of this, as Clay Shirky points out in Here Comes Everybody, limits our ability to leverage the Internet, with social media tools, to organize and engage in collective actions other than protest movements.

How will society change in the next two or three years when all of us are connected to a World Wide Web of rich media, all the time, in devices on us and around us; with fast, friendly software that knows about us, our friends and the tribes we associate with; when the last geographic and cost barriers to collaborative action for the common good are gone?

Tags: Cablevision, Chrome OS, Clay Shirky, DVR, Google, Internet, Mosaic, netbook, Social Media, Supreme Court, Vermont, Virtual Corporation, Web, WIFI, Windows

The EasyOffice is an exciting new entry in the world of Cloud Computing and software as a service (SaaS) for small and medium sized businesses. The CEO, Philip Meese, and I belonged to a small collective of freelance APL programmers in the early ’80s, and shared an interest in sailing and flying. He was even my upstairs neighbor for a few years. We recently reconnected at a reunion. He had a problem.

The website for his new business–low cost outsourcing of office systems, networks and applications—was unfinished; stalled. The content and visual assets were on a designer’s development server and communications with that vendor had broken down. I offered to rescue the site for a fixed fee; rebuild it in WordPress, duplicating the page hierarchy and site navigation; slapping a blog on the side to provide Philip with the tools to communicate with his customers and market.

I had fun with this one. The visual design was easy to implement so it was mostly organizing the content within WordPress’ CMS. We built the basic site in a couple of days then customized the elements and added new features over the last few weeks. The navigation bar’s drop-menus didn’t work in Internet Explorer, so that had to be redone and I had to modify the templates to show a smaller header image on the inside pages.

The site is optimized for Search Engines using the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin and features cool sliding content effects using the MooTools javascript framework.

Tags: client, cloud computing, EasyOffice, mootools, Philip Meese, SaaS, SEO, SMB, web service

Hi.

Please help my friend and colleague Howard Greenstein. Howard’s trying to raise money for  Stand Up To Cancer as part of the Charity Smackdown ’09 online event.

For donations of $100 or more, Howard is giving away one hour of his personal time to talk to you or your organization about social media, online marketing, Internet business strategies – whatever.

There’s only one day left in the Smackdown. Please give whatever you can and help spread the word with my thanks and the gratitude of many.

— Larry

Tags: Cancer, Charity, Howard Greenstein, Smackdown, Stand

Nope, this is not a post about professional wrestling. A client recently asked an interesting question about how to show her URL on printed materials:

What’s the difference if I use just my domain name in a URL or use www.mydomain.com?  One of my colleagues said I should use www because more people understand what that is.

Okay. So what is the ‘www’ good for? Is it a necessary part of your Website’s address? In what contexts should it be used or omitted?

Technically, saying,  www.yourdomain.com, directs the Internet user to your domain’s webserver. Saying: yourdomain.com, directs the visitor to your domain’s network and you’ll figure out which server to use along the way.

Conceptually, the former presents your website while the latter presents your brand. Visually, designers like the ‘www’ prefix for its 3.x.3 symmetry. Practically, it makes no difference.

www doesn’t necessarily denote a Webserver, it’s just a widely used convention. Sixteen years ago, when the World Wide Web only attracted the attention of computer geeks, they would install web server software on a separate test or development machine in their corporate network. Each computer in a network must have a unique host name which is prefixed to the domain name. Typically, whoever first created the network would set the theme and server names were chosen from that theme — Norse gods, British warships, state capitals, whatever. There already were loosely adopted conventions — mail, news, gopher (an early, global information system without hyperlinks.) Somebody named a webserver ‘www’ and others followed suit. Interestingly, the Web’s very first home page did not use www, it used info.

The Web’s http protocol has gained dominance over other Internet protocols and the Web’s conceptual framework is synonymous now with the Internet itself. Most organizations make their Web server the primary entry point into their information domain. Hosting companies do this by default for virtual hosting accounts.

Today, search powers the Web and the Web, for many organizations, is the primary means of delivering their service and promoting their brand. When someone wants to find information about You they are more likely to enter You in a search box, than to type your url into a location field. Mobile users really appreciate shorter URLs. And for audio content, the extra ten syllables are a pain.

Like ‘dubya’, ‘www’ should fade away.

— Larry

Tags: computer, dubya, Internet, network, professional, webserver, World Wide Web, wrestling, www

Ann Phelan has a dream job. She facilitates and books vacations to two of the best islands in the Caribbean, Bonaire and Antigua. Moreover, she’s active in the communities on both islands which makes her an essential resource for anyone interested in visiting these two slices of paradise.

I first met Ann a few years ago when I answered her ad in Windsurfing Magazine for a Windsurfing singles week in Bonaire. It was a wonderful vacation with get-togethers every evening and optional activities during the day if the wind was too light to sail. Bonaire, a Dutch island off the coast of Venezuela, is for windsurfers and divers; Antigua, in the northeast corner of the Caribbean, has 365 beaches and and a hot nightlife.

A few months ago, we started talking about redoing her website. She wanted a separate destination site for each island and she wanted to be able to post articles, pictures and videos. I discussed with her the various hosting options available and the features and capabilities of WordPress. We decided the best approach was for her to start blogging on a free WordPress.com account to get familiar with the process. Later, if she needed additional technology—Wordpress.com limits what you can add to a site—we could move her blogs to a hosted solution.

The result has been immensely satisfying and quite beautiful to see. Ann has taken to blogging like a reef fish takes to the warm, clear blue waters of Bonaire and posts something new just about every day. She’s found her personal voice in writing posts which makes both sites authentic and appealing. She’s learned quickly the ins and outs of using images and embedding YouTube videos. Every time I visit BonaireBliss.com or AntiguaBliss.com I find something new to make me smile and warm my heart.

Tags: Ann Phelan, Antigua, Bonaire, diving, singles, vacation, windsurfing, wordpress

Photo: Amazon.com

Amazon.com announced today a new version of its Kindle reader. I’ve occasionally seen people using a Kindle on the NYC subway. It’s a beautiful device and I want one. The Kindle2 will ship later this month. You can order it from Amazon.com for $359.

The Kindle2 looks to offer major improvements over the current device. It’s lighter (10.2 oz,) slimmer, faster, has more storage (up to 1500 titles,) longer battery life (up to 4 days with the WIFI on; 2 weeks without) and improved controls. Some other features that excite me:

• It can read text through built in speakers or stereo headphones
• No WIFI contract needed — Amazon pays for Sprint‘s 3G network
• More than a dozen file formats supported
• The battery can be recharged from a USB port

Of course, there are still some things to complain about:

First, it’s a gray scale device, and with only 16 shades of gray at that. It somewhat makes up for this with higher resolution (167 ppi) but still, I read many more documents than just books and color is important.

Secondly, it’s too expensive. Cut the price in half and it could revolutionize education in this country and especially abroad, where the cost of physically acquiring and moving textbooks is prohibitive.

I’m hoping that Amazon realizes the potential in the Kindle line and does something truly innovative in marketing it. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time before Apple comes out with a large format iPod-Touch and eats Amazon’s lunch.

— Larry

Tags: amazon, apple, kindle, reader, WIFI

I’ve just finished a new Website for Kate Nasser, a wonderful customer service consultant, trainer and popular speaker on the subject. It’s been one of the most enjoyable collaborations I’ve ever experienced. Unlike many of the other sites I’ve created, all the design, layout, graphics and type styling on this site came from just the two of us working together; trying out different ideas and refining the ones that felt right.

Like my own site, KateNasser.com has a static home page. A custom menu provides easy navigation to other pages and sub-pages. The sidebar prominently features her contact information followed by an embedded video clip from one of her speaking engagements. Below that, is a list of her most recent posts. At the bottom of the page is a section showing post excerpts in a special category: “Hot Topics and New Bits.”

What was most fun was teaching Kate how to use YouTube to organize her video playlists and embed them in posts for her site. I also taught her how to use social media services to drive traffic to her site. She’s become an avid twitterer. You can follow her tweets at @KateNasser .

Please take a look at KateNasser.com and let us know if we did as good a job as we think we did.

— Larry

Tags: collaboration, customer service, Kate Nasser, Twitter, YouTube

Many of my recent projects have been conversions of old, static websites into modern, content-managed sites built on WordPress. WordPress has an option to set the homepage of the site to a static page instead of the index of posts in reverse chronological order that usually characterize a blog.

Some of my clients were motivated to make the upgrade because they wanted to blog (verb) but were not sure they wanted a blog (noun.) The easiest thing to do is start with the old site and recreate its structure in WordPress pages, mapping pages of the old site to the new. A sidebar widget can be used display the titles of the most recent posts.

Okay, but one of my recent clients wanted some more flexibility and asked for some way to attach post listings to selected pages. For example, a list of featured articles on her home page.  Hmm, that’s exactly what I’d like for my homepage, too. It would have the following benefits:

• Make the home page more interesting to humans and robots
• Highlight the important posts separating them from all the other stuff I publish
• Encourage me to write more posts that people will actually read

The technique I developed should work in most WordPress themes, I started out with MistyLook by Sadish Bala. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, so make sure you have reliable backups before you change anything. Most of the code for the feature will reside in a separate php file, named  page_posts.php, which will be included into the default page template, page.php.

Start by uploading an empty file, named: page_posts.php to your theme directory. Edit page.php inserting the following line right after the endwhile statement at the bottom of “The Loop”.

 <?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/page_posts.php'); ?>

It will pull in the contents of page_posts.php. Since that file is empty, nothing changed on any page. If anything goes wrong with this or after any of the next steps, just delete the above line of code from page.php and re-save it.

Here’s the code for page_posts.php

It does  the following:

• Looks for a custom field called ‘post-category’; it’s value is a category name
• Writes a section title using that category name
• Getsall posts in that category
• Loops through the posts displaying the permalinked title and excerpt for each.

Now that the code is in place, pick an existing category or create a new category to associate with some page, for example, Featured Articles for the home page. Edit your posts and add the ‘Featured Articles’ category to whichever are appropriate. Edit the home page and add a custom field with the key = post-category, and value = Featured Articles. Save the page. Check the home page. It should now have a heading with the category name followed by a list of posts.

Each post in the list is in a division with the css class, post-item. On my site, I added the following rules to the site’s stylesheet:

#content .post-item {
 border: 1px #dde solid;
 padding: 4px 8px; margin-top: 6px;
}
#content .post-item .post-info {
 background: none;padding:0;
}

The first rule puts a light thin border around each post and spaces them nicely. The second rule resets the styling my theme normally uses on the author line.

Further information can be found in the WordPress documentation. If you try this and it works for you, drop a comment on this post with your URL.

- Larry

Tags: Blogging, custom field, Featured Articles, php, post listing, posts, wordpress categories, wordpress templates

I’ve just finished a project: DigitalHHR – a WordPress blog for the Intellectual Property department of a big law firm. The IP department, consisting of 4 lawyers, wanted a online platform to promote their ideas and opinions about intellectual property and generate good press for their firm. I was under contract to a wonderful creative agency, Aha! Insight Technology and was working again with Howard Greenstein. Howard provided the strategic direction, project management and training for the client while I provided the technology.

Howard proposed a robust set of features to showcase their familiarity with leading edge, social media technologies and services. The specifications called for an integrated BBs, an event manager, feature-rich videos, a Flash-powered header with a customized navigation menu tying it all together. Howard and I knew we were pushing the limits of WordPress and that’s what the client wanted to show off.

We started with a three column theme, Seashore by Sadish Bala. I added a video presentation space on top of the  sidebars and a game space below. With a bit of work, I was able to shoehorn the custom flash video the lawyers designed into the header code and replaced the generated navigation menu with a two-level structure.

The four lawyers were already blogging on other sites. This was their first opportunity, not only to write under their own brand, but to actually craft that brand as publishers and editors. As they began to post articles, they became concerned about their authorship rights —they’re IP lawyers, remember, and important ones at that! So, as we neared completion of the project, new feature requests started creeping in.

They wanted special lawyer profile pages so they could edit in additional content about themselves. These page would feature a portrait image and an expanded contact section with a download-able, virtual address card. For these special pages, I cloned the standard single page template and modified it to fetch the page author’s portrait photo from a sub directory of /wp-content. I setup custom fields for the contact information and displayed those next to the portrait image. Following that, I formatted a box to display the most recent posts by that author. Finally, I displayed whatever content they wanted to add via the post editor. Click here to see some of the code.

The head partner of the IP division liked the profile page so much that he wanted a special version just for himself that also displayed  any press articles written about him. I figured out how to accomplish that using a custom post field and some more template programming.

They also wanted to post co-authored articles. I know that there was third-party plug-in that did something like that, but at this late stage of the project, it was easier to add more template modifications to get exactly the functionality the client wanted. The solution we devised features a double portrait image, double email links and a hook to pick up the post for the special lawyer profile pages.

It’s been exciting to watch this blog progress from it’s initial launch last month. Everything we did is being used by the client and it’s all working well.

Tags: blog, flash, law, lawyer, Seashore, Social Media, video, wordpress

Hooray, I don’t have to do systems admin work anymore.

Systems admin work was anything I had to do with a client’s hosting company in order to accommodate their domain and work with their files. It often involved waiting on hold while some tech support person, somewhere in the developing World, tried to find an answer. It wasn’t that my requests were anything special, it’s just that every Web hosting company thought that their Web server’s unique configuration options were special.

That’s now changed. In the past couple of years, a quiet productivity revolution has dramatically simplified and standardized the business of Web hosting. Hosting has been commoditized and, consequently, is more reliable and a lot cheaper than it ever was. How cheap? Less than $10/month will provide more than enough resources for most small and medium-size businesses, including support for multiple domains, email accounts and databases. But more important is the availability of Web-based administration tools that automate the process of installing and configuring dynamic Web applications. Two in particular, cPanel and Fantastico De Luxe, have cut down the amount of time I typically spend in preparing a client’s site from hours to minutes.

cPanel is a suite of tools that a Web hosting service installs on their servers so that you, the client or me, on your behalf, can manage the options and settings related to your account without having to contact technical support. Using cPanel, you can set what domains and host names point to which Web sites; which email address are attached to your domains; who can upload and download files; and what logs and usage reports are generated. If your Web pages contain dynamic content (e.g: a blog) cPanel gives you complete control of the database that serves that content.

Fantastico De Luxe is a web application services installer. It works under cPanel to install popular programs automatically in seconds. I’ve used it serveral time to install WordPress and it just works. WordPress, by itself, is not difficult to install but does require a few more steps and knowledge about what you are doing. With Fantastico everything is done over the Web. A basic WordPress used to take about a half hour of uploading files and configuring options. Now it takes about 30 seconds—and always works!

There is quite an extensive list of applications that fantastico can install besides WordPress: other blogging systems; portal and content mangement systems; ecommerce, shopping cart and customer support software; discussion boards; image galleries; mailing list managers, polls and survey software; courseware and educational applications; advertising and real estate listing programs and more.

So, if you’re looking to move your business onto the Web, or feel it’s time to update that old, static Web site and engage your customers with dynamic content and custom services, you can have confidence in having it done fast and right.

Tags: cPanel, fantastico, web hosting, web service

I’ve been working with Michelle and Ariane Gold for about two years helping them maintain their website, ButchAndHarold.com. Michelle and Ariane market a line of peel-and-stick artware on their Yahoo Store-based website. Pretty nifty stuff. They have recently expanded their product line to include peel-and-stick photo frames and mini-stickers and, so, the website needed updating. New pages had to be created for the new products and their URLs had to be linked into the navigation menu. We decided to change the top level “Collection” menu button to “Shop” and make it a drop-menu showing the three product lines.

The BUTCH & harold website is a traditional HTML website. It’s nicely designed but unlike the blogs I’ve been working on recently, there are no templates or includes for global page elements. There are just a lot of HTML files. I didn’t build this site, but the Web designer/programmer who originally constructed it did a good job writing clean, modern code, making It easy to add content and make minor layout changes within the existing architecture. However, s/he did use some tricks with the navigation menu that gave me headaches trying to implement the drop-menu without rewriting the entire thing—and make it work in all browsers.

The remainder of this post is more technical. Skip it unless you’re really interested in how page navigation works. Or just visit the site and check out how I built the Stickr (frame) and Stickr (mini) pages. You’ll see (hopefully) some fun javascript in action.

Continue Reading »

Tags: art, butch, Chrome, CSS, design, Flock, harold, HTML, IE6, peel, stick, Web 2.0

Two new Web browsers have recently become available for exploring the Internet. Google Chrome and Flock take radically different approaches to the browsing experience and I recommend you take a look at them when you get a chance.

Google Chrome is a minimalist’s browser. It doesn’t offer a multitude of features, but it’s very fast and solid as a rock. It relies heavily on tabs when visiting different sites and each tab runs in its own process. This keeps the browser from crashing from a page error or some misbehaved plug-in, and prevents pages in the background from slowing down the foreground window. I like Chrome’s history function. When you open a new tab or window it displays thumbnails and links to your most recently vistited pages.

Chrome offers a single address bar for both URLs and keywords. Google is the default search engine, but it can be switched to others—Wikipedia, Aol, Yahoo, etc. The address bar has a fast auto-suggest function. For flying around the Web from site to site, Chrome is a jet fighter. However, if you mostly stay put on a collection of actively fed “home” pages, Flock may be the browser for you. It’s a mega-cruise ship.

Flock is Firefox on social media steroids. Flock takes a framed approach to visiting the Social Media Web, grabing feeds from places, such as: Facebook, Twitter and MySpace into sidebars and YouTube selections into a headband. Flock works best opened full-screen on a big, wide, LCD display. Beware! The shear number and variety of tool bars, control tabs, bookmarks, menus and search boxes can overwhelm.

Flock, by default, remembers the sites you had loaded when you last quit and reopens them. It also opens a generated page, “My World” that captures all your various feeds, messages and pings.  I like the way Flock integrates with Gmail, and find it useful as an “active desktop” – a one-stop site that I scan every so often to keep in the mix as I’m doing other work. Flock pops-up a standard blog editor when I want to post something and just about anything can be shared with a drag-n-drop action.

The online support documentation provided by the these two new browsers also provide a facinating contrast. Google wrote a Chrome comic book that teaches you how to use Chrome with a technical depth that’s actually readable. Flock has uploaded a series of youTube videos showing Flock’s Features in action. Check it out, you’ll get a better idea of what Flock is like and I won’t have to insert a screenshot here.

Google Chome is only available now for Windows. When it becomes available for the Mac, I’ll probably be using both Flock and Chrome more often than Firefox and Safari.

— Larry

Tags: browser, Chrome, Facebook, Firefox, Flock, Google, Safari, Social Media, Twitter, YouTube