AdvisorBits

I was looking at Jesse Gardner's site again today. I like the layout and I think it renders fairly well in most browsers. He has these creepy eyes that pop-up in a window. I'm not sure what they mean, but I have my ideas. The JavaScript he uses automatically closes that window a few seconds after the main document loads, and I think that has interesting possibilities.

What if there was a headline or image that really caught your eye and then faded away. You could leave a clean simple link on your pages that only had text that says "Tell me more about that thing I saw again..."

I'll have to think about that. I'm not sure if there's a decent market for local links, but I keep thinking about it. What could set it apart and make it better than the run of the mill banners?

I was looking to see when he last updated the site. He's working on the new KinetixHosting.com site, and I haven't heard from him in a while. It's been a while since he explained the name of the site, Plastic Mind. Seems it came from a realization he had in college while drawing a "blonde-haired bowling-ball".

And I thought grasshopper brain might be a problem...

It seems that everywhere I work, I end up writing about DNS, or the Domain Name System. It probably doesn’t help matters any that there seem to be so many different permutations of the acronym. There’s really only one authority (although there are several references) and that’s the Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF. The relevant documents these days are RFC 1034 and RFC 1035, which obsolete RFCs 882, 883, 973.

And if you read any of these, you’re likely to become more confused. Don’t worry; the concept is easy, even if the specifics are a bit obtuse.

Computers “talk” to each other on the Internet using IP addresses that look like this:

192.168.144.120

Humans remember computer addresses like this:

www.some.com

DNS is the service that translates human names into network addresses so the Internet can work for everyone.

Why should you care? In your whole career, you will probably only need to know about DNS for two different reasons.

You’re setting up a network or Internet connection on your computer. Your ISP has name servers available to your computer, and when you click a link to www.somereallycoolsite.com your computer will look up the address from your ISP’s DNS servers. Most ISPs and proprietary consumer on-line services set this up when you log on, so you may never even know this has happened. If not, the instructions your provider gives you should include 2 IP addresses and how to apply them correctly to your specific configuration.

You’re registering a domain name and the registrar is asking about name servers. In this case, you need someone to keep track of the names and addresses of your domain. The people who host your website probably provide DNS service for your domain, they can tell you what server addresses to use, if they don’t do the domain registrations for you. This probably is NOT your ISP. Nothing against them, but their business is getting you connected to the Internet. Even if they do that well, you’ll be dealing with a different group when you setup your web account.

We may be slightly impartial, but we think your best bet for DNS or other web services is someone whose business focus is providing web services.

The National Sciences Foundation has puiblished the 2002 Science and Engineering Indicators survey. It's a fairly clearly organized site, chocked full of statistics, more statistical data, and presumably damned lies. (With respects to Clements, who poularized the phase, and Disraeli who coined it: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.")

The good news is that this site is a nice expample of how an organization can use the web to communicate a large volume of information. The site fairly closely follows the conceptual model for document construction. This is the model we were taught in high school composition class, with an outline and supporting paragraphs, and bibliography, table of contents indexes, and so forth.

The bad news is two-fold.

First bad news is the actual content. There are pages and pages full of discouraging facts such as:

50% of American adults does not know how long it takes for the earth to make a revolution around the sun.

The second bad news is the code. The have a perfectly organized outline, and a language that tries to enfource that model. (I'm guessing they meant to either present this as HTMLor XHTML although the document code doesn't say.) And they choose to put this in tables.

Tables may have been popularized as design elements during the 4.x browser wars because it was fairly easy for designers to get similar effects in very poorly compliant browsers. But let's move on. As it says in the standard,

Tables represent relationships between data. Authors specify these relationships in the document language ...

All of which is to say that tables are supposed to show users some data in a grid layout for easy creadability. Though use of other elements and correct CSS authors can do most things that we used to do with tables and still have our code and document layout meet standards.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for December 23 is now online at:http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021223.html

Jakob Neilson is known for his fairly drastic positions on web usability. His Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002 represents a significant deprature from previous efforts in that he includes funny pictures.

If you suscribe to AlertBox you'll probably "get" this post. If you don't you should probably glance the the article anyway.

Free Linux still exists. www.debian.org This is Good Stuff (tm), but it's not for the timid.

RedHat has not been free for me since my first Linux Box. (Once Mark used his media to install it, and I borrowed Frank's media once for the same box.) I've always tried to buy a copy of each major version, because I supported this vision of an operating system for the masses. I sometimes bought two back when they were $50 per boxed set.

Now they have this thing called RedHat Enterprise Linux, and the entry level server product costs $350. - $600. depending on what option you get. If you want multiprocessor support for 8 CPUs and up to 16GB of memory, they're looking for $2,500 for the premium edition.

One can still get RedHat Linux, the current flavor is 9 and MSRP is $165 for the Professional version. (And you can get it for free, all you need to do is download 3 CD images. It's usually cheaper to buy the retail box in the final analysis.)

That's the easy part. The upfront price is a fairly small part of the equation a lot of small businesses who have made a commitment to RedHat currently face.

To understand what these decisions may cost over time, one needs to look at maintenance, and the useful life of the product.

As noted above, RedHat does not require you to purchase a license in order to run the operating system, but in order to use their RedHat Network, (RHN) you must pay a per system fee. RHN is roughly equivalent in function to Microsoft's Windows Update which is a free service that Microsoft offers to keep its commercially licensed operating systems up to date.

Given these variations, and the $30 difference in the RHN annual fee, small businesses are prone to choose RedHat Linux. Why do we need an Enterprise class product?

The answer is simple once one understands that each version of RedHat Linux will only be updated for 12 months, and then you will presumably be forced to upgrade versions. As any systems administrator can tell you, this is when problems (lost productivity, down time, broken applications) occur. Recently we have seen 7.3, a first time for a fourth minor revision, and 8.0 both superceded by 9.

Presumably there will be a new release in less than 12 months, I foresee a schedule of updates every 10 months. So the RedHat Enterprise Linux with a 5 year support life cycle, seems like the way to go.

Only one problem. My app doesn't even run on 8.0 yet. No mention of Enterprise at all on the vendor's web site. I hope RedHat doesn't find out the hard way, by loosing Linux market share, that they can't wield the bully pulpit the same way Microsoft does forcing market changes on its customers.

I already mentioned this list. But this week I was reminded how simple things like putting prices on the page can make a big difference. As Neilson says:

Price is the most specific piece of info the consumers use to understand the nature of the offering, and not providing it makes people feel lost and reduces their understanding of the product line.

This week, I was given a referral for a subcontractor. I reviewed the very nicely constructed web site, and the site convinced me that the contractor could do the work I needed. The only question I had was how much it was going to cost me. It was the only thing standing between him and a decent opportunity to gain an on-going client for his professional services.

I could not find the pricing information on the site. So I sent an email with the stated purpose of obtaining pricing information. Two phone calls later, I am aware that this contractor has had a routine, not major dental appointment, and that while he does have a relationship with his banker, he does not think he is an "A" list customer because of the interest rate he gets. (How ironic, his banker doesn't give him a good price. )

But I don't know anything about how much it will cost me to him to do the work I need, other than "It will be expensive to do what you want."

So I will probably find someone else who will tell me how much they charge.

I am learning from the rule too. On my business pages the prices will be more prominently featured. I am also going to mention this to several of my clients who don't feature pricing on their sites now.

Yesterday I got the Garden Party Web site majorly tuned up. It's all pretty well managed through the same tool I use to publish AdvisorBits, Moveable Type.

Moveable Type supports plug-ins and there is a small but active group of independent programmers contributing modules. If you use moveable type as part of your marketing strategy, or even just for personal use, you should get over to mt-plugins.org and check out the stuff they have!

The plugins are really easy to install. All I had to do was create a plugin directory in my MT installation, and put the downloaded plugin files there. The plugins are written in perl, and Ben, the author of MT, has written the API very nicely; according to most reports it is easy to use.

I installed RelativeDate by David Raynes to do the countdown to Garden Party. This one generated errors because I needed Date::Calc. This is in the instructions and there is a way to see if it is installed on your system. If not, it installs pretty easy with CPAN, but you also need Bit::Vector, which required some time to test. This should not be a problem for most users, and most systems administrators should be willing to install the modules needed, if perl is a supported part of your web account.

I also installed BlogTimes, which generates funny little graphs detailing the distribution of time of day when I post to the Garden Party Journal.

The MT Plugins site is maintained by Kristine and other voluteers who have been very helpful. BlogTimes was off line a few weeks ago and I wrote one of those notes that never gets answered "Where is ....?". Kristine answered it when the site cam back up, I thought that was nice. And among other things, she makes templates for Blogs. So if you need a blog design, you might want to see: http://love-productions.com/portfolio/ I may as well warn you now, the site is pink.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon recently talked about how Amazon has grown, and where their key expenditures went over their slow but sure rise to profitablity. CBS Marketwatch and Information Week both have more indepth coverage of his speech.

Amazon has grown and changed the way they manage and move information over the years, they have spent more that 3 times as much on technology as fulfillment. This technology allows them to personalize the shopper's experience to a high degree, and I believe this is a big part of their success.

The challenge for me and my small business retail clients is to scale this model effectively. And from $900 Million we have a lot of scaling to do.

When designers lay out web pages before the final copy is ready, they need to use dummy text. Why reinvent the wheel? Lorem Ipsum is dummy text, and the Lorem Ipsum site will generate paragraphs of the stuff for you. (And lists of it too, if you need them.)

Dude! (If you're reference impaired, that's from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, an early effort of Keanu Reeves.)

I know most of my family would never be as rude as they are in email if they only knew what they were doing and how it is perceived. My father, for instance, seems incapable of only placing one address in the To: field of an email. Maybe he feels like they get lonely there and they need some company, so he adds some other addresses for good measure. I've often wondered how to mention this to him.

On-line Netiquette Uncensored by Judith C Kalios is a web site that gives me a tool to send to people who are netiquette impaired or otherwise oblivious normative standards of on-line Courtesies described on the site.

To be fair to my family, there are Courtesies described here that clients forget too. I laugh to get a message with a signature of 6 or seven lines of additional information. I wonder when they include a fax number and omit the web site URL. And less you think that I believe myself perfect:

Dear Aaron,

I will never send an informal note again. I had no idea the inferences you may have drawn from my gross misspelling, and I will always open and close the notes properly from now on.

Thanks,
John

I've been working on two new sites for my company, JSW4.NET. The one I am coding myself has XHTML and CSS validation links at the bottom of the pages to prove that my code is good and pure. (What a geek!)

On one page I constructed a form for contacting me. (This is something all web site managers should think about. It gets your email addresses out of your pages. I mentioned another trick I use to accomplish this important task in "Sweet Trick" on March 12 this year.)

When I tried to validate the page with the form I got a cryptic error that said something about needing an obj or applet tag. This was confusing to me, and frankly I am still not sure what the error message meant. But I figured out what the actual error was.

Upon further examination, it turns out I had illegally included the form in an in-line context. You can't do that.

A form is a block level element that cannot be included inside of certain other block level elements, in my case a paragraph. (

I moved the form outside the paragraph and everything validated fine.

I have been working on a 3 column site which has given me some problems lately. I have looked all over and found some really cool examples. It wasn't until I came accross Position is Everything (p.i.e.) that I found the right answer for my situation.

Big John, the author of the site, has a great essay explaining the problems I was facing and some nice simple examples of code which allows me (and you) to over come these issues fairly easily. I was extreamly impressed by the "guest demo" by Holly Bergevin which shows just how complex one can get with valid css.

As I mentioned last month, I was working on a 3 column site and I used information from the p.i.e. site.

I turned the site over to my client the other day, you should drop by and see it. (especially if you are in the market for a home in Columbia County) www.cresinc.com is nice and fluid design, based on a printed sketch supplied by the client. It renders cleanly in the latest Opera, Netscape and IE, and it validates both for CSS and XHTML.

Email is my life. If you do business with me, you know it is the fastest way to get in touch with me, and in the long run, I will get to the bottom of it if you send me an email. (If you call me about something I am very likely to forget it within 24 hours.)

I mention all of this to explain the next outrageous thing, which is that I think it's time to give up my dedicated Exchange server. By dedicated I don't mean a single box dedicated to serving Exchange. I mean and Exchange server more or less dedicated to serving just my mailbox.

I need search features, and big time antiSPAM featrues. On the Unix side I am familair with spamassissin, so I decided to check out SAproxy. This comercial application allows me to use just about email client and have the program run some sophisticated analysis of my mail to determine which are SPAM.

Bloomba is the companion email client that makes it easier to "train" SAproxy to be even better at recognising SPAM. Bloomba and SAproxy support "white lists", so I can allow mail through from people I know.

Bloomba's primary claim of superiority is its ability to quickly search through a lot of mail or contacts and find the relevant information. I can't confirm or deny this at the moment. I did think the Smart Groups feature was nice, you can configure it to check your favorite RSS feed for recent updates.

Plus, it is one of those words that's just fun to say.

After thoughts of killing off the Exchange server earlier this month, a cruel twist of fate has brought us a copy of Small Business SharePoint technology that has almost no application for an independant consultant. Unfortunately this and several other features sound cool as heck, so they'll probably at least get tried out.

SAProxy that came with Bloomba will probably get purchased anyway. Between that and Cloudmark SpamNet, and the blacklists on the mail server, I've cut down to about 1 SPAM in my IN box in the morning. For anyone who's counting, that's between 0.9% and 0.6% false negative, and the only false positive so far had the GTUBE, [Generic Test for Unsolicited Bulk Email] in it and was a test.

I don't like non-interactive flash. I will not eat it on a train or in the rain.

Our old friend Jesse over at PlasticMind.com showed us a site that just had to be checked out. But I just spent a good half hour building atoms on the PBS web site. Flash has the ability to be interactive, and this seems to be a great method to instruct. For the first time since 1982, I learned something about physics and atoms.

When I was in school, they didn't have up and down quarks, just plain old nutrons and protons. It turns out that Mr. McVee didn't tell us the whole story, but PBS does it with flash in a way that informs us and teaches us something instead of the usual Flash eye candy that just rots the brain.

Over the past couple of days, there has been an interesting worm variation going around on the MyDoom worm. I only mention it because some pretty well educated people are calling me and asking if I sent them a security update by mail. I do not supply software to customers and clients, so you can be sure I don't supply email updates. Niether does any software company I know of.

The worm is mutating frequetly, so some confusion is natural. Just remember, if you have up to date virus protection and you do not execute attachments sent to you in email, then you are safe. Binary attachments are a bad idea for a number of more technical reasons too.

Here's Symantec's description of the issue. Here's McAfee's take on the most recent variant. And of course there's our own AdvisorBits article from September 2003.

The other thing both the reports we heard had in common was that the email headers were forged. That is to say, they appeared to have come to the users FROM themselves. This does NOT mean they are infected. The email "From:" headers are forged to confuse users, this is not difficult to accomplish.

Yesterday I spend a few hours on the phone with a client whose XP Outlook 2002 patch (MS04-009)and he was having problems. This client is pretty good about applying his Windows updates like I showed him to, and so when he had this complaint it seemed like a very reasonable one.

If there is a critical update for a MS product like Outlook, why isn't it on the Windows Update site?

My guess is that Microsoft might (rightly or wrongly) blame the Justice department and keeping other products out of the article on InfoWeek says that MS might have heard my client. They have plans to roll out a comprehensive updater product for small network administrators just like me (and him.) They even have plans to roll out an extended version in the future that would support updating other companies' software.

And I have been hacking away at computers for longer than I thought too. I ran into a guy I haven't seen much lately and he was telling me about his adventure with computers, because that's what he remembered that I do. Of course the last time I saw him about 10 years ago, I don't think the Internet was very widely known, and so I let him slide on this minor point. I know he didn't have EIGHT kids back then. (And that's what made me feel old.)

But it was another example of the problem I wrote about the last time. The complexity of maintaining personal computers in today's networked environment is becoming such that the average user cannot reasonably held responsible for knowing how to keep their computer safe.

I wonder what this means. Will Microsoft get it together? My old friend asked about Linux, is it ready for the desktop? Why not? And what about our new friend OSX? Is the computer really an entertainment device, or should home consumers just get a thin client like Web TV tried to be a few years ago?

No one can know everything about computers, most like me learn what we need to do our job. (Admittedly, I use mine as much as anyone in my job.) It has taken me years to understand what is worth spending my time to understand about computers, and what I can do by means of just "follow the instructions and get by". Children probably grow up with this sensibility, and the rest of us are racing towards retirement so fast it may not matter soon. This issue may just grow away.

In the mean time, us network guys just keep hoping the computer guys get the same thing that the phone and TV guys already understand. End users need something that can be controlled with no more that 12 to 24 buttons which only needs to be updated when it is replaced. We'll let em have a keyboard for writing email only, but all configuration and command should take place in less than 24 different buttons.

If you don't believe me, look at your TV (or the cable box; but NOT your remote control which most of us really can't fully use anyway) or your phone.

I have heard various technologies compared to color TV for purposes of creating a marketing campaign. The first color television broadcasting began in December of 1953, the Rose parade was televised in color on January 1st, 1954.

The first consumer color television rolled off the line in Bloomington Indiana at the RCA plant March 25th 1954. There were other earlier competitors but mostly because of the cost none were mass marketed; RCA sold 5,000 the first year at a cost of about $1000.

RCA Web site history page

http://www.tvhistory.tv/

I was looking around at how to launch a product for a web site marketing project I am working on. I came across the hoojum site. I thought I would point it out for all of the following reasons:

• I like the design and marketing of the site
• They integrate the slide show feature of Gallery very nicely.
• It's a COOL looking PC.
• I always point out any sites with pictures of cats and computers to my sister.

Photo by me, image manipulations by the GIMP

One of the truely cool things you can do with computers these days is make wonderful images. The price of entry for high end image manipulation software need not hold back any aspiring digital artists. GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a freely distributed piece of open source software.I downloaded the GIMP 2.0 for MacOS X to see if it ran the same as GIMP 2.0 for Windows, and I was pleased to find everythign was just as I remember it.

Sometimes it can be a challenge to figure out where everything is if you are used to some other program. Most simple tasks like shrinking and cropping pictures are a breeze. If you poke around long enough you'll find everything you need and a few graphical toys I can't even begin to figure out.

If you have a small company website, the chances are strong that whether you know it or not, one of the major sources of outside traffic is Google. Today they become a public company by offering an IPO 2.7 billion dollars.

The founders of the company have developed a loyal following of users by supplying services that are useful. The following is so strong that their product like Kleenex or Jeep has become a part of the lexicon: "I Googled the site for the place we're going to dinner." (I looked the restaurant up on Google.)

The 2.7 billion dollars also caught our eye because its very much the same as what these fellows at another famous Internet startup did. Hopefully Wall Street will take heed of the attitude they are getting from Sergey and Larry, and let the guys continue to do what they have done so well already. They earned a profit of over 100 million dollars in the first quarter of this year on sales around 750 million in the same period.

We will watch with interest what happens to our favorite search engine. If you want to read more on this story, why don't you Google it?

http://news.google.com/news?q=Google+IPO&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=nn

So I was rambling on about document structure and how important CSS is, and my new client inquisitively asks me "WHY?"

And I stumbled...

Since an early age everyone knew I would be a proponent of standards, it was inevitable. But why is CSS and XHTML such a darn big deal? (And how do you explain this to a children's book illustrator?)

The answers are:

1) By separating the content (words and pictures) from the presentation (font, color, size, placement of the content elements) we make it easier to make design changes consistently across the whole site. This is perhaps best exemplified by a site which has kept my attention for hours over the past week, the CSS Zen Garden.

2) This separation is important to make the web accessible to everyone. Usually here there is an arguement for making content accessible to persons with sight imparement, who use browsers that read aloud to them. I think in fact that most webmasters are looking for a different business side effect of making the pages accessible to some other "readers".

Ok, next time my client asks, I'll be ready.

The TypeKey thing is working now, so you can go over to the type key site and register to get your posts immediately approved. It's free, and it makes it easier for you to participate in the conversation here.

As I mentioned last time I will approve posts as on an approximately daily basis if you would prefer to simply supply your address and URL, but those comments are moderated. Comments with links to adult sites will not be approved.

(It's really wierd, I used to get a few spammer posts a month. I have upgarded and implimented this new policy, now I get some who try 10 times from different addresses.)

My own hosting company provides OS Commerce as the intergrated ecommerce package for our customers requireing an online shop. Its easy to install and setup, and users are able to start managing their own online shop in very little time.

Today I came accross a new resource, b2services.com - OSCommerce Services for your Shop. They have a lot of templates and modules to use to customize the look of your shop.

I was going though some blog related reading and tripped to the site SimpleBits which not only sounds a little like Advisorbits, but the topic there is also web design. The author, Dan Cederholm seems to have a similar philosophy to us too; "...a consulting firm that specializes in building simple, accessible sites with web standards."

His idea of simple may be a bit more decorative than ours; but there is something to learn there too.

He's written a cookbook, SimpleBits, with an interesting table of contents. If the TOC is any indication of the actual content it should be useful to web designers.

Jeffrey Zeldman of "The Daily Report" fame (and ALA and Happy Cog Designs) had nice things to say about it, so I thought I would point my readers over there.

In a sense I guess this post could also be known also known as the "Hey Mikey likes it" of book reviews.

Sender Policy Framework or SPF is a new specification that ties DNS and SMTP together to in a sense assume that "all email is SPAM until proven otherwise." I predict that all the mail servers I manage will be using this system within 6 months.

If you run a mail server, I encourage you look into this specification. What occurs is that you publish a list of mail servers that are authorized to send mail for your domain. This publication occurs via the exisiting mechanism of a DNS zone file for your Internet domain name; no new services need to be configured or added for this.

The recieving mail server will merely check to see if the message came from one of those servers. This will allow the message to be discarded if it is forged. (Ever get SPAM from yourself? Well, then you know how easy it is to forge mail envelopes.)

By discarding the messages before doing expensive SPAM checks locally and over the network, the processor cost to scan and deliver mail also decreases.

This should also help lessen the impact of phishers by giving end users some degree of confidence that messages that appear to come from your bank or brokerage actually are!

The Web. Although parts of the Web had existed in practice since 1980 when Berners-Lee wrote ENQUIRE, it wasn't called the Web until he wrote a GUI and made up the name WorldWideWeb as a name for the first graphical browser. [Screenshot at W3C]

But even back in 1980, one of the things that made ENQUIRE work and made it different was the list of links that was a part of each "node".

I would tell you how to find out what the State Muffin of the Empire State is by providing a link to the official tourism site, which has the information, but I Love New Yorkwon't let me link to them, so you'll just have to guess. (Hint: Think state fruit, but I can't link you to that on the tourism site either.)

Links are important to your web site.

Well designed linkage within your site can allow your visitors to easily "dip" into your site and find what they want to find. This is important because some current thinking and research indicate that this is how people use the web. It's also important because your website should be there for the convenience of your customers.

Links to other useful Internet resources are also imporant for the convenience of your customers. Links to your site are imporant to you, because they will expose potential new customers to your products and services.

For instance, as you read this, some of you may be wondering: Where would I find information about tourism in the State of New York? Unfortunately, under the terms and conditions of use listed on the site in question on a page with the title:

Welcome from the Governor and Mrs. George E. Pataki - I LOVE NEW YORK - The Official New York State Tourism Website

... one finds a most unusual thing for a public tourism website:

Linking by third party web sites to this web site is strictly prohibited unless the Department grants express written consent. All requests to link to this site should be directed to [here they actually provide an individual's email address, which we will ommit out of courtesy]

What's so public or promotional about that?

They probably would have let us link, I have found a lot of links to the site in Google, but its a matter of principle. State Toursim information should be public and linking to it should be as free as Apple Muffins.

Or what about the State Song? Just Google it. But, remember I didn't link you to the New York State Tourism website located at I LOVE NY dot COM.

I LOVE NEW YORK (repeat 3 times) There isn't another like it. No matter where you go. And nobody can compare it. It's win and place and show. New York is special. New York is diff'rent' cause there's no place else on earth quite like New York and that's why

I LOVE NEW YORK.
(repeat 3 times)

This is not a rant about Macs or Microsoft.

It's a little more like confessing defeat, but the cost to benefit ratio strikes me mighty thin to work around these CSS Bugs in IE5 XHTML and comes with the OS X these days.

I don't believe in designing for the bleeding edge browsers that only a few of us have. By the same token I won't refrain from using valid page layout techinques because they break in a fairly old browser that a tiny number of users have not discarded in favor of other readily available and free alternatives. This is why some pages on the web, including these presumably, will not look good in IE 5.x for Mac.

Related Links:

• Safari Home Page
• w3schools.com Browser Stats Page
• Mozilla, Firefox, and Cameo browsers for Mac

I accidentally said "Yes" a few days ago when Firefox asked me if it could be my default browser. And I only noticed it today. I really reccomend you get over to Mozilla and get yourself a copy.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Reasons for today:

Tabbed browsing. Instead of a new window (and icon on the Windows task bar) you can open additional pages in "tabs". This makes it very easy to switch back and forth between lots of different web pages, and also leaves space for other applications to run.

Shrink-to-fit source code printing. I know it may be old school, but lots of times I need to print code, and I hate how IE used to break long lines when you printed the source code of a page. Firefox defaulted to shrinking the type so the code fits across one printed page.

Here's an informative little quiz you can take to see if you are vulnerable to phishing scams. Phishing is the practice of impersonating someone, or more usually some company, via email in order to get the intended victim to divulge personal or financial information. Messages often contain real logos and similar devices designed to trick unsavvy users to click a link to a web site and supply the information.

This is a new quiz to help promote awareness of the problem among users. Check it out and tell your friends. MailFrontier Phishing IQ Test

At the end of the quiz you'll be rewarded with an informative brochure to help you to spot the phish in your in-box.

This post serves to thank my friend Jacqueline Rogers, a children's book illustrator and painter. I met Jacqueline over the summer when she hired me to work on her web site, http://www.jacquelinerogers.com. I realized I may not have given her site a plug since it was launched.

Whether she knows it or not, she has been very helpful to me in developing my ideas for the model of how to do a successful web team project with a small business client. We both are veterans (and graduates) of RISD where we learned to have thick skin and politely but critically and honestly discuss ideas to improve each other's work.

If I wanted to be a bit more project manager-like I might call this article “Definition and Scoping”. But it is really about accurately setting expectations. Putting together a web site is the same as any other project that involves two or more people. There needs to be some plan or specification that the group understands and agrees to work towards or the project won’t get done well.

Setting expectations is an opportunity for the small business owner to discuss the project’s business goals with their web team. Through the process of discussion, whether in person, on the phone or via email, the web team can in turn provide suggestions for applying their technical, verbal, visual, and web-marketing skills to the web site.

By the end of this discussion a consensus should have evolved, so that there is a project plan that can be followed to completion. Generally this plan will be in some written form; whether written or not a “check-list” helps to minimize misunderstandings and keep the team focused.

This post seeks to provide a minimal framework for small businesses to use as a starting point for developing their own specific project plan.

Type of Site
One of the first things to discuss and make sure everyone understands is what the site is supposed to be when it is finished. Some web projects are self-evident, and the client knows (correctly) exactly what they want. An example of a self-evident site might be a mail order catalog business that wants to launch an on-line version of their catalog. Both the real world business model and on-line equivalent are fairly well established, and so to a great degree, we know what is meant when the client wants an “On-line Catalog”.

Many small businesses need to simply offer their customers some additional convenience by having minimal information available via the web. Displaying the type of business, an address and phone number is sort of the minimum “business card” or “yellow page ad” type of site. A description of the business and hours of operation are typically included. Directions to the business and descriptions of additional services that a business can offer via the web are all ways to help customer use the business.

More frequently the small business person has less well conceived notions of the business goals for their web site, and so the type of site may not be as clearly defined. The process of discussing and defining the type of site that the client envisions is important so that business expectations for the site are appropriate. Knowing what the benefits of the finished site are allows the client to decide how much it is worth to them to develop the web site.

Size and complexity of site
For lack of a better method of guessing, a site’s size and complexity are often expressed in terms of a number of pages. For small sites this may be a sufficient method of measurement. Some factors that will contribute to the complexity of a typical small business web site may include:

Architecture

How is the site information organized? In many small business sites this can be distilled to an outline, just like the ones we had to write in high school composition class. There are also other more complex relationship models that may be applicable for database driven sites.

Graphics

Photographs, logos, backgrounds, buttons and bullets are examples of graphics files that may make up a page. These graphics files have to be created and changed as the design develops. How many of these items are needed? How many of these items can the client supply at the beginning of the project?

And that’s not to mention animated sites or those with audio and video clips…

Layout

Well designed web sites will attempt to conform to known standards of page layout and accessibility. This means different things to different people, and the client has a hard time knowing the difference between “good code” and bandwidth consuming table based layouts. Often the best way to define this is in terms of in which browsers the site will “work” or render correctly.

I recently worked on a site and was rather embarrassed and slightly irritated to find out after the fact that all my client’s friends seem to use IE5.5 for the Macintosh. It looked fine on my Mac in Safari. On the other hand, the percentage of users with this browser is less than 1% in any statistics I have seen recently.

(n.b. Almost none of my own sites render correctly in IE Mac 5 either. I must figure this out and it shouldn’t be so darn hard.)

JavaScript

Client side scripts can serve a number of useful purposes, and almost 90% of users allow these scripts to run in their browsers. If the web team decides to implement some of the client’s business goals through JavaScript, these should be defined. Care should be taken that an end user of the site cannot “break” it by disabling JavaScript in the browser.

Fees to license or write these scripts vary and should be evaluated against the value they bring to meeting the client’s business goals.

CGI

Site searches, feedback forms, and guestbook scripts are examples of CGI scripts that may run on the server to provide a small business web site with improved customer service. Most e-commerce sites are run by some kind of CGI (or server side stuff anyway.)

Difficulty in implementing these scripts varies widely as does the complexity of the setup. These needs, if there are any, should be examined and discussed carefully at the beginning of the project.

Maintenance
Everyone can maintain their own web pages. (Well, everyone who has access to a computer and the Internet.) In day-to-day fact there are often a number of additional requirements to maintain a web site. Was it created using a specific “client side content management system” such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver, or GoLive? Is there a server side content management system, such as Moveable Type? Does the client need one? What is the skill level of the client’s staff that will be performing the updates?

And how much maintenance does the site need? AdvisorBits is updated whenever a new post is made, or a new photo added to John Walker’s Photoblog. The JSW4.NET corporate site is updated several times a year with news and new service information. The Cheflisa.com site has never really been finished in the 5 years it has been on-line, but it is very successful for my wife. Some sites need more or less maintenance.

Promotion
Method of promotion and responsibility for promotion should be considered as an integral part of the site. At a minimum the keywords and description of a website should be decided before beginning the site. Not only will this help to define and scope the project, but it should be included on each page in the code in order to provide information clearly to search engines.

For many small businesses guerilla marketing can be extremely cost effective way to promote the site to their target markets. By working with relevant websites to exchange links and free placements in major search engines small businesses may get all the on-line exposure they need or want. Everyone who has an on-line presence should announce the fact whenever they communicate in electronic or other mediums. This means putting email addresses and web sites URLs on business cards and in all advertising; and using short signatures at the ends of email correspondence with the web site address of the company.

Some small businesses may seek to finance their web site though corporate sponsorships or through directly selling advertisement. Other small businesses that want to use the net to do business nationally or internationally may want to examine paid listings and promotional programs.

Completion
By definition the web is always changing. And so in a sense, a website is never “finished”. We are always looking at the most recent “snapshot” of the website’s development. Some sites change more rapidly than others.

For a web project to be successful, we need to have a snapshot that we will evaluate against some criteria and be able to say “The site we have described in our plan is finished”. This may happen in multiple phases for some businesses.

The list of web site project components in this article is not exhaustive, I can think of other things that could be part of a web project.

Price
For my business, the price we quote to our clients is based on how long it will take to complete the project and the hourly rate of the team members. When the project is clearly defined, it’s usually easy to figure out how long it will take to do each part of the project. (I have done this a few times before after all.)

Licensing fees (if any) for JavaScript and CGI programs should be discussed. Are these included in the price or will the client license these directly from the authors?

If the small business client can work with the web team to define the project more or less as I have described here, then I think it is the responsibility of the web project manager (people with a job like mine) to deliver the site as defined.

It is my experience that customers who get what they expect at the price they were quoted are usually very satisfied. To me a project where the customer is satisfied is a project that is done well.

As I was noticing the phpBB critical update of the week, I thought that the real cost of having cool stuff like forums and guestbooks for your site's users, or content management systems in the background is probably not so much related to the purchase price of the product as it is the cost of maintenance. Even if I am wrong about how big a portion of the total cost of ownership, maintenance is still a significant component of the cost over time.

The hosting company I work for (http://www.kinetixhosting.com/) offers phpBB and several other scripts as a part of our hosting plans. It is pretty easy for customers to just turn them on and presto! They have forums on their site.

And when they wake up the next morning they check their site and it is defaced; filled with links to porno sites and heaven only knows what else. The culprit could be a feature in the software, or it could be a bug; which it is will not be really important when your web site is gone.

They could have avoided it all if they had updated to the most recent version of phpBB. Ah... but there's one cost of this free software. You have to read the announcements from the vendor.

You did sign up for the announcements list didn't you? Oh ... you can't because they don't have mailing lists; you would have to subscribe to their forums, which were hacked along with the server they run on. If you were on their forums, now you are in spam lists. ... but that is another post. They claim the rooting (root is well defined in this PC World article from 2001) was because of a flaw in another script they didn't update.

You're starting to get the picture about updating the software on your public web site, aren't you?

After you somehow find out the software has been updated, then you have to act on the information, and that usually takes some time. You have to get the software, and you have to install and test it. If everything goes well, this can cost you less than half an hour. If you have customized your version of the software, you will have to apply the customizations to the new version. That will take a bit longer. Your milage may vary even more if you run into any snags; I once gave up in frustration and reinitialized some forums that had to be updated after only a couple days on-line.

When you are doing a small web site project before you use any complicated scripts, you should know what return you will get on you investment. Plan for on-going maintanence; I usually look at the bugtraq list to see how many times software is mentioned there as an indication of how frequent upgrades are likely to be. Put all of the factors together and get a realistic view of the real costs over time. Then decide if it is worth it.

Christopher over at the MS IE weblog points out that IEBlog : Windows 2000 moves into Extended Support after June 30th. Similar to what one commenter noticed, most small business users I work with are already switched off of the Windows 2000 desktop platform. I only have a couple more Windows 2000 servers that I am involved with to move over too Windows 2003, or the Longhorn Server, if that is ever released.

I was amused to notice the comment: "that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000". Especially in light of the definition of trivial at the Jargon File.

BuzzMachine: Dell Archives I was attracted to this category archive at the Buzzmachine. I have recently had conversations with people in the networking IT profession who have also told me horror stories about doing business with Dell.

I actually have had a few support issues with Dell myself, but I usually let them slide. My issues are never simple and they, by virtue of their size and purchasing power, are severely handicapped in dealing with actual people. Its all a trade off.

Earlier this month, I wrote an entry here about Kubuntu, a Linux based desktop operating environment. I think choice is good, but the fact is that I will have a Windows operating system on or near my desk for the immediately foreseeable future. Everyone else does, and they all call me for help, so I have to. Its the same reason I gave up Apple Macintosh after my first 1986 MacPlus. And now I have all three back in my office... but that's another story.

One reason I have always liked Linux is that I found the community more helpful. I thought that people in that community were more willing to share knowledge. I had the impression that people who had Microsoft skills were less willing to part with information without a consulting fee. Not that there's anything wrong with this.

It now appears I may have been mistaken and here are a few things I learned recently and some good places to look for Windows information which don't have any fee associated with them.