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How to be a famous web developer
2006-10-27 14:09:02
So you think you’ve got what it takes to play with the big boys, eh? But, you’re not sure how to make it big? Well, this post is for you. Just follow these simple steps and it will be you telling people you can’t take projects until sometime late next year. Learn from the masters It seems to me that there is a pattern among the web developing elite: develop with standards, maintain a website with a blog, promote a side project, write a book, and earn accolades for your work. Develop er Website Project Book Dave Shea mezzoblue CSS Zen Garden The Zen of CSS Design Shaun Inman Shaun Inman Mint and Designologue N/A Jeffery Zeldman Zeldman ma.gnolia Designing with Standards Molly Holzschlag Molly WaSP and W3C 30+ books, including The Zen of CSS Design Eric Meyer meyerweb N/A Eric Meyer on CSS Cameron Moll Cameron Moll N/A CSS Mastery Dan Cederholm SimpleBits Cork’d Bullet Proof Web Design Todd Domney Dominey Design, What do I know? SlideShowPro...
More About: How To , Famous , Web developer

Search engine optimization basics
2006-10-20 01:57:03
At this point in web development, virtually everyone I talk to about a project tells me they would like to “come up in Google”. In the industry, we refer to that as search engine optimization, or SEO for short. This post attempts to cover the basics for search engine optimization as a starter resource for others. SEO Overview It has been my experience that most people think about SEO as something one does after a website is up and running, like tuning a car. While SEO was born from trickery designed to exploit the algorithims search engines use to rank web pages, modern SEO practices need to be considered and implimented from the beginning of a site’s conception. SEO is more than just keywords, it’s a part of the site’s structure itself. Search engines 101 In order to understand SEO, you must know a little something about how a search engine works. Essentially, there are 5 pieces to a search engine: The web page crawler, also known as the spider The i...
More About: Search Engine Optimization , Search Engine , Optimization , Engine

Web presence and site traffic
2006-10-20 01:57:03
It used to be the only way to put information online was through one’s own website. Today it’s possible for an individual or organization to have a great deal of information about themselves on the Web and not even have a site. Site s such as MySpace, CitySearch, and more offer profiles that can contain information that ranges from basics like hours, location, and prices to sophisticated options like photo galleries, blogs, and even ecommerce. At a Webmaster World conference a couple of years back, Alexa made a presentation on the changing landscape of how people find sites they are looking for. In the late 90’s the overwhelming majority of people found sites through search. Now, while search still represents the largest single piece of the pie, the overwhelming majority has stratified into a growing number of channels. The presenter offered that the change in trend is due to the maturation of the Internet. In the beginning, no one knew where to go, which made searc...
More About: Traffic , Presence

Complexity threshold design
2006-10-20 01:57:03
Over my years of providing professional web design services, I’ve learned a few lessons. The biggest lesson I learned is that design is a process, not just pretty graphics. What I used to consider design, I now refer to as the stylization phase in a longer design process. You see, design is more than just aesthetic considerations. Web design is about creating a web site that solves the problem for which it was commissioned. As Mies van de Rohe would say, form follows function. The form a website takes on depends on the site’s intended function. Ultimately, all websites are created to serve information for a specific purpose. The amount of information and how it is organized depends on the strategy the site’s creator is using to accomplish his/her mission. And, while it may be strategy that determines whether or not a site has a gallery, blog, forum, or some other section, it is the volume of information within those sections that determines the organizational struc...
More About: Design , Comp , Desi , Complex , Sign

How to install a WordPress blog in cPanel
2006-10-20 01:57:03
Word Press is a great content management system because the system itself is free and there’s a community of people also creating free layouts, plug-ins, and helpful tutorials (like this one). It’s powerful enough to manage most individual and organizational website needs, yet simple enough for everyone to use. I don’t mean to oversell WordPress, but it does make it possible to start a website with minimal effort and upfront expense. I’m writing this post as a resource for my clients and to encourage more people to start blogs on their own. Why have your own blog? For those tuning into this post just wanting the nuts and bolt of a WordPress install on cPanel, feel free to skip ahead. I felt like this section should be in here because some people reading this post will be installing WordPress because they heard from trusted sources that they should do it, but they may not understand why. In the spirit of being as complete a resouce as possible, the first thing...
More About: Wordpress , How To , Blog

Tube dicks
2006-10-20 01:57:03
I was telling my buddy Mike about the prevalence of mean comments on YouTube . I noticed that many of the comments made on the videos on YouTube are hateful and some of them are shockingly mean spirited. I have a sense of humor that stretches the bounds of piety to go along with the best of them, but these aren’t jokes. I have seem on many occasions people saying blatantly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic things. It’s so bad that I’ve felt compelled to click on the names of some of the people who have left these comments, and say something. Not surprisingly, the majority are from accounts with no name or videos and the least amount of information. I was referring to them as cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the net, but I think Mike said it best, they’re Tube dicks. YouTubers are a very cynical bunch. That’s not fair, most of them are nice, but there are soooo many involved in some unspoken competition to see who can hate someone else’s vi...
More About: Dick

The domain name mafia
2006-10-20 01:57:03
The first section of this post is the background story, if you’re not interested in it, just skip to the next headline. My domain name loss and then reclaim experience So, a little over a year ago my former business partner registered my name as a domain, JustinKistner.com. Before I had the chance to transfer it from his registrar to mine, it expired. Having already lost one domain, I knew that I was likely going to lose it to a spammer or some dropped domain name speculator. Sure enough, before I could reregister my name, someone bought it. I was so infuriated, but unsure about what I could do. The first thing I tried was to check the whois info on the domain name for the contact person. I then wrote that person to request my name back and offered to pay the registration fee for the one year they registered it. After a few weeks they wrote back and said, “No problem, you’ll just need to pay the $900 administration fee.” WHAT?!?!?!?!?! What the hell could pos...
More About: Domain , Domain Name , Main , Name , Doma

Facebook effin? pwns!
2006-10-20 01:57:03
Ok, so I’m into MySpace the way dogs are into sniffin’ crotches. At the same time, I’ve also been a long time critic of the MySpace design, code, and usability. In fact, I think as a website, MySpace is really quite bad. The reason I love MySpace is because 1) it has so many people and 2) those people are very actively engaged with the site. When the whole purpose of social networking is interaction, those two points are pretty strong sellers. Even though I crack out on MySpace, I am by no means a MySpace loyalist. I’ve played on a number of other social networking sites such as Friendster, iMeem, Hi5, Rouge Connect, and more. But I didn’t feel like I got the feeling of connection with other people the way I did with MySpace (perhaps in the not too distant future I’ll write a comparative post for these sites). On the other hand, I’ve heard people say many great things about Face book. I had tried to create an account before, but because I was...
More About: Ebook , Book , Facebook

HTML basics for MySpacers
2006-10-20 01:57:03
So, I get a lot of questions about how to do various things for a profile, so I thought I’d put together a little list of FAQs. This information is in no way complete, so you may find many different methods for accomplishing what I cover below. I can tell you that I am a knowledgeable web designer and most people use code incorrectly. At least you know that if you follow what I offer, you’ll be doing it right. Overview If you just want to copy and past code, then skip ahead. However, if you want to further your understanding about HTML and how it works, then read on. HTML is an acronym for HyperText Markup Language. HTML is used label the content in a document, link to other documents, and embed objects such as images, videos, and Flash. Hypertext simply means text that contains links to other documents. And, a markup language is a standardized system labeling the components of a document to control formatting and provide an extra level understanding about the content on...
More About: Space , Myspace , Basic , Acer , Pace

FeedBurner said my WordPress RSS feed was invalid
2006-10-20 01:57:03
I was just trying to set up my Word Press feed through Feed Burner and I discovered two interesting issues: If you activate the gzip option, your feed won’t validate on FeedBurner. It will say there was an error on line 2. I didn’t spend any time figuring out if there was a way to make the gzip compression work while maintaining a valid feed, and instead I opted to turn it off. The gzip option is found under the Options>Reading menu. It’s a checkbox at the bottom of that page, make sure it’s unchecked if you want to use FeedBurner. In searching for help, I found an article about an invalid tag that WordPress uses in their feed that can cause compatibility issues with some feed readers. Apparently the <wfw:commentRSS> tag should not capitalize the SS in RSS, which means it should look like this: <wfw:commentRss>. As this article says, “An edit to line 50 of wp-rss2.php fixes the problem nicely.” Don’t forget to edit the closing tag too! ...
More About: Wordpress , Feedburner

Switching hosting providers
2006-10-20 01:57:03
From time to time it becomes necessary to move your website from one hosting company to another. Reasons for moving might be due to: You need a different server environment, such as moving from a Microsoft server to an Apache web server. You need more features, such as disk space, bandwidth, or email boxes and someone else has a better deal. Your traffic is increasing and you need to upgrade from a shared server to a dedicated box. Reasons for moving can go on and on, but one thing that has been fairly common among my clients is their concern about how moving will impact their site and email. I’m writing this post because I find myself having to explain this stuff over and over and it would be smart for me to just refer them to a post that answers all of their questions. Domain names vs. hosting The first thing that I’ve found causes confusion is the difference between a domain name and hosting. A domain name is the address of your website and it will end with a .com, ...
More About: Hosting , Switch , Host , Sting , Switching