I said it before. I get all gung-ho about blogging when I first start, and then slowly drop off to nothing. Well, I’m not at nothing yet, but I’m approaching. I’ve got all kinds of ideas, but nothing flowing out yet. No time. I hope to have one more post before I go on vacation.
I just picked up Wikipedia and Kenneth Lay
http://www.jasonunger.com/2006/07/10/wikipedia-and-ken-lay-not-a-real-story/
I originally blogged about this in the moments after Kenneth Lay’s death, that Wikipedia was almost immediately reporting his death. I think Jason Unger is right.
“Wikipedia is NOT a source for news”
Of course it’s not, but it’s often the place where journalists go for information, because it contains a wealth of information on just about everything, from obscure local references — to major breaking international news. But, as journalists, we must keep in mind, Wikipedia is only as reliable as its editors, and its editors are anyone who damn well wants to be an editor.
The people who post information to Wikipedia are not journalists. They are anonymous and while I would venture to say that most are honestly trying to create a useful online encyclopedia, there are others who, for whatever reason, have less noble motivations.
As journalists, we can use Wikipedia, but we must use it as a starting point for gathering further information. As the Kenneth Lay incident has shown us, we can not take what Wikipedia says as gospel. We all use it from time to time to check some fact or other — but we must remember that sometimes it’s better to be right and a little late with a story, than to be first .. with the wrong story.
Jason hits the bigtime on Boagworld podcast
Have you heard the latest Boagworld podcast, #42: Choosing the right design? I’m the guy asking the question about whether it’s ok to be “inspired” by other websites. Paul and Marcus essentially said it’s OK, to a point to get some inspiration — just don’t “copy.” Which is the answer I’d been hoping for. I realize afterwards that what I do a lot is get ideas from several sites at once — maybe a color scheme here, a cool javascript idea there and maybe a neat box or button from a third. I don’t copy those elements, but see how they could fit in with the site I’m creating. It was nice to hear from Paul that while he doesn’t actively seek out inspiration, he does find bits of other sites that could be used, in some form or another (not a copy), in his.
Finally, Paul’s advice was to get inspiration from things in the real world, signs and pictures and things — and that way you can never be accused of stealing someone else’s design.
If you’ve never heard of Boagworld and you’re a web designer or developer, then please go check out his blog and podcast.
PS: Marcus what’s my prize for being the “winning question of the year, so far.” Hey there’s a great idea guys, how about a weekly or monthly giveaway! I’d be honored to be the first.
Performancing test
This is a test post created with Performancing. Not quite sure how it’s supposed to work, but I’m sure I’ll find out soon.
UPDATE: This is edited a few minutes later.
Another update…: Can’t figure out how to add categories. Is it possible?
Which web design book to buy?
It was my birthday the other day and I got some gift cards for a leading Canadian bookstore as presents. I’ve decided to buy one or many of the following, but I really need help deciding on a web design book.
- Designing With Web Standards, 2nd edition by Jeffrey Zeldman
- CSS Mastery, Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd
- Build your own website the right way using HTML and CSS by Ian Lloyd
I’m looking for a book on Web Standards and CSS. While I’m not yet a master at CSS, I do have a basic idea of how it works. Now I’d like to learn a little more, some tips and tricks and get more familiar with it all. I don’t want a book that’s too easy — I think I learned all the easy stuff with online tutorials. I want one that will help me now, and perhaps be a reference in the future.
Any suggestions?
Why doesn’t anyone want to buy my mouse trap? It’s better!
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/07/nbc-will-buy-tribenet/
I saw this article this morning on Techcrunch. I’m always amazed when I see websites being sold for exhorbitant amounts of money ($50M in this case, $600M in another case named in the article.) I’m amazed because I know I can create sites like these. I don’t have the ideas, or the time, or the money — but I do have the know-how. It’s not that I don’t have ideas, it’s just that I don’t have the right ideas.
Although I guess it’s like the a lot of things, if you don’t try you’ll never succeed. If you don’t buy that lottery ticket, you’ll never win. If you don’t try inventing a better mouse trap, you never will. Well, maybe I should set out build that better mouse trap and hope that NBC or some other huge corporation with lots of extra dough around will see it, want it and buy it.
Anyone have any ideas? I’ll cut you in for 10% if I hit it big. No, wait.. make that 5%. Wait, if it’s $100M, that would be $5M….. better make it 1%, I can’t afford to give away $5M.
Kids and pools
Please, watch your kids constantly when you’re around a pool.
The summer’s only about 2 weeks old and already we’ve had several cases of young kids finding their way into the family pool and drowning…. DYING! Please, please do not leave them alone for even a second. If you have to run in to the house for “just a second” take your toddler with you. Do not leave her in pool area and tell her not to go near the pool, because there may be no child left to get upset at, if she doesn’t listen to you. Your precious baby might accidentally fall in and DIE!
Quebec is the pool capital of Canada. Almost everyone has a pool or knows someone with a pool. Because of this, the problem is particularly acute here.
The latest case involved a 2-year-old girl from Laval (north of Montreal) who wandered away from her father’s view for just a few minutes and was found floating unconscious in the pool. She died yesterday.
A sad ending to the story of a 2 year old found in a family pool in Laval on Sunday. The girl died yesterday. She slipped out of her family’s view for only a few minutes, and was found floating unconscious in an in-ground pool. Police are treating it as an accident — there is a regulation fence around the pool — and they probably won’t lay any there charges. — CJAD NEWS
I bet this has happened to you, if you’re a parent. Your kids are playing outside. You’re even out their with them, but your mind wanders for a second or you get into that phone conversation or that book you’re reading or you get wrapped up in the conversation you’re having over the fence with the neighbor. You turn around and your son or daughter is not where they were a second ago. You look around and sometimes they’re just a few feet off behind a tree or maybe it takes a few seconds to realize they went around the front or side of the house. You find them, but didn’t your heart start racing as those long seconds went by? Didn’t the worst thoughts go through your head? Well, what if you found your child at the bottom of the pool, even the kiddy pool and what if she’s DEAD!
Don’t let your child die!
IE7 crashing: resolved! (I think)
I believe I may have solved my problem. Not only was IE7 crashing all time, but anytime I opened — and then closed any folder in windows, explorer.exe also crashed. After much googling around I came across this thread and this one. First I tried EasyCleaner, which didn’t do it, but I think it did speed up my computer a bit. Then I tried ShellExView which magically solved all my problems.
Y’know what the problem was? Some IE7 addon I installed for mouse gestures. I can’t seem to find the addon anymore on the ie7 addon site, so maybe it got taken down. Here’s how I tracked down the problem:
1. In ShellExView, I sorted the extensions by company name and disabled all NON-microsoft ones, figuring it was a third party one that was causing the problem. This was in fact the case, because when I then tried to open and close “my computer” it did not crash (it had been crashing EVERY single time I did that before.)
2. I then enabled blocks of about 10 or 20 extensions at a time and tried to open and close “my computer.” When explorer crashed (and then restarted itself) I knew the problem was caused by one of the extensions in that block.
3. I then narrowed it down to only one possible extension and disabled that.
Everything is now both hunky and dory!
BTW: I also installed BigFix which kinda just sits in my tray and is supposed to check for problems BEFORE they turn into problems.
Web Standards
I linked to the Boagworld web site in my last post, about IE7. I discovered the site and its owner Paul Boag a few weeks ago, and he’s totally changed the way I think about designing websites. I, like many others, have been using table-based designs since we started playing with HTML about 100 years ago. While I’m still not 100% convinced that tables are wrong for layout, I have wholly embraced CSS design and web standards. With tables, you place all the different elements of a website, like navigation, main content, search etc in table cells within the html and usually style it within the html. With web standards, you create flat html (xhtml) with no styling, divided into <div></div> and other tags; tags that are meant for holding the elements of a website — and then style the elements in a separate “style” file or files. Anyone who’s done any website creation anytime in the last 5 years has at least seen CSS or cascading style sheets and like me, you might have even used CSS without realizing you were doing so.
CSS is the style part of a tag.
<a href=”http://www.domain.com” style=”font-size: 12px; font-weight:bold”>link</a>
The point of web standards, though is to remove all of the styling from the HTML file, and place it in a seperate CSS file. You can then link a tag in the html to the CSS like this:
<a href=”http://www.domain.com” class=”important-link”>link</a>
I really like the idea of separating the page elements from the style. It makes for much cleaner and easier reading html files and makes changing the look of your website, minor or major, so much easier. For example, when you look at the html file for a web standards based website, the menu items might look like this:
<ul>
<li>menu item</li>
<li>menu item</li>
<li>menu item</li>
<li>menu item</li>
<li>menu item</li>
</ul>
Which you’d think would give you a straight, vertical bulleted list, but with styling in the css file, you can do any number of things — like laying it out horizontally and adding borders and background colors and borders. You can also tell the browser to change text color or background color when the mouse moves over the menu item.
I’ve known about and have on occasion used CSS, but thanks to Paul Boag’s insistence, I have now completely moved away from tables and putting the style in the html. My HTML and style are completely separate and I consider it a challenge to myself, to make sure it stays that way. I’ve got much more to say about this, but thus post is getting long — so I’ll save it for another time.
How did I learn XHTML and CSS and the concept of web standards. W3schools, of course.
