Hot Dorkage

One of the reasons why I always cringed from web front end in the past is that presentation is so “dirty.”  We have all felt the flames.

• HTML was never really designed as a presentation language
• confusion of XHTML validations and the different DOCTYPES
• CSS is supposed to be for design
• browser wars and their slight but MADDENING incompatibilities
• people who think CSS is for fonts and colors and still use tables
• Javascript  came out of the box as a pretty lame language in 1996.

The Javascript language has improved, but it’s still tedious, awkward, cost-ineffective, and painful to do modern effects in it from scratch. Javascript frameworks are libraries that attempt to discipline Javascript, define reusable functions for commonly done things, and basically make it usable.   A very popular framework is JQuery — a library and framework that makes doing whiz bangie front end things, including Ajax server actions, MUCH easier.  I’ve been going through the Theme Forest JQuery tutorials by Jeffrey Way for the past few weeks, and they are absolutely awesome.  They are tiny code sprints that handle one little thing per lesson, in a 7-10 minute Camtasia-style video.

Here is a link to the head of the series.  They are up to about 14 lessons at this writing, and I have no idea how many more they are going to do. I totally recommend it! After doing lesson 12, I was ready to try an original project. I took a low-res version of a popular culinary reference poster on dried chiles and made it into a Web 2.0 style image map. If you hover over the hot spots it pops up an enlarged image of that particular chile and a little blurb of info about it. Then I incorporated it into a blog post on my food blog. It took just a little additional tweaking to make it play nice with Word Press. Check out my interactive JQuery chile map, and if anyone knows why it fails to work inside frames, I’d love to know!

Google sucked away my LUV! Sorry!

With a heavy heart I disabled commentluv and Dofollow on Hot Dorkage. See the two post series below for why. Continue Reading…

Is “shrinkage” ever a good thing? Actually, Jerry Seinfeld notwithstanding, yes! If you don’t know about shrinkage as it applies to the internet, learn the basics first , then come back and learn how to make money with it. I’ll wait.

There are rumblings that TinyURL, the oldest and probably most well-known URL shortener on the ‘nets, may not be the best link shrinker to use any more, mainly because you can’t track clicks.  There are many other free shorteners that allow you to track your clicks. Adjix.com gives you the option of monetizing your clicks as well. 
Continue Reading…

Regex's save the day

Pundits say you should produce original content but people visit when I embed xkcd comics in my blog.

Another fave from XKCD. Gotta love ‘em! The thing is, even when a dork such as yours truly actually does end up saving the day with a stunt like this, we usually manage to annoy the muggles so much in doing it that the take-away for them is never “Woah, that awesome geek saved my sweet little muggle A$$,” but instead, “That bloody geek is SOOOOOOOO annoying!”

This post started as a follow-on comment to my post “Not All Dofollows are created Equal,” but it started to get long and linky, so it became a new post. In the previous dofollow post, I was wondering why, given the number of comments I write on other blogs, I get so few inbound links from comments, and so few inbound links on my WP dashboard in general.   There are a lot of blogs that claim, as mine does, to be dofollow blogs, and/or to offer comment luv.  I am much more likely to comment on a blog that has dofollow and/or commentluv.   So why so few incoming from comments? And the reverse side of the coin: Does my “dofollow” blog generate the kind of link luv that I intend it to for people who comment on it? Let’s test.

Continue Reading…

The other day for no apparent reason I was reminded of a fleeting memory I have from when I was about four and I was at my cousins’ watching a rerun of The Jetsons.

Anyway, Jane Jetson AKA Mrs. Jetson says, “children, don’t bother your father now. You know he’s been working HARD at the office.”

(I’ll just keep quiet for now about all the totally 60’s gender stereotypes implicit in that little line.)

Then there is slight pause, then the laugh track comes on. I didn’t get it, so I asked my cousin Robin.

Me: “Why are they laughing?”

Robin: (with eyes rolling for good measure) “Because all he does is sit around and push buttons all day.”

Hmmmmmm…..

I comment on plenty of of blogs. I never noticed my comments scoring me serious incoming links on my WP dashboard, even from so-called “dofollow” blogs. That’s what dofollows are meant to do — increase your incoming link count, and ultimately bump your Google PR.

Continue Reading…

This amazing free SEO analysis website deserves more than just a feeble fleeting tweet lost among all those 500 lb. canaries on Twitter.    The mostly nontechnical website owners in our local Etailing group really liked it.  Why?  Because it not only flags SEO issues, but it tells you in non geek what you can do about them.
Continue Reading…

I was recently reading Guy Kawasaki’s blog post on how he uses Twitter.   I was thinking, sure, Twitterfeed is great because it tweets my blog posts as me, but it would be even nicer if my awesome readers had a button to tweet my blog post as them in one click, i.e.  without the brain cell killing mousage/keyboardage of 1) shrinking the URL, 2) going to twitter and 3) copy/pasting the title. That’s a good thing in three ways:

• More cred for you if someone else besides you tweets your stuff,
• more potential reach,
• your friend who tweets for you appears magnanimous and with it to all his followers.

It sounded like something that would be easy to automate  and useful to a lot of people, so I thought, there has to be a WordPress plugin to do that. Sure enough there is – Tweet This by Richard X Thripp.
Continue Reading…

One of my good friends related a story to me about some of the earliest Hewlett Packard programmable calculators in the early 80’s.   When engaging in lengthy number crunching, the calculator would  print  “crunching” (or processing, or something) on the display, and every few seconds it would add a dot, so the user would know something was happening.  User feedback is always a good idea, yes?
Continue Reading…