There is a bill which passed in the US congress which is H.R. 5889, the Orphan Works Act of 2008. I'd contacted my congressman about the bill and my concerns over the bill. I've received a reply which I would like to pass on here:

I'm not one to put a lot of personal information on my blog. I don't have problem with people that do it, it's just not my personal style. When I was first on the web, it took about 3 or 4 years before you could find a picture of me anywhere (as a woman, I needed brain respect first). I was one of the last people I know to join Facebook (never have had a Myspace page). Don't get me wrong, I love the web, but I've just never found the need to expose a lot of personal information there.

Enter our new, confusing age

I've posted here about Twitter. And I do love it for a variety of reasons. I post more information there than I do in other places. Oddly, it feels like I'm talking to my friends--in some giant, controlled IM. Of course, I know that since I don't protect my tweets, anyone that follows me, google, and the world can read them. Still...

Facebook however, has turned out to be another animal entirely. After joining for an orchestrated birthday prank on a friend, I stayed and connected with a lot of folks--from real life friends to web friends I've not yet met in real life (IRL). In the past few months in fact, I've connected with several old friends, from grade school to college. It's fun to see what they're doing now.

Facebook is a Tattler!

What I and others seem to forget though, is that when you change anything on Facebook, it is broadcast to all your friends. Relationship status is a perfect example. When Greg and I got engaged via Twitter in March, most of my online friends knew what was going on. But my real life friends, the ones that I see at volleyball or on the weekends (as if I had weekends) are also connected to me on Facebook. Since I was headed out of town, I didn't have time to let most of them know, but intended to when I returned. Unthinkingly, I changed my Facebook relationship status to engaged instead of, in a relationship. Duh. Instantly, I started getting wall posts and emails -- Why didn't you TELL me!!? Ooops.

I'd say, in fact, that I know more about some of my friends from Facebook than I do from real life. Casual acquaintances, that I connect to there, show things like their new tattoo. They probably wouldn't have displayed it to me if we met on the street. Maybe they post pictures of their wild beer pong bachelor party. Who knew? People obviously feel safer in online social networks than they do in personal interaction.

Tonight I was reminded of just how far reaching this phenomenon is. I went to Facebook to join a group I was invited to by email. Somehow I followed a rabbit path ending at my younger son's girlfriend's page. I noticed she is now listed as single. Not surprisingly, so is he. We live in the same house. We talk a lot. I even knew he had told her we were moving at the end of the summer. But he omitted this one small detail about the outcome. Weird world where you learn of things in your own house through Facebook, eh? Maybe that's why my nineteen year old refuses to be my friend there, eh?

So how do you know WHO to friend?

This question has arisen in my own mind several times recently. I used to have much stricter rules for who I'd friend (though admittedly, not as strict as those that will only friend someone they've met IRL). On Twitter, if someone's witty or relevant, or knows lots of my friends, I'll follow for a while. But I try to keep the numbers I follow within reason so that I can actually pay attention. About 250 is the max I can comprehend. On Facebook, I tend to want to actually know the person somehow. I think it's because Facebook "feels more locked." I actually put my real email address there (though I don't list my phone number like some do).

But now there's BrightKite. BrightKite tells people your exact location (or a close proximity if you don't mark them as a trusted friend). So now I'm rather befuddled as to who to accept as a friend or not. When people ask to be friends, I (probably just me) feel bad to decline their friendship. I mean how do you meet new people if you decline anyone you don't know. But again, as a woman, how do you know if there are any "unsafe" people you're connecting with. This new, online community is a new and different place to navigate--that much is certain. What do you think?

Ok, I'm in Kansas and I thought we're pretty good with online business tech stuff - I have to file, monthly, on my income, etc. I can do this online which is quick, convenient and saved me a stamp and a check (EFT payment). Now, I'm no fan of taxes, but it is the law and not paying is more painful than paying, so I've been faithful to make the payments every month before the due date (errr.... on the due date) and get the yearly required paperwork in too. Each transaction has a confirmation ID and each monthly form is stored, electronically, on their site. I can see that I've paid for the entire 2007 year, have everything filed, etc...

However, today I get a call from the Kansas Department of Revenue - I wasn't there, so I call back when I get in. It is a long distance call and they are only open from 9am to 5pm. I have voip service, so I dial away. I'm put on hold. (insert elevator music here with brief interruptions telling me how important my call is to them...)

Mike answers the phone, I chat a little letting him know why I'm calling, give the case number and wait. He asks some questions to make sure I'm the right guy (you know, that hard to get information, like the address of my business...) - after he's certain I'm not some stranger calling to make good on a government debt for someone else, we proceed to figure out why they called....

"Sir, we don't have your filing for all of last quarter no the payment for the last quarter either"

I'm a little shocked, I know I paid, I saw the money leave my account, all he can tell me is I need to get the right paper work in. They do have my yearly, which has the exact details for my monthly, but we won't go there - having the government actually make the connection between the yearly and monthly reports is asking too much. I mutter something and then get off the phone. By this time, I've loaded up the Kansas on-line payment system and just got to the section about my payments. I call back.

May answers the phone. I give her the details like I did Mike. As we progress, I tell her I've got the electronic confirmation numbers for the payments. I give those to her. She says she sees them, but she can't open them (huh?) and tells me I'm late and fees are assessed , which I suspected, and that, if those were the reports, I'd need to call someone else to get it figured out. Oddly enough, they know I did make a payment and they know that the payment made matches the figure they said I didn't pay in December. Again, this is a leap they cannot grasp. I'm given another long distance number to call.

Kevin answers the phone. I tell him the issue and he's able to figure out that, yes, I did make the payments and yes, the confirmation numbers are for the transactions I said they were for and, yes I filed on time. However, he can't do anything about it. The money was credited to the first quarter 2008, mind you, we're not allowed to file for the first quarter until it is over which is in two weeks. I need to call someone else and, yes, it is a long distance number again. I need to call accounting and tell them that Kevin in the electronics division said it was OK and verified the payments (and since there is only one Kevin, I think they may check on that). See, someone in accounting mis-keyed the information in to the wrong area. Several thoughts went through my mind, but the ones I can print involve:

• Why am I fixing this problem? I did what I was supposed to do.
• Why can't the revenue department open the confirmed electronic transactions?
• Why can't Kevin call accounting himself and fix the issue?
• Why can't Kevin just fix it himself?
• Why couldn't May or Mike have called Kevin and then accounting to fix the issue?
• Why couldn't May or Mike have fixed this themselves?
• By the time this is done, I'll have spent more time resolving their foul up than the entire bill is worth
• When I screw up, as they thought and billed me for, I'm charged, who pays me for their screw ups?

In any case, I had to leave for an appointment before I could call accounting, something I'm "looking forward to" the same was you look forward to a root canal. Luckily, they will find in my favor and reverse the charges and all, but, man what a waste of time...

So maybe you've never heard of twitter, or maybe it's old news but you thought it seemed silly. That's what happened to me at first as well. A friend told me to check it out (with no instructions), I took a look at the home page, wondered why I cared what all those people I didn't know were doing right now, and closed it. For those that haven't heard of it, twitter is a social networking tool that requires you to answer one simple question - "What are you doing?" - in 140 characters or less. And I agree, it does sound rather silly every time I try to explain it. However, I've found Twitter to be my favorite social tool. I've basically turned off IM (which can be an extreme time sink for me when friends need CSS help!), but I can still keep up with people I care about.

In light of the confusion of new people looking at the app, I thought I'd write a few tips I've found along the way that make it work for me.

A Quick Twitter Primer

1. Your initial job is to find people you want to follow. You follow them by viewing their profile page and clicking "Follow" under their main icon. These are your friends. (They're called "Following" in your Stats sidebar and their icon will now appear in your sidebar.) There are a variety of ways to do this. Most obviously, start with the people you know. Then, check their friends and see who you know, or know of. Don't worry about whether they know you, it doesn't matter. They may not follow you back for now. Just find interesting people you'd like to know about, know better, or simply eavesdrop on. Heh. Once you've pillaged and plundered your friend's lists, use the search feature for other people you know. If you're really outgoing, you can search for people in your geographical area and start getting to know people you can actually get to know in real life! Wow. This is where twitter can become a great local networking tool. You can even watch the main twitter page for random people you might want to follow. I don't personally find this to be very useful with all the various languages represented.
2. After adding some friends, you'll likely end up with a few that add you as well. Those people will actually "hear" what you tweet (a tweet is slang for your 140 character post--though you'll hear it called many different things). The tweets of the people you follow will be on your home page when you're logged in. Your tweets will be mixed in chronological order among them. If you're on someone else's profile page, you'll see everything they've written. If you'd like to see the interaction with their friends, click on their With Others tab.
3. The people that don't follow you will not see what you tweet. But there's a workaround if you'd really like to interact with them (that is, if they're paying attention). Using the @ symbol and their username (for me, that would start with @stefsull), your tweet to them will show up in their Replies tab. But though it once worked in a different way, currently, the @stefsull must be the first thing in your tweet. Putting it somewhere in the message will not make it show up in their Replies pane. I try to check my Replies pane at least once a day to see what I might have missed (since I don't sit and read twitter all day). Even if I don't know someone, intelligent or witty comments may cause me to add them. :)
4. Once you're set up in this way, just start twittering. Periodically through the day, leave a tweet. Doesn't matter if you only have a couple followers to start with--having a higher number of updates will likely get more people that find you in some way. And the numbers grow over time.
5. When you follow people and they follow you, you have the ability to send Direct Messages (DM). These are messages that no one else sees and can be set to be sent to your email.
6. Unless you set your tweets to private, anyone can read them, including googlebots which will kindly add you to the index. If you choose private tweeting, you will have to allow people to follow you. I don't do this, but I know some people, especially those who work at larger companies, enjoy that privacy.
7. Be sure to check out your settings. You can customize your profile page, add your icon, set privacy, add twitter to your mobile device or IM client, choose how you're notified of DMs, etc.
8. And if you're an organized person, you can click the little star icon at the end of any post and add it to your favorites. So if someone posts a URL you don't want to forget, or simply says something that makes you giggle uncontrollably, click the star so you can find it again.

What's the Point Really?

Well, maybe there's not one for you. But for me, a person who works from a home office, travels all over the world meeting people, works remotely with a variety of people and companies, it's an amazing tool. I began by adding anyone I knew of in the industry. Many of them I'd never met and perhaps hadn't even conversed with by email. But reading my page periodically, I began to feel I knew something of these people. I learned who had wicked wit, who had spouses and kids, when they were sick, when they had great accomplishments, when something traumatic happened. Yes, you can argue I don't really know them. And you're right. We haven't sat over coffee and shared our deepest feelings. But I certainly know them more than I did, or could have. When I do get an opportunity to meet them later, at a conference, there isn't that uncomfortable feeling of meeting a person you've only heard of. For me, feeling like I know them allows me to be immediately comfortable, relax, discuss, hang out. For those I have met, I don't lose track. I can keep up with their life until I see them again in the future.

There are companies and organizations using twitter to send out news and notifications. You can even keep up with politics, weather, news feeds, etc. Twitter is a tool. Use it as you will. But for me, the part that matters is it keeps me nicely connected with the little people inside my computer--my virtual, and sometimes real, internet buds.

OK, so I'm reading ALA (A list apart) on the latest new thing to come out of the web standards group, something Microsoft intends to implement in IEv8. One of the biggest issues we web developers face in developing web pages is the varied version of browsers and code compatibility. If you look at the offerings here at CMX, you will find, from time to time, articles that address this in some manner (as in, for IEv6, you need to include; for Firefox, include; for IEv7 do this and for IEv5.x, try this - oh and Safari v1, just give it up). The proposed idea is to implement a meta tag which allows you to specify the browser engine to render the page with - for example, if you specify IEv8, when IEv9+ comes out, it is rendered with the same, prior, version of IE, v8. The goal of the standard would also to be allow multiple browsers to utilize this same functionality so that Firefox, Safari and the rest could also use this to render pages in prior engines for their product line (so I could specify IEv8, FFv2 and Safari v3, for example). The implementation will look like:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

The articles went on to talk about the prior attempt to have web pages rendered differently using the doctype declarations. Both articles are a good read (not so much on the comments to the articles). It is my opinion that this is a good thing. I believe it will allow us to create a work on the web and not have to freak out when the next version of whatever comes out, worried our sites will break. I also believe it will aid us in transition from one browser to the next. Likewise, I have a couple concerns as well - how well will the future browsers render prior versions? and if I have a site created for IEv9 and you have IEv8, what happens? The articles from ALA are:

Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8
From Switches to Targets: A Standardista's Journey

Ok, so I'm curious about all the data services available for wireless internet access over cellular providers. I go looking around and, having worked with a telecom, I look for the "hidden" charges as I know it is their favorite thing to do, sucker you in with a "low" price and then - BAM - your bill is not what you expected. I was shocked at how brazen and, in my opinion, fraudulent these charges have become. In no particular order:

• AT&T
  • Regulatory Cost Recovery Charge $1.25
  • Federal Universal Service Fund 11.0%
  • State Universal Service Fund 4.99%
  On a $59.99 plan, you pay AT&T - $70.83
  
  
• Verizon
  • Tolls, taxes, surcharges and other fees up to 34%
  • Monthly Federal Universal Service Charge is 11%
  • Wireless monthly Regulatory Charge - $0.07/line
  • Monthly Administrative Charge - $0.70/line
  On a $59.99 plan, you pay Verizon up to $87.76
  
  
• Sprint
  • One mention of an 11% "fee" charge was seen
  • $1.55 in line fees
  Sprint hides their charges extremely well, so this number is probably lower than it should be - $59.99 plan, you pay Sprint $68.14
  
  
• T-Mobile
  • Regulatory Programs Fee of $0.86 per line
  • Taxes, tolls, roaming, and other charges (including Universal Service charges) additional. Not specified, but when I looked at an example bill (for $39.95), I found:
    • Federal Excise Tax - $1.25
    • Federal Universal Service fund - $0.62
    • State Sales Tax - $2.60
    • City Utility Users tax - $2.55
    • Local Sales Tax - $0.56
    • State 911 - $0.20
    • County 911 - $0.50
    • Regulatory Programs fees - 0.86
  T-Mobile - best I can figure - $59.99, you pay $60.85
  
  
• Alltel - they won't even give you a clue what they charge, but someone who posted a complaint said (on a $39.95 bill):
  • Federal USF - $1.79
  • Regulatory & Admin Fee - $1.15
  So, $59.99, pay Alltel a minimum of $62.93

I find it astonishing that the businesses are allowed to setup a binding contract (usually for two years) based upon a figure you pay per month plus an undisclosed figure that they change change without consideration to you at any time for whatever reason and, if you don't like it, they can stick you with a disconnect fee. This is a classic bait and switch tactic - and it is difficult to actually figure out what a plan will end up costing - all of the above are based upon estimates and vague legalese wording.

And the real irony of this all, cell phone providers are considered to be among the worst customer service providers in business, give consumers the worst contract deals and have less the stellar product offerings (dropped calls anyone)... amazing

If you have read my most recent article, Tools for Designers: del.icio.us and Flickr', I made mention of starting a CMX Blog piece for anyone interested in sharing their design and inspiration tools,resourceful solutions for their business, and for self-organizational purposes.

Please leave a comment on this post to share your thoughts. I look forward to seeing what you're up to and if I can get new ideas and be inspired by your ideas.

Happy blogging!

Well, I was all ready to make a tutorial on how to make those cute little RSS feed icons - I was doing well, working in Fireworks, getting it done. Then I hit a snag, getting the arc to look right. I searched the regular resources for hints on how to get this done and one of them pointed me to a website. When I got there, I realized, this was the perfect solution. Unfortunately, it also made the creation of the icon moot - it was a free collection of PSD and other graphic formats of the icon all sized, colored and ready to go, even a grayscale copy of the image for customization.

Check out Feed Icons to pick up this handy little resource.

Seems Comcast thinks that they can interfere with your web usage on their network.  Apparently, if you have Comcast, you no longer are paying to use the bandwidth as you want - Comcast has determined various applications and services just aren't allowed.  Things like peer-to-peer file sharing, other VOIP providers, Lotus email and FTP.

So, if you have Comcast and you've been noticing things not working right, it isn't your computer - nor your browser (for once!) - it is your ISP meddling in what you are allowed to do.  Most likely they have a government mandated monopoly where you're at too, so you can't move to an ISP interested in just giving you service.  If you have Comcast, make sure you let them know you do not appreciate their business practice and, if you can, leave.

Comcast violates net neutrality with this move and if those with Comcast don't make it an expensive business decision, other ISPs may feel emboldened to do the same.  If they are taking an inch and not stopped, they will eventually make sure the only Internet service we get will be through their mutual business partners... 

PHP.net announced (a while back) that PHP 4 is at end of life and will end all support by the end of the year (2007). If you are still using PHP v4 and haven't considered an upgrade, now would be a good time to do so. PHP 5 has been out for years and it is stable and solid. Many applications are being written to take advantage of the new features in PHP 5.

They are promising security updates until 2008-08-08 on a case-by-case basis, but after that, it is all done. From a security standpoint, you have to upgrade before that as exploits beyond that point will not be fixed leaving your website and contents vulnerable to malicious attacks.

Good luck and start now so you can migrate safely before you are forced to because of security reasons.

You'd think that the perfect Web 2.0 recipe organizer would already exist online — after all, they have a tool for everything else! — but I have yet to find it.

Food blogs are really big now, and though I don't food blog myself, I have gotten hooked on reading them. In fact, I pretty much get all my recipes these days from food blogs and never look in my cookbooks. Why would I? They're not searchable, they don't have beautiful full color photos of every recipe, recipes aren't backed up by real people's comments of how they liked it or adapted it, etc. Online recipes really are the way to go.

I began bookmarking each individual recipe in del.icio.us, as do many other food bloggers and their readers, because you can tag each recipe bookmark with all of its main ingredients or other characteristics (like "low fat," "easy," "Indian") and then use those tags to search for recipes that contain the mixture of characteristics you are looking for. So, I could find all recipes tagged with the combination of "dinner," "low carb," "chicken," and "garlic" by using the plus signs by each tag listed as a "related tag" to further filter down. I could also just do a search within my bookmarks if I was looking for something very specific.

This system worked exactly as I wanted, with these exceptions:

• no photos of recipes from the pages
• no rating ability
• no ability to add items to my list that aren't online
  

The rating ability wasn't a big deal to me, and I could also do without the ability to add my own recipes (I was fine with maintaining both an online and offline paper recipe collection) but I really, really wanted the photos. I searched high and low for an online tool that had the abilities of del.icio.us but with the added ability to choose a picture from the page you're bookmarking to associate with the bookmark. I found a number of online recipe organizers that came nowhere close to what I needed, and a number of social bookmarking tools that let you have a thumbnail of the whole page associated with the bookmark but not an individual picture that you can choose from within the page itself.

Finally I found Kaboodle, which is billed mainly as a wish list and shopping site. I thought it did everything I wanted except the rating, so I was thrilled. But I was wrong — it actually lacks the essential search tool of combining multiple tags to search that is the strength of my current system in del.icio.us. You can view all your items with a specific tag, but then can only filter those by keywords within their titles, instead of by further tags.

So, I'm still without the perfect online recipe manager, and undecided whether to stick with del.icio.us or Kaboodle. If anyone has a suggestion for what to use, I'd love to hear it! In the meantime, I have no problem with someone stealing my idea for the perfect online recipe manager and becoming the next big Web 2.0 success story — just please let me be the first person in your beta.

Usability has become quite the hot topic. Seems it's on everyone's lips of late. If it interests you, I'd like to bring a couple things to your attention.

First, Tuesday, November 14th is Worldwide Usability Day. There are 206 events in 39 countries this year. That's pretty impressive. Find a usability event near you. One of the interesting activities you can participate in no matter where you live is card sorting. From their site:

"Card sorting is a technique used to help identify how users organize, and expect to find, information on a website. The way the cards are sorted, and the labels the users give the cards are often used (along with other methods) to create the global and local navigation on a website."

Participants will take about 20 minutes to go through the card sorting exercise and demographic survey. The information will then be analyzed to look at regional, cultural, and other demographic differences, and shared with the usability community. You need to RSVP by Monday, November 13th to have the information emailed to you about participating.

The second bit of usability info that you may find interesting is related to a new, excellent book. It's written by Robert Hoekman Jr., called "Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design." I know Robert well, and he's passionate about usability, customer loyalty and just using common sense (which we all know isn't always so common). I've turned to Robert myself at times to look at larger web rollouts and he always has something helpful to say. And yes, once he says it, it's quite obvious. I've nearly finished the book and plan on writing a review on it here at Community MX in the near future. But I can already tell you, you need it. If you do anything web-based, you want it.

Robert is currently working on making GoDaddy a more usable place. This week, I went to GoDaddy to renew a few client domains -- I was shocked (in a really good way) at the new interface when I logged into my account area. It rocks! Pared down, everything at my fingertips, sexy. Thanks Robert!

In my last post, I complained about sites that pop up windows and take away my menu bar so I can't print. Tonight I found the perfect Firefox extension to stop this annoying scripting: Unhide Menubar. It keeps scripts from ever hiding the menu bar, ever. I've already put it to use to print out my flight confirmation through Orbitz.

Why do so many sites that insist on opening popup windows also insist on taking away my menu bar when they do so? Sometimes it makes sense, such as in my Yahoo Music player that pops up. But other times it seems to only be done for its own sake, and it's really annoying.

Last month was the annual enrollment period for health care spending accounts, dental insurance, vision insurance, and several other benefits programs offered by the State of North Carolina, which I work for. This year, they offered an online enrollment option for the first time. However, the web site they created solely for this purpose (they already have a couple other web sites, and I have no idea why they didn't make this new site simply part of the old sites...but I digress) was awful. The navigation was very unclear and hard to use.

When I went to enroll, the site insisted on popping up a new window with all of my toolbars stripped away, including the menu bar. Why? This didn't help me in any way that I could see. The enrollment process was just a series of forms and text-based pages — in short, nothing that couldn't be presented in a regular web page as part of the rest of the site. Perhaps they didn't want me to click any links other than the form buttons that navigated me through the enrollment process? If that was the case, why not just strip the nav menu out of the enrollment pages, and just leave me in the regular site?

I can handle a popup window, as much as it annoys me, as long as it doesn't hamper my work. This one, however, did. When I finally enrolled, I clicked on their printer-friendly version link. This opened another popup window. I expected it to automatically bring up a printer dialog box, since I couldn't access File > Print to do it myself. Instead, the new popup told me to hit the Print Screen button to print the page. But the PrtScn button doesn't actually print — it takes a screenshot! I had no way to print my page. Why had they decided to hide the menu bar from me? What harm would it have been to include it? What benefit did they get from it that was so important it was worth completely wrecking the user-experience for me and preventing me from printing?

Ironically, after I finished my enrollment, they presented me with a feedback form, "in order to ensure that www.ncflexonline.org provides the ability to meet your needs." However, the comment fields they provided only allowed 256 characters, which is only a couple sentences worth of comments, and not nearly enough to convey my dissatisfaction. I suggest that if they really want to create sites that meet their users' needs that they employ extensive usability testing before launching a site, instead of taking surveys afterwards that never appear to be acted on.

After this frustrating user experience, I went straight to userscripts.org to find a Greasemonkey script to override all those sites that try to take my menu bar away from me. Alas, no such script exists on this site. I beg someone to write one and let me know about it! Or, if anyone knows any other tricks to get the menu bar, or other toolbars, back, please let me know that as well! 

I will reserve final judgement until I can properly view all my sites (I'm on a Mac and BrowserCam does not yet have the final version available), but for those waiting in anticipation, Internet Explorer 7 has arrived. An 8 pound-10 ounce bouncing bundle of joy -- or so we hope. Call me naive, but for the most part, I'm actually looking forward to it. Many of the rendering bugs in IE6 are reported fixed. Most of my sites have held together pretty well through the beta versions I could test on. I don't code using a lot of hacks for older versions of Internet Explorer, and many of the bugs I was squashing with the "* html #selectorName" trick have been fixed. So even though IE7 won't see those separate IE-specific values, it shouldn't need them too often either.

I have been looking at Internet Explorer 7 a great deal over the past two days. Partly because I'm preparing to present two of the more advanced CSS sessions at Adobe MAX and wanted to be sure I had the latest available info to share, and partly because some of our subscribers have started to ask questions about IE7 in our Community MX forums. In light of that, today I ran all our JumpStarts through the IE7 beta3 over at BrowserCam -- and though there are some reported changes between the beta and the final release version -- they fared pretty well. I'll check them again as soon as the final version is available to compare. It appears we'll need to make a couple tweaks to Internet Explorer Conditional Comments (IECC) here and there, but overall it looks swell.

I'll report more as we test the JumpStarts and as I test my own sites. Let me know how you fare too...

Ever since Firefox updated to 1.5.0.5 a few weeks ago, it's been crashing like crazy for me. The crashes come in two forms. One is when I click a random link on a site (I can't figure out any pattern to it), it acts like it's working on taking me to the page, then the icon at the top right stops moving, so I know it's frozen. I can't click to any other tabs, but if I'm listening to Internet radio in another tab, it keeps on happily playing. If I go to the Windows Task Manager, it tells me that Firefox is "running," not that it's "not responding" as I would expect. So I manually shut it down from there anyway. The second type of crash is again seemingly random, and this time the browser shuts down completely and both Windows and Mozilla pop up their little feedback agents to report the problems.

When Firefox 1.5.0.6 was released right on the heels of 1.5.0.5, I thought, "Oh good, they've quickly released a patch to fix all these crashes." Nope. Firefox is still crashing just as much for me.

Am I the only one facing this annoyance? Does anyone know of a fix? Or even the cause? 

I have a problem with Yahoo!. Had I not been verbally attacked by a man in a neighboring city, I wouldn't even realize this interesting issue existed. And though it benefits my clients, it really bugs me personally.

The back story in a nutshell is -- I have a client in the moving industry. A man in the same industry an hour away was having a fit that our search returns on Yahoo! were coming up at #2. (Nice for my client of course.) This competitor was sure I was cloaking or doing something illegal to get my client to that level (well actually, he accused me of putting text into the meta tags. But anyone that knows anything about SEO knows how far that would get me. And if he could read code he'd know that there are no meta tags on this site. There never have been.) When I looked at the search return he was complaining about, it read more like an ad than text on my client's website. Odd. So I looked at the page. Then I looked at various pages on the site. I also looked all through the way back machine archives. That text has never been on the page Yahoo! is linking to (or the site). Hmmmmm... A mystery.

It took, me a couple days to figure out (and some sleuthing from some brilliant SEO folks) that my client was marketed by BellSouth. And though I've put nothing in the pages, he had purchased something, as he put it, "to help with my SEO." Well, my my yes. It surely did. (He had no real clue what it was even when I told him.)

I always thought paid advertising was placed at the top and right side of the SERPs. That it was easily distinguishable from the regular organic returns. Turns out BellSouth pays an SEO company (Trafficleader). They create these little ads which become an XML feed directly to Yahoo!. Yahoo! puts them directly into the database and thus, the supposed organic return area (and of course, it's pay per click for Yahoo!). There's no way for the consumer to identify that it's basically a paid advertisment.

Am I the only person this bothers? The fact that we can work our butts off to move our clients up in the organic returns and someone else can pay Yahoo! per click for an XML feed directly in -- well, something's smelly about that. Yes, in this case, it's benefiting my client. And good for him. But meanwhile, I think it stinks. Sorry Yahoo!, bad call.

You would have thought no one ever saw someone eat 3 lbs. of crabs before...

Hey folks... I've been back from TODCON almost a full day now (got back into Washington DC at 7:00pm last night). So I thought I'd give you a brief synopsis of my trip and what I did, what I thought and what I experienced the last couple of days at TODCON.

Thursday (leaving for Orlando):
My one big purchase for this trip was a Washington Nationals baseball jersey. I promised myself I wouldn't purchase any Nationals merchandise until Major League Baseball got their proverbial act together and named an owner and, since they did that two days before I had to leave, I was good to go with my capitalistic morals still intact.

Got to the hotel a few hours earlier then everyone else, so I got my room and walked around the lobby where I ran into Ray and Danielle Mickey. So, we helped Ray set up the registration table with all the books, t-shirts and name tags for all the TODCON attendees. For the t-shirts, I PROMISE I'll put the t-shirt design up on my web site today or tomorrow (I swear!). While Danielle and I were organizing the name tags, I grabbed Tom Green's name tag and re-inserted the generic name tag sample that comes with all the plastic holders. You've seen them before... they generally have a picture of man or woman with the office supply logo on them. So, in essence, Tom's tag has his name on the front and a picture of some generic secretary-looking lady on the back. I made a bet with Danielle to see how long it would take Tom to discover this. I won the bet with "half a day".

Later that night, many of us went to Roy's - a Hawaiian restaurant where Vicki Berry blinded us with her digital camera. The women is dangerous with a camera, folks! She's posted some of her TODCON pics here.

Friday:
After the sessions for the day, a group of us went out searching for a good ribs place. Unfortunately, after walking endlessly around the strip mall, we found out the place went out of business so we opted for a steakhouse instead. By that time though, I was too hungry to notice what the name of the place was but they had some gooooooood steak.

One of the TODCON attendees that came with our group was Hassan Ellis. Eating and talking with Hassan is an example of one of the nicest and coolest things about TODCON - it's a chance to meet your peers and "talk shop" in an intimate and pressure-free way that no other conference can. As Paul Davis is fond of saying: You sometimes learn MORE from the "after sessions" then you do DURING the actual sessions. TODCON gives you a chance to discuss and compare each other's working habits, techniques and general advice to one another.

By the end of the evening, we came to the conclusion that Hassan was "separated at birth" from the actor, Richard T. Jones ("Judging Amy) and we all had a good laugh about that as others at the conference told him the same thing (even though Hassan didn't know who Richard T. Jones was).

Saturday:
The morning session, we all got to talk with Scott Fegette and Paul Gubbay (formerly of Macromedia and now Adobe) about all of our "wishes" for all the tweaks, changes, improvements and other things related to the Adobe line of products. My "big wish" was that if we were all going to play "Taps" for Freehand, at least make Illustrator a lot more "Freehand-ish" so it's much more intuitive and easier to use. That and I wanted them to add "bendable triangles" in Fireworks so triangles can be manipulated the same way they currently are in Freehand.

That night, it was decided that seafood would be the place of eats that night. At first, I was reluctant to go since Ray said the place didn't have crabs - imagine that... a seafood restaurant that didn't serve crabs!!! Talk about the horror! But I decided to go any way.

Thankfully, the restaurant did, indeed, serve crabs. In fact, they had three main choices of snow crab legs to choose from: 1.5 pounds, 3 pounds or all-you-can-eat. To everyone's utter horror and shock, I chose the 3 pound selection and casually explained to all the dropped jaws at the table that I come from a long line of crab eaters and in the Flick family, we take our crab eating VERY seriously. Three pounds of crabs is nothing but I chose that instead of the all-you-can-eat selection because I would still be eating there if I did.

I'm telling you... it's like people never saw someone eat crabs before! Amateurs.

Later on, many of us decided to take the Trolley back to the hotel since it was about 5 miles away. Me? I decided to get off 4 miles away from the hotel. Mainly because I had to do some "tourist shopping" to bring back something for my wife and kids.

And... walking four miles wasn't a bad way to burn off three pounds of crab.

Later on that night, I went swimming at the hotel with the Interakt gang where two ducks decided a hotel pool was a nice place as any for a 1:00am dip as any!

Sunday:
Sunday was the debut of the Orlando Jumpstart. I designed the layout while Zoe, Sheri and Jim helped organize and put together. As in Las Vegas last year, we wanted to show a preview of the Orlando Jumpstart and give everyone there a taste of how it was put together and what some of the things you can do with it.

All in all, it was a great session and my first since speaking at MX North a few years ago. Quite a few people came up to me and told me how much they enjoyed my particular part in explaining the design process and commented that they would certainly be interested if I decided to ever do a full session on something at future TODCON. So if you were at this year's TODCON and attended our Orlando Session, what are some things you might like to see from a guy who mainly uses Photoshop, Fireworks, Freehand and Dreamweaver? TODCON 9 is, sadly, a full year away but like I always say, you can never start preparing too soon!

Anyway, that was some of my memorable moments at this year's TODCON. What were yours?

How many times have I complained, or read the complaints of others, related to various company's poor customer service? If you enjoy that kind of thing, move on. This time, I wanted to take the opportunity to acknowledge some web goodness.

The back story is, I've used GoDaddy to purchase domain names for my clients since about 2000. I've never had anything but good things to say about them. They're inexpensive, I rarely have a problem, and when I have one they get it resolved very quickly.

Currently, I have no domain issues. So I was surprised to hear from them by phone last week. Thinking there might be something I was unaware of, I returned their call (the woman who called me was Sue, and she specifically asked that I ask for her when I called back). The number rang me in to the "Customer Appreciation" Department. Hmmmm... sounds kinda hokey. Like Newspeak from 1984 or something. Was I ever wrong...

If everyone at GoDaddy is as friendly, helpful and personable as Sue, they've got it made. Sue thanked me for my years of being a customer, told me how many domains were in my account and proceeded to tell me about several ways I was unaware of that I could recieve discounts on things I was already doing at GoDaddy. Sure, she also told me about some of their other services (none of which I needed), and when I declined she moved right along. No hard sell.

The best part was - she sent me her personal email address. I now have direct access to Sue for any issue I might have. Heck, she'll even purchase domains for me if I don't want to log in and do it myself. I think Sue may be my new best friend -- at least she made me feel that way. ;) Very valued, appreciated and listened to. Sue rocks! Point me to another good sized company who routinely make their customers feel like something more than a basic household pest! I'm sure they exist, but I haven't run into them lately.

Thanks again, Sue -- and kudos to GoDaddy for having such a great team.

Wow. That's the only word I have for the conference that was South by Southwest Interactive. That was definitely the largest group of geeks I've ever had the pleasure of meeting at once. And such a varied assortment too.

After the daily dose of panel discussions, the parties were booked till 2am. I made sure to quit about midnight the first couple days, but the last couple, I closed the place down. Something about knowing I'm about to lose my geeks makes me stay as long as possible to talk. The only real problem was, the music was always so loud, and I had to talk over it. Each day, I woke up a little more hoarse. Wednesday (our travel day home), I woke up with no voice. Well, maybe 15% of one. More like a croak. Good thing it was over.

The food was good, the sessions were good, and everyone was amazingly friendly. There are a few Flickr streams of the event. Just to name a few people I met (in the order they pop into my brain) -- Heather Armstrong (Dooce.com), Shawn Inman (haveamint.com), Mike Davidson (Newsvine, sIFR), Jason Santa Maria (Happy Cog Studios), Derek Featherstone (furtherahead.com, boxofchocolates.ca), Ian Lloyd (accessify.com), Andy Clarke (All That Malarkey, Stuff and Nonsense), Andy Budd (Clearleft Ltd), Jon Hicks (hicksdesign.com), Porter Glendenning (AOL), Ethan Marcotte (Vertua Studios), Dave Shea (Zen Garden, mezzoblue.com), Drew McLellan (web application developer and author), Dori Smith (wise women, writer), Jeffrey Zeldman (Happy Cog Stuedios), John Allsopp and Maxine Sherrin (Westciv), Mark Trammell (ufl.edu), Faruk Ates (Web Kaizen), Rob Weychert (robweychert.com), Denise Jacobs (trainer), Jonathon Snook (snook.ca), Shawn Henry (W3C), Kevin Smith (Centricle), Harry Heymann (Google), Eris Stassi (Eris Free, Apple), several Blue Flavor and Adaptive Path people -- OMG -- there's a ton more I can't think of right now -- I'm half brain-dead at this point.

I also got to see old friends like Molly Holzschlag, Eric Meyer, Tantek Celic and Amber (iamthedj.com), Scott Fegette, Jen Taylor, Bob Regan, Heidi Voltmer and several other Adobe friends. You couldn't ask for a better group of folks to lose your voice with. I'm definitely planning a return trip for next year. Hope to see you there. :)