Archive for the ‘learning’ Category

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About time for another redesign

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

This was going to be a weekend for other projects.  One thing led to another and now I’m rolling out yet another redesign to my homepage and this blog.

The last design had/has (still transitioning as of 6/7) some problems.

dvv0902

First was inconsistency.  Homepage, blog and inside pages all looked different.

Second was my fat mug was getting old, even for me.  My profile pics are adding up and it is time to narrow down, find a new, normal-looking profile pic.  Decided to take the picture during my new pastime; both the picture of my head and the landscape shot are from a bike ride this weekend.

Third, the technical implementation of the buttons wasn’t right.  I figured out a more right way, thanks to cssvault, and look I forward to using this method of mouseovers on all foreseeable projects.  Nice blend of real links, unordered lists, image sprites, and popular CSS.  This was the biggest reward of the project.

Forth, I need to keep pushing towards a “Web 2.0 feeling” site.  Even though some would say Web 3 is upon us, better late than never.  Play with the new navigation.  That’s a big part of this attempt.  There is a big orange drop down when you hover over “web design”.  Somewhat reminiscent of vimeo I guess, or one of these.

Fifth, I need to hone my cross-promotion of superwebguy.com.  There was a definite style divergence on the homepage that I wasn’t happy with.  Now the homepage has its own feel and doesn’t try to feel half like SWG.

What I ended up, while perhaps not as in-your-face and a little text-heavy, is solving the above issues.  Like?

dvv0906

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Posted in css, learning, project | No Comments »

Local business website directories and link building

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

One possible step in marketing your business online is putting it into the big local directories.  I’ve been on the hunt for good ones but keep coming back to the big guys.

Link builders, start your engines.

If you are just getting started, remember to track your ROI by first installing this analytics bad boy.

Big guys

Physically local directories, chambers of commerce

Customer review sites

Listen

  • Set up Google Alerts so you can immediately see where your business is popping up

Beware

As with all things web, there are countless no-name sites that are probably just harvesting your data for a nasty spam blast.  Be skeptical; I would stick with the big guys.

Just getting started

Getting into web directories should only be one part of your online marketing strategy and ROI’s will vary.  There is no silver bullet with link building.  Keep looking for ways to be visible online.

From here I might progress to popping up in:

  • Yahoo Answers
  • Squidoo
  • Facebook’s Pages
  • and, uh, maybe Twitter.  One note about Twitter: it seems whatever keywords are in your  Twitter username will rank favorably in Google for those keywords.  Twice I’ve seen Twitter users be the first results in my searches, regardless of follower count.

I should mention one little thing: your website should be awesome, useful and worth linking to! Good luck with that.

Please leave comments with your own suggestions!

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Posted in learning, linkbuilding, marketing | No Comments »

Awakened by Mikeyy. Little punk.

Sunday, April 12th, 2009

I was browsing Twitter late into the night.  At some point I hit a profile with a funny ASCII animation at the top.  Maybe that was where it started, I don’t know.

This is what I saw in my Twitter account…

Dude! Mikeyy! Seriously? Haha. ;)
Dude, Mikeyy is the shit! :)
Dude, Mikeyy is the shit! :)

What I do know is I woke up and was unpleasantly surprised.  I checked my emails.  A nice and informed person had notified me that my Twitter profile had been hit with the “mikeyy exploit” and I may want to check it out and change my password or something.

He left me this link to read up on the situation.

http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/

Then I went to search.twitter.com and looked up tweets people had sent me.  Other people were either asking why I was saying things about Mikeyy, but some knew what was happening and sent more links like this one.

http://dcortesi.com/2009/04/11/twitter-stalkdaily-worm-postmortem/

I don’t claim to understand what exactly happened, other than it seems some temporary Javascript can be applied to a page and funny business can be made to happen on that page by a page from another site.  This is apparently called a cross-site scripting attack or XSS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting

The issue can be addressed by Firefox users with the “NoScript” extension.  I hate the idea of installing this.  Seems like there should be a better way.  Indeed maybe one of Explorer’s annoying popups has addressed it over in that camp.  I need to look more into that.

Here is the Firefox solution.

http://noscript.net/

I have installed it.  It is annoying.  I went into the preferences and cranked it down a little.  There is also an “S” logo at the bottom of the browser that lets me change specific preferences for a site.  I turned on a sound effect when it is called up so I can change the settings for a given site and not miss the intended and good functionality of that site.

In this particular situation, I do not believe the code is still in my Twitter profile.  I think last night’s issue has been resolved.

Being someone who makes websites and loves Javascript, this is a troubling fix.  The browsers should step it up here, as they may have already begun doing.

I have exposed some of my ignorance here.  I hope if you know more you will leave a helpful comment below.  Thank you!

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Posted in javascript, learning, programming | 6 Comments »

PHP filter_var, where have you been all my life?

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Stumbled on something handy that I can’t believe I’m just now finding.  Gotta love PHP convenience, including this built-in way to validate form input.

PHP filter_var

Thanks again, NETTUTS (tutorial here).

if (isset($_POST['email'])) {
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);
if (filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
echo "$email is a valid email address.";
} else {
echo "$email is NOT a valid email address.";
}
}
// also FILTER_SANITIZE_URL, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL

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Posted in learning, php | No Comments »

Mundane quality marketing nerd

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Networks v. Blogs

I’ve heard it said this week that social networks are about the network, and the blog is about me.  Don’t go to the network and expect the world to revolve around you.  Get involved.  This feels like wasting time, but sharing keeps good people connected.

On the other hand, people expect my blog to be about me.  How am I doing?  What am I doing?  I’m achieving neither with this blog, but at least I’m thinking about it. :)   I want to post more, but I can’t get over my problem with posting non-quality content here. (more…)

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Posted in learning, persisting, philosophy | No Comments »

Facebook is for kids. Haha, just kidding. Who says stuff like that?

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

Okay, besides people who have a money tree and can say anything, or are simply outsiders.

Come on, man!  It’s the future!  Haha.

But seriously, at the very least, assuming it’s mostly kids, which is it less and less, if that’s how an upcoming generation communicates, it’s not wise to ignore it.  They’ll be running things soon.  Communicating is a big deal. (more…)

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Posted in friends, learning, philosophy, trends | No Comments »

Recording myself talking is fail

Saturday, November 29th, 2008

The keyboard is my friend.  Coding is a blast.  I can email for days.  Typing this blog entry is easy.  My Facebook friends might even mistake me for an extrovert. (more…)

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Posted in learning, podcast, projects | No Comments »

Timeline of stuff I am into

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

I dream up, design, build, deploy and maintain web-based tools and web sites using these tools. So much fun in so little time.

Timeline of stuff I am into.

Quick Links: Social Networking | Web Programming | Web Design | Art

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Posted in learning, programming, projects, trends | No Comments »

Ranking, Blog Code, Custom Search, Firefox Add Ons

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

Improving your site’s Alexa Rank and Google PageRank, showing code in your blog posts with syntax highlighting and line numbers, creating a custom Google search box for your website, surviving and thriving in Google Reader using PostRank, and exploring Firefox addons for web developers including GreaseMonkey and Web Developer.

Source code in blog posts:

Ranking:

Google Custom Search

Toolbars:

Firefox Add Ons:

jQuery Experimenting:

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Posted in javascript, jquery, learning, programming, tools | 1 Comment »

Code formatting in blog posts

Friday, September 5th, 2008

Do you like posting source code samples on your blog?

I wasn’t sure how.  I just surrounded it with “<pre>” tags. That works in the basic sense. What about the syntax highlighting and line numbers?

A search of the WordPress FAQ’s revealed this how-to on posting code.

Basically it looks like this.  Just tell it what language you’re using.

It also revealed Google’s syntax highlighter for when Javascript libraries are doable.

Pretty simple. Thanks Google and Wordpress.

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Posted in learning, programming | No Comments »

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