As reported by Eric Meyer amongst others, a problem users of A List Apart’s new release are experiencing is that IE/Win seems to hate, amongst many other things, “tags” as an id value.
It appears that “tags” is a method in the IE/WIN DOM. Therefore setting id="tags" changes it from a reference to the element with that id rather than the method. A more thorough explanation can be found here but suffice to say, refrain from using “tags” to identify an element.
Ok, so there’s no conspiracy, I just thought it was a catchy title. Blogs are all about catchy titles afterall.
I was listening to NPR the other night on the way home from work and this story comes on about an agency that represents dead celebrities…exclusively. You can listen to the story here. You might remember Apple posters featuring Albert Einstein. Thank the Roger Richmond Agency. It seemed strange to me at first until they rationally explained that the families of deceased celebrities seek out representation from Roger Richmond not to make a buck but to prevent the stars’ names and images from being used improperly. Fair enough.
Although an agent for deceased celebrities is odd enough on its own, the part I found peculiar and got me writing this is the author’s mention of Corbis. Maybe I live under a rock but I had no idea that Corbis is owned by Bill Gates. Again, that’s neither here nor there as far as the story is concerned. The interesting part is that Corbis recently purchased the Roger Richmond Agency.
Probably nobody cares but does it sound like a conflict of interest that the very celebrities whose images are sold as stills and other media at Corbis are represented by an agency also owned by Corbis? Therein lies the “conspiracy”.
Just a quick note. I spent some time working on the site this week. I’m happy to report that the front page is now updating dynamically with the latest post. Prior to this it’s stayed the same old static content until I got around to changing it (rarely). Very soon there will be a proper contact form in the “Contact Michael” section. That’s all for now.
On a side note, keep your eyes peeled here for a major announcement probably coming some time this week!
Professionally I work in an all Mac shop but the cost keeps me in PC world at home. When I saw the Mighty Mouse gleaming at me on Apple’s front page a little while ago, I thought to myself, “I’ve got to get a Mac. Now!”
Apple’s inability to keep these popular new gadgets in stock, coupled with my semi-busy lifestyle has enabled me to nourish my obsession over the Mighty Mouse’s “coolness” for a few days now. But like a summer romance, my infatuation was short-lived.
It was my first visit to the new (only) Apple store in this area so that was a positive. Also, it’s really hard to grasp just how big the 30 inch monitor is until you see it in real life. After marveling at that for a while, I got right down to business and found the Mighty Mouse on display.
It took a few minutes to track one down since I expected it to look somewhat different than it does. Now I’m not sure why but I expected something similar in size to Microsoft’s IntelliMouse but instead it looks just like Apple’s existing single button mouse except that it is all white instead of having a clear cover. There was only one Mighty Mouse on display and the store was fairly crowded so I didn’t stick around and use it for very long but here are my general impressions.
It’s not as cool looking in real life as it is on Apple’s website. Since the side buttons are nearly invisible from the top, it looks just like a single button mouse…with a little grey “nipple” on top. Probably appealing to those who like the single button mouse. It doesn’t do it for me.
The “nipple” is kind of interesting. I didn’t get to do any horizontal scrolling but it worked well vertically. It’s pretty intuitive; it’s not a wheel but it somehow behaves like one.
Lastly, I found the side buttons awkward to use. Again, I expected something along the lines of the IntelliMouse, with side buttons that operate independently of one another. I don’t think that’s so with the Mighty Mouse. It took me a while to figure out the “squeezing” motion that brings up the dashboard and I still didn’t have the knack for it when I left. It didn’t feel natural to me to maintain the hand position required to effectively operate the buttons. I think this was a common complaint among those who commented on it when Dan discussed it on his site.
So that’s my two cents. It’s Apple. It’s cool. To me it’s sort of like watching Club Dread right after Super Troopers. It’s still good, just not that good.
Big thanks to Rands for posting about Veer. He raved about their design catalog and even the ads…yes, the ads. Having never heard of Veer, I decided to check it out. Point to http://www.veer.com/ and check it out for yourself. Like Photonica or Corbis, they sell stock photography and all sorts of other media. I spent about an hour in the Ideas section alone, mostly downloading the free and amazingly attractive wallpapers. If you’re ever looking for media for any project, I strongly suggest you start your search there. If you’re just looking for inspiration, again, this is the perfect place to start. Enjoy!
On a side note, you should check out Rand’s site. With almost 30 years in the industry, his posts range from project management and tech life in general to writing and Las Vegas. His insights are useful, relevant, and, particularly the Vegas posts, entertaining.
I’m looking for some feedback here. Not too long ago Google announced a BETA of their sitemap program. The idea being that you can submit an XML feed of your sitemap directly to Google as a way to improve the indexing of your site. This feed lists all the URIs on your site and has optional information such as frequency of modification to those files, you can assign higher priorities to the most important pages in your site, etc. According to their website, Google claims this should result in better indexing of all a submitted domain’s pages, fresher crawls, and a “smarter” crawl because now Google knows when pages were last updated and how often they change.
I know this is in BETA but what I want to know is, has anybody participating in this noticed any difference in their search engine results? I’ve participated in this program now for a few months with some of my employer’s domains and this personal site. Although I see from my control panel at Google that they are downloading my sitemap files every few hours, I don’t see from my logs that this has resulted in more frequent visits by Google regardless of how often my feed says my pages are modified. What I do see is the same results in the same positions as before. While Google specifically states in their FAQs regarding the program that participation will not change PageRank or the way a page’s results are calculated, again I still don’t see pages not previously indexed but included in my sitemap appearing in Google’s index or a greater frequency of visits by Google despite regular updates to my site.
Is anybody else experiencing the same thing? What do people think about this?
If you’re in the market for a shopping cart, look no further than X-Cart. I made some updates for a client who has been using it and I was very impressed. This cart system, written in PHP, is based on Smarty templates which makes it very flexible and easy to modify. It also has loads of built-in modules so features like the ability to accept coupons or processing credit cards real-time are just a single click away. Speaking of processing credit cards, it took me days to enable this feature for the cart system I’ve used in the past. I read the documentation for the cart system, read the documentation for the payment gateway, and modified some code to get the two systems to meet in the middle. X-Cart already has information for dozens of payment gateways pre-programmed. All I did for this particular client was select the appropriate one from a dropdown menu, enter some account information, and in minutes they were processing credit cards. Although there is tons of built-in functionality like upselling, here are some additional, interesting modules that can be purchased. A gift registry that does just what you think it does plus emails notifications to participants. There’s a module to handle E-Commerce sites that want to run affiliate programs and another that handles highly-customizable products like computers, software, etc. At $185 for the Gold version, this product is highly recommended.
High Tech Heretic by Clifford Stoll
The Blind Side by Michael Lewis
