I work from home. I see my kids all the time. We eat breakfast and dinner together, I drive them to and from school every day and am always within ear shot. You may think that this is an ideal setup but what most people don’t realize is that when you work from home you are basically always at work.
I’ve installed the new Highlighter plugin for WordPress from the folks at Unique Blog Designs. Looked interesting AND they are going to give away an iPad. Is it the “next big thing”? Who knows though it does seem kind of cool at first glance, UBD is a great company, it is free, and I would really love to win an iPad.
CSS3 has been around for quite some time. The fact that it doesn’t validate is probably one of the main reasons we haven’t seen it all that much. Truth is that it does validate however, W3C doesn’t have a CSS3 validator and your styles are validated to CSS2 by default. To date almost all browsers support except of course IE however, IE9 is claiming support for several selectors though it is not available just yet. I’ve been using Chrome for quite some time now so I don’t really notice or care, I just make sure that whatever I’m doing will look OK if a browser doesn’t support it.
We’ve heard it before, cell phones cause brain cancer. I’m no doctor but I would think we would have heard more about this if they did. There is no general consensus among doctors about cell phones and brain cancer, and the leaders in the industry (obviously) claim there is no substantial evidence to prove that cell phone radiation levels are dangerous. However, in Maine there is pending legislation to make the state the first one that will require cell phones to sport warnings about the dangers of cell phones.
Here is a local news item involving a school laptop web camera that is becoming a nation wide story. In the Lower Merion School District of Pennsylvania, about 4 hours West of Pittsburgh, a student was punished by his school for “inappropriate behavior”… IN HIS HOME. How did school officials know what he was doing at home? They saw and recorded him using the web camera on a school issued laptop.
Last month several of my sites got hacked. I found a JavaScript on every file named index.html on WordPress installations as well as regular html sites. On WordPress it on index.php in the root, wp-content, and wp-admin. On HTML sites it was on every index.html going one sub-directory deep. All sites looked and worked fine and I wouldn’t have even noticed it except that there was an error in the injected HTML that broke one of the pages. When I looked I saw a JavaScript at the bottom of the file. No idea what it did or was planning to do.
Google has threatened to shut down its business in China. To date the big G has been censoring its data served to the global giant complying with Chinese law. However this decision has been under scrutiny due to an attack on its infrastructure that originated there in the later months of 2009.
This is just one of those things that is so weird I had to write about it. I was working on a WordPress theme for a client using Dreamweaver CS3 as usual when all of a sudden Dreamweaver just disappears. Dreamweaver stopped working for no reason, no warning, no error window, it just went away. I try to reopen Dreamweaver and it comes up for about three seconds then just disappears again. I begin to panic a little because I am right in the middle of making a website for a regular client. I of course start thinking about the phone call I will have to make telling them that I can’t finish the project by the deadline because my software has disappeared, real professional. I also start thinking about what a drag it will be to have to start using notepad and Filezilla or spend the next three hours reinstalling Dreamweaver and losing all my site definitions.
The value of copyright and registered trademark laws is undeniable. Anyone that provides a product or a service can put forth the effort to create a brand that will effectively represent their work and when one reaches a level of success they can rest easy knowing that there are laws in place that protect their efforts and their brand from being copied. This is fair play, a by-product of our democracy where everyone is allowed their shot at the American dream as well as a right to defend it once they are successful.
Checking out a new service called TypeKit. If you are a web designer then you know well the fact that you are quite limited in what fonts are available when using HTML. SEO Web Design is the practice of making pretty sites that are also optimized for the search engines, too bad you can’t use pretty fonts without using images. Alt tags help but it just isn’t as effective as good old HTML text.