What is a feed?

A feed is a web document that usually ends in .xml or .rss and it is a slimed down version of a website that is created to be easily syndicated. It may be represented by an orange icon.

What does it cost? $0 - It’s free.

What is a feed reader?

A feed reader is an application, stand alone or web based, that reads feeds. A feed reader is to feeds what an email application is to email.

What is a Chicklet or feed button?

I’m very excited to have been picked as a judge in the 2006 WebAward Competition!

Sites from all over the world will compete for a WebAward in 96 different industries. They will be judged on design, innovation, content, technology, interactivity, copy writing and ease of use.

Everyone from Disney employees to to Microsoft folks have participated as judges in the past.

If you think your site should be included, submit it before May 31st.

Good luck to all who enter, and it’ll be great to see all the sites.

I read an interesting article on SEOMoz today about how IE got sued and now all IE users must hop though a few hops before viewing any Flash or ActiveX content on the web.

…anyone using Internet Explorer now has to “activate” any flash or active-x element related to their website (EOLAS 521 millions lawsuit anyone?). This means that accessibility wise, our industry is now suffering greatly.

So if you are using IE and you find that Flash files no longer work and that ActiveX isn’t working either, it’s probably because you installed the patch (maybe automatically) and now you have to click on everything to activate it. Either you have to do extra work or the developers of each site need to implement a work-around.

Google Calendar is out and I’ve only played with a it a few minutes but it looks cool! I was going to complain about a few missing pieces like syncing and sharing with a specific group of people, but those features do seem to be there. It’ll take some digging to find all the features, but I hope that it’ll be as cool as I hope.

So far, the only downside I see is that I can’t subscribe to a private calendar when the URL includes the username and password. Phpicalendar can do it so I hope that Google Calendar can do it too.

As always, I’m considering changes to the design of my site/blog. I’m not sure what I want to do exactly but I have lots of ideas. As soon as I work them in though, I’m not a big fan.

One thing I’d love to do is pull the entire site into Wordpress. Doubt that’s going to happen though. I also really want to do something with the sidebar. It’s just to plain to me. I want my site to stand out and not look like the average blog.

If you have ideas, or sites you think are cool, feel free to share them. I’ll take all ideas.

I’m looking for a replacement for Dreamweaver on my new iMac. I like Dreamweaver but it seems to complex (and expensive) for what I need.

What I’d like in a new app is code completion and code preview abilities. Granted, I know that’s not always available. Built in FTP would be good too but not necessary. If I could edit in graphical mode that’d be awesome. Dreamweaver has the code and preview modes and both are editable.

Here is my list of applications so far that I’ve found. Granted they don’t meet all my needs, but I want to consider everything. I can adapt to fewer features for $350 dollars less. (Dreamweaver is $400)

If you’ve ever used CSS drop down menus and Flash on the same web page, you may have found out that Flash is always on top of the CSS. Well almost always, there is a fix!

Macromedia has a good tutorial on how to make a Flash movie with a transparent background. It’s quite easy and it allows for CSS drop down menus to drop down on top of a Flash file.

Basically all you have to do is go into the Flash publish settings, to the HTML tab and select ‘Transparent Background’ in the ‘Window Mode’ drop down. (I’m in Flash MX so newer versions of Flash may be sightly different.)

I logged into my GooglePages account this morning to see if there were any stats. None that I could find. But I did find the option to mark my Google site as an adult site.

I find it interesting that Google allows people to create adult content with their GooglePages tool. I don’t quite understand why they would want to hassle with the legal issues and moral issues. Then again, if they add a little adsense, maybe Google would make big bucks.

Who knows, I just thought it was interesting.

Google has now started offering free web sites. That’s right, with the Google Page Creator they have a WYSIWYG HTML editor, pre-defined designs and one nice, easy to use system.

I played with it for five minutes or so this morning and you can see my page: TwisterMc’s Googlie Home Page.

I even looked at the code and it looks pretty nice. It could use external CSS but that’s my opinion.
Good work Google!!

And now everyone can start speculating on how these pages will effect rankings and bla bla bla.

There seems to be a discussion going on about web design vs SEO. Why is it that web designers and SEO don’t go together? Well, it’s two different fields that have be separate for so long, but now have to act as one. And no one is willing to change or take the time to understand.

I was a web designer for 5 years and we never though to SEO. We built the pages to look cool and work. That’s it. Heck, they focused on IE most of the time and that bugged me as I believe that any site should work in a any browser. IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Search Engines!