St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for September, 2006

Nearly one-fifth of American adult users of the Internet in August 2006 spent some time reading about politics or the coming U.S. election, a big increase from November 2004, according to a survey released on Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

The non-partisan think tank said 26 million Americans — or 19 percent of adult users — turned to the Internet in August to read political news and information, compared to 21 million in November 2004 when a presidential election was held.

The latest figure is noteworthy because August is typically a quiet month in political campaigns due to summer vacations, said John Horrigan, associate director of the Pew project.

“We think that increase is due to more and better content about politics than there was a couple of years ago,” Horrigan said.

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Trying to pretend he’s fighting child porn, Alberto Gonzales told Congress that they should require that ISP’s perserve all user Data for years so the government may review it at will. Again trying to tie this aspects of the current administration to fighting child porn, Gonzalez said tried to convince the Senate that the government’s lack of access to customer data the biggest obstacle to deterring child porn. ¹

Sound like I’m deriding a reasonable request by someone trying to stop a legitimate and horrible problem? Think about it like this: They already have all the tools they need to fight kiddie porn that they could ever possibly need. A search warrant isn’t even needed to get this data, just a subpeona. It’s even easier for the feds to get one than it is for the RIAA to get one when they think someone is downloading free music.

So if this isn’t really about child porn like the Attorney General says, then what is it about?
Well I’m glad you askepreserved. This administration has been linked several times to several programs like CAPPS, which collect data about real American citizens like you every time they fly, rent a car, get a hotel room and other travel related activities and under the quise of fighting terrorism, gives this data to marketing companies that are owned by republican mega-donors.

CAPPS was killed off when the secret program was discovered by Congress, CAPPS II was also killed of when Congress found out about it. Recently it was discovered that the US Military has infiltrated the airline JetBlue and been implementing another program similar to CAPPS.²
Then there is the infamous AT&T spying case, at least one private telephone and ISP company voluntarily let (and even actively helped) the government record and analyse every single phone call and electronic communication that went through their network.
Or how about another program that was kept from Congress for years, Secure Flight program, which added commercial database info (ie; your spending habits) to passenger info at the airlines, created a new database and then gave this info to a private – rebulican sponsoring marketing company to do with whatever they wanted (ie; sell this data to other marketing companies after they’ve used it to try and sell whatever they were hired to sell).

Why do I mention these things? To establish a pattern. The pattern is this:

• The current administration is trying to get access to every single communication made by every single American
• They are NOT trying to fight crime, nor terrorism when they do this.

Well what are their motives then? Given their history of trying to destroy all critics of their policies and their close alliance top large corporations I think their motives are crystal clear.

Google Inc. has added more video and other bonus features for users of its popular three-dimensional mapping software, called Google-Earth, to unearth even more information about destinations around the world. The latest innovations unveiled Wednesday are available to any computer with Google Earth software installed.

Google Earth’s latest attractions, activated by clicking on a “featured content” box, include online video of cities and popular tourist attractions provided by Discovery Networks and Turn Here, an Emeryville-based startup. The federal government also is providing details about all 58 U.S. national parks, and the United Nations is supplying time-stamped images documenting the environmental decay in 100 areas, including the Amazon and Africa.
This adds to the video content you could alreadt supply with thrid party hacks, like the one from National Geographic.

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That’s right, Dream Designs by Texx Smith has been performing Florida Web Site Design services professionally since 1996. To celebrate ten wonderful years in business and to increase the portfolio of satisfied customers, I’m rolling back the prices to where they were for when my company was first starting. In 1996 we didn’t perform all of the web design services we do now. For instance in 1996, Search Engine Optimization just wasn’t done by anyone. Flash Animation design had just been invented and was still a “risky” technology to use on a web site, remember almost everyone had dial up internet access then.

For a limited time, here’s the 10th anniversary Celebration prices:

• 2 Page Brochure site $200
• Premium 5 page web site design – $400
• Premium Plus Flash 5 page web site design – $500
• Premium 12 page web site design – $600
• Premium Plus Flash 12 page web site design – $750
• One years “Bare Bones” web hosting package – $125

I’m sorry but SEO packages aren’t discounted currently because, The directories I have to pay to include your site, the text links I have to purchase, etc, are not rolling back their prices!

CSS is a technology frequently used in modern web site design. It’s an acronym which stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Sheets because it’s documents that hold instructions, like a sheet of paper. It’s Style because it holds instructions on the visual appearance of just about everything in a web site, except the browser itself. It’s Cascading because it’s scope is nested – which means, well we’ll get to that later.

there are two main advantages of using CSS:

1. Because it gives you far more control over the appearance of a web pages elements than HTML.
2. Because you can set a “style” and use it on through out the site, just by mentioning it’s name. This means if you want to change the font color for every piece of text that has a style named “RegText” (we use “classes” to name styles), attached to it, you can just change the parameters in the style sheet and every where in the web site(s) that use that style sheet will be automaticlly updated. Sure beats going onto every page and changing every element that needs it.

Just a little personal note to keep people informed on the happenings in my life lately. We kinda have a cycle of life thing going on here . . .

My Mother died back in July. I haven’t written about it until now, because I just wasn’t sure what to say. To you the truth I still don’t know what to say. So I’ll just stick to the facts. My Mother died after a long battle with esophageal cancer. This was her second battle with cancer. Her first was back in the early 1980′s when she defeated Hodgins Lymphoma. She is survived by her husband, daughter, recently adopted son, two brothers and myself.

And with life passing one way it passes another:

My wife, Shannon is pregnant. She due with one child sometime in April. We will be calling you for your old baby clothes, cribs, sippy cups etc.
Just kidding! For those of you who like to count such things, yes, we conceived shortly after our honeymoon in early June.

Well that’s all the personal news for now. Have a good day and keepsending me content!