St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for May, 2009

This sums up how to export a movie from Adobe Premiere CS3. the only thing she says that you shouldn’t ever do is export a movie in a Quick Time format. Quick time movies have poor quality, high file sizes and even when the player does work, it’s missing all kinds of features that normal video players have.

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Evidently Microsoft is totally revamping their search engine again. From looking at their preview, it’s pretty clear that they don’t get search. Maybe this is why their desktop SE sucks, Windows has never had a good search feature and their Windows Live Search Engine is doing so poorly.
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I was working on a project at home today and wanted to set the first letter of the FAQ paragraphs (The “Q” and the “A”) be larger than the rest of the letters. I knew I use CSS to do this quickly and easily, but had forgotten how. It may be a surprise to some of those I’ve taught, but I am not, in fact, able to remember every single tag in every single language there ever was or is currently, pretty close to all of them, but not quite 100%.

I realized tat my CSS reference book was out on loan. Hmmm, I tried looking it up in Dreamweavers reference section, but it wasn’t there. So I turned to the to internet. I was shocked at how complicated some people think this is. Some people use a span tag and then pseudo classes of the span tag. Some people were even using JavaScript! This is how is done, the quick and easy and proper way:
.YourClassNameHere p {font-size: 12pt}
p:first-letter {color:#ff0000;font-size:xx-large}

Feel free to substitute “xx-large” with whatever value is appropriate.
This will . . . well I hope at this point it’s obvious what this code will do.

Another St. Petersburg business has chosen Dream Designs to create a web site for them. Pateco Inc. has chosen us to promote their latest product, a retooled Marine Winch.
They also manufacture electric boat lifts in the Florida Style.

I always knew that click fraud was way more prevalent than what Google says it is (and they admit it’s above 30%!). But now we have evidence that Google themselves is defrauding their own advertisers by teaming with adware companies to redirect directly typed addresses into searches.
That’s a mouthful, what’s that mean?

That means Google, in certain cases, is taking a directly typed domain name and turning it into a search and then a click on and advertisement so they can charge the advertiser for something they wouldn’t normally have to pay for. This is called click fraud, even by Google’s own definition which states:

Invalid clicks are clicks generated by prohibited methods. Examples of invalid clicks may include repeated manual clicking or the use of robots, automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Invalid clicks are sometimes intended to artificially and/or maliciously drive up an advertiser’s clicks and or a publisher’s earnings. Sources of invalid clicks may include:

* Manual clicks intended to increase your advertising costs or to increase profits for website owners hosting your ads.
* Clicks by automated tools, robots, or other deceptive software.

The evidence is long and tangled, but here’s another article that explains this better (LINK). Techy version
Here’s a link to the evidence and original report (LINK). Very techy version