St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘Learning’ Category

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Content online is king. Internet users spend nearly half their time online viewing news or entertainment content, surpassing activities such as sending e-mails, shopping or searching for information, according to a study released by the Online Publishers Association on Monday.

The four-year study, conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings, tracked a 37 percent increase in amount of time spent viewing content such as online videos or news, surpassing a 35 percent rise in using search engines like Google Inc. (GOOG.O).

The abundance of content and faster online speeds accounted for the spike, the study said. A proliferation of social networks such as News Corps’(NWSa.N) MySpace and Facebook have helped boost content viewing as well.

Overall, viewing content accounts for 47 percent of time spent online in 2007, up from 34 percent in 2003. Web search accounted for 5 percent of time spent online in 2007 from 3 percent in 2003.

Read Quoted news story

Sooooo Embarassed!Story Update:
I’m so embarassed, I was hoaxed! Turns out the whole thing was a hoax perpertrated by Matthews Cutts hisself as an April Fools Day prank! The site is back and working fine. Here’s the story I mistakenly wrote about the event:

Google’s Matt Cutts Blog gets hacked!Matthew Cutts, the engineer who works for google and runs the official blog for communications from Google to SEO experts and novices alike has had his site hacke yesterday. Some say it may have been an april fools joke, but today’s April 2nd and it’s still hacked!

In case Google has regained control over thier web site by the time you read this I’ve provided a screenshot of what it looks like when your web site gets hacked.

Microsoftsnew operating system, Vista is, according to Microsoft, supposed to be all about security. Most of in the computer business know that Microsoft has the worst record on security of any major software vendor. But Vista was supposed to be more secure, it’s the first operating system they’ve designed since announcing that they finally take treats like viruses and trojan horses seriously. Of course they still call spyware “Value-adding software” and they still use “Active-X” in their browser to enable web developers to interact directly with your computer unbeknownst to you through Internet Explorer.

But Windows Vista did something they thought was going to assure computer users that Microsoft was on top of security this time. They locked down parts of the operating system. Of course w/ large American corporations like Microsoft, nothing is as it appears. The move to lock down the operating system wasn’t about protecting your computer from access by others. The only benefit of locking down the OS was to prevent anti-virus and anti-spyware software makers from being able to work on Windows Vista.

Hmmmmm, why would Microsoft (a software company, remember), do that?

The policy was a secret, but only to those in Microsoft. The treat of lawsuits didn’t help the anti-virus, firewall and ant-spyware software makers from going public. A few of them are rich enough to defend themselves against Microsoftlawyers issued press releases saying that Microsoft had locked them out and if Microsoft didn’t let them in the only anti-virus or firewall Vista users could have would be the infamously poor performing “Windows ‘Firewall’ and the only anti-virus they could use would be “Microsoft Windows Live OneCare”

After responding to the negative press by trying to say that by doing this it’ll make Windows safer (Windows safer by not allowing security software to work!?), it quickly became obvious that this press tacticwouldn’t work, they have to actually do something. So they opened up parts of the operating system allowing security software to be installed (although not with ease).

Now they the “Microsoft Windows Live OneCare” now were planning on sticking us all with has finally had it’s second and likely last performancetest. The first test it failed miserably was the Virus Bulletin VB100 certification tests.

The last test is the big one the industry goes by, it’s called: Av-Comparatives. Security researcher Andreas Clementi conducted in-depth testing of 17 anti-virus scanners,subjecting them to no less than 497,608 items of malware during the process. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a test to be dismissed as insignificant. It is the real deal, which is why the results are so devastating for Microsoft. Of those17 products, including entries from all the major vendors in the marketplace, Windows Live OneCare came last. Worse yet, it came last by quite some margin.

Indeed, only it and the little known Dr Web scanner failed to reach an overall detection rating of 90% and whereas Dr Web only just failed, with 89.27%, OneCare managed a really very poor 82.4%. Compare this with G-DATA AVK leading the test on 99.45%, F-Secure 97.91%, Kaspersky 87.89% and even arch-rivals Symantec Norton AV with 96.83%.

So bad was the OneCare result, in fact, that it didnt actually make the cut for inclusion in the evaluation process so is unlikely to even appear in the next set of tests in August. To reach the lowest grade of certification, standard, a product needs to hit 85%. Then again, perhaps for Microsoft it will be a relief if it doesnt as no news will be good news for a change.

read quoted story 

Most of the time when a client starts a new web site the just assume google, yahoo, MSN and the other search Engines (SE’s) will index their web site and show it their search results. This is just not the case. Why?

Well there are several reasons:

• Search Engines make more money when they don’t relative content in their results. After all no one would buy those ads if the search engines worked the way they should.
• IT’s hard for a robot to tell what your site is about. The SE’s don’t have humans reading the sites, they use “bots” to do it. That’s where the Basic SEO I give to all web site design customers comes in. This valuable service lets the SE’s know what your web site is a about and tells them “Here’s a quality web site you should include.”
• Competition. For most search terms there are literally at least hundreds of thousands of competitors. They haven’t decided “I want to compete against you” (most of them anyway), but their web site content is similar to yours (at least the SE’s bots think so).

Continue reading “The top 3 Questions I’m asked about Google and other SE’s” »

A lot of graphic designers and web designers have been thrust into the video editing arena lately with the rise in popularity of video viewed on the web. While most of them just say “I don’t edit video” (I even heard one say that videos can’t be edited by anyone except a film studio or TV studio – liar!), others are willing to learn. I’m fairly good at it myself, but it’s always a complicated procedure and there are no shortcuts. Here’s a perfect example of how not to edit a video to remove something you’d rather not have the viewer see.

Again, there are no shortcuts. It takes expensive software, patience, alot of tedium from someone willing to spend the time on it and lot’s of computer processor time.

Everyone who’s been embedding flash into a web page for a while remembers last year when Microsoft changed their browser in response to loosing a patent -infringement lawsuit. And then they changed it again soon after because the first change was so awful (Warnings everywhere!). What they ended up with – that white border that appears around a flash object when it is hovered over and must be clicked on before the movie can be clicked on – isn’t very graceful, but it what it is and there’s no way around it for a web designer.

It may seem like, or even be, a blatant and desperate attempt to get people to stop using the non-microsoft technologies like flash, java, etc. But yet we as web designer must come up with a Internet Explorer Active Content Fix. You could choose to follow the instruction from the new owners of Flash, here’s a link to Adobe’s Active Content Update Fix. But dues that’s like 6 long scripts that you need to choose for your particular

You could write your own solutions. In theory it’s pretty easy, for JavaScript writers, just document.write your normal code in. For php programers just echo it in. etc.

But here’s what I’ve been doing lately. Since I almost always use DreamWeaverMX 2004 on web sites, I found a nice Dreamweaver extension called the Softery IE Flash Problem Solver. It inserts a command that works simply. It only has two options, Fix the IE Active Content Update Problem on the current open document or on all pages with flash in the current local site. It works quickly and perfectly every time.

Don’t ya love it when something works just like it should?